Slashdot Mirror
Sun Bashes Linux on (IBM) Mainframes
dagbrown writes: "An article linked from Sun's front page, entitled
"Linux on the mainframe: Not a good idea" by Shahin Khan, Sun's chief competitive officer, has the interesting theory that Linux on mainframes makes no sense because, among other things, the VM/Linux combo isn't a very good match. What do the folks on Slashdot think?"
Like Solaris on pc
Looks like an interesting read to me. But it seems like it is logical for sun to do this. They're still trying with their fledgling solaris, I'm sure this kind of bashing goes on at every company.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
But free software on a mainframe isn't bad. Remeber, we also have such things as "FreeBSD", "OpenBSD"; also "NetBSD." Yes, they're new to me too.
Got friends?
Actually, I thought Sun would be saying lots of nice things about their arch-rival, and complimenting them on their excellent choice of operating system.
Why would it be a good idea when you can buy Sun machines with Solaris, and get much more quality computing power for your dollar!
All this is is Sun actively protecting their brand.
my 0.025$
Besides, Sun will attack IBM at any chance it gets.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Because the more machine types it's used on, the better it will become, and the more people will use it.
/.ers are gonna say? Linux sucks? Come on ;)
Beautiful in principle, but we will see how the sheeple react.
btw, what do you think the majority of
Sent from your iPad.
Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system, defeating the whole purpose of introducing open standards like Linux.
Running Linux on an IBM mainframe doesn't defeat the entire purpose of using open standards like Linux. You still get the man years of free testing, free software, interoperability, and speed. Or rather, IBM gets them. And by tying software you can't charge for to hardware you can, IBM will have come up with a business model for selling Linux systems for incredible sums of money. Quite an ingenious plan - selling Free Software.
Sun's just pissed they didn't think of it first.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
And it was a serious pain in the ass. There were problems with the virtual machine suddenly giving up the ghost from underneath us, and we'd see Samba processes go wild for no reason whatsoever. We had load averages spike well into the hundreds, and it was like we were always scrambling to keep it running, as opposed to setting it up and just having it work. We used to tell the students that the machine had caught on fire and had (literally) fallen over. We were even thinking of doing up artwork.
All those impressive demos where they have 32 hojillion instances of linux running on a mainframe are meaningless. Sure, you can do it, but it doesn't do anything. If you try actually working with the setup, you'll be rebooting your machine 10 times a day, and those mothers take forever to freakin' reboot.
Too bad you can't moderate a whole story...this is a troll if ever saw one!
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Sometimes I think your just baiting people. This should be interesting.
The next one will be, "Microsoft Claims it can server webpages 2x Faster on IIS3.0 than Apache!".
Stand back, even water will not save you from the flames!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Like the man said, this sounds like the normal responce from sun, I'm sure Microsoft should have simular arguments for why MS is better. Unless we get a complete third party to analysis with no aligence to any OS. And maybe on that day pigs will fly.
http://www.funwithpenguins.com
This may sound a bit odd, but it could be that the mud throwing that Sun is doing could end up being A Good Thing(tm) for all Un*xes just because it bring s more media attention to our community. Sun isn't directly saying that Linux sucks or that it's worse than NT or whatever, they are drawling attention to the use of Linux on mainframes of all things. So the drawn out fact that Linux is being used on Mainframes and being acknowledged by two major companies could result in good juju.
Chief Competitive Officer? I have never heard this title before. Is it new?
...that to really make a fair comparison, I'll need access to a mainframe running Linux. So, if Sun would be so kind, please send me a mainframe so that I can check your conclusions. I promise that I'll write a very thorough article in exchange.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
It seems that Sun is a bit scared about Solaris losing out to Linux. They are both Unix(-like), both solve the same problems but Linux does it cheaper and allows you to look ath the source code. While Sun has used Linux to gain money and new friends (penguin computing) they would rather do their own controlling from Solaris.
...Plain and simple. Sun wants to sell solaris, and IBM is competing with them. This shouldn't suprise anybody... Plus, they have a point about the VM. 2.4 VM still needs work if you want to run it on a mainframe. Not taking $$ into account, Solaris would probably be a better choice.
Perhaps the point is that the user might not want to have to buy a seperate box for each of their customers. Maybe Sun wouldn't be so upset if they had a similiar technology. (Which they don't, to my knowledge... at least not to the same level of scalability)
For a company that is planning on dropping all support for x86 in the first place, does this really surprise you? as a sun tech myself i totally see there point. Especially when the mainframes they refer to require another proprietary OS to run on top Linux. The article makes some good points, but this is also standard sun marketing.
Sun: A solution looking for a problem
When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
Microsoft says the same thing. Does this make it true? No
If anything, this is a really good sign for the ever maturing linux operating system. Of Course sun would want to move people away from an open source, free operating system, over to their 'paid for' one. And if they can't do that by simply saing "don't use linux, use solaris", it makes a lot of sense for their marketers to simply say "don't use linux, its bad... and scary". It still cuts out a potential threat to them.
I figure if IBM says that IBM is ready for linux, i will trust that a lot more than solaris saying IMB isn't ready for linux.
Not that i have anything agasint sun, or solaris.. i respect sun and what its doen, and been through.. i just question the reasoning for this 'article'.
News at 11.
There is actually a difference, apparently. You see, trolling involves making up facts to support an argument, whereas marketing involves, erm...
You know, like this.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
running linux on x86 was the original idea of linus
back in 1991.
linux has come a long way from it. if linux can
run on sparc, alpha , x86, PPC
why cant it run and scale in a VM environment ??
say what u may mainframes are mainframes, and
add linux to them u have a win win situation.
sun would be better off showing strengths of
its own product line than try something like this.
reminds me of the M$ FUD about Embeded Linux and
Embede Win XP.
yawn. yaaaawwwwnn. wouldn't it like be funny if they said the exact opposite, hunh, wouldn't it? wouldn't it be funny?
Just a little FYI:
With Amdahl checking out of the mainframe business it seems IBM has decided to raise mainframe prices significantly - it's actually charged more for the same performance in 2001 than in 2000! This is why IBM's mainframe revenues increased by a fair bit between 2000 and 2001 (while it's PC and Unix revenue dropped). Mainframe revenue accounts for about half of IBM's total server revenue...
Come on. What do you think the folks on Slashdot think? I don't know the first thing about mainframes, but I assure you that the folks on Slashdot think that any suggestion that Linux is not the best solution to everything is pure FUD, Linux r0x0rs, rah rah, the unstoppable might of open source will surely roll over any puny opposition unwise enough to stand in their way.
That may or may not be true in this case - like I said, I don't know the first thing about mainframes and I haven't even read the article. I'm just saying it's pretty silly to ask slashdot if anyone should use Linux.
Sun's bull shit. Just trying to make Solaris look good. But we don't buy it for one moment, do we!
I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Sun has a "Chief Competitive Officer." Please tell me that there's more to the guy's job than spreading FUD about the competition.
This article is misrepresented as bashing Linux. It doesn't say that Linux isn't up to the job of running on a mainframe as much as it says that many of the benefits Linux offers are lost when running it on such a system -- basically bashing IBM's solution, not Linux.
Finding mainframe staffing is an obstacle in many organizations(6); combining mainframe and Linux staffing further complicates the matter. Running multiple Linux images still requires administration that needs to grow with the number of images being run.
This statement applies no matter what operating system you choose, you still have to find people who know the hardware. And as with all VM systems, you have to actively administrate each image. This statement is Linux agnostic.
Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand. As a result, a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would; high utilization is a myth.
Again.. Linux isn't repsonsible for the machine not being able to dynamically allocate resources to over-utilized images, it's a hardware/underlying OS issue.
Applications that run on Linux for Intel need to be recompiled and recertified for each new platform; thus the application portfolio to run Linux on a mainframe is small
Duh. It's a different architecture.
So, SUN isn't really bashing Linux, they're bashing their competitor, IBM. No real news here. SUN is very careful not to say "Linux sucks", because they have Linux offerings, they're just saying that customers should buy the SUN/Solaris solution for their high-end systems, not the IBM/Linux solution. I'm sure we'll see something from IBM soon.
--XaXXon
... when you have detractors.
Well, they said that man could never fly and that he would never make it to the moon. Linux on mainframes IS a good idea, especially when someone says that it isn't.
So what if those who have a vested interest cook up reasons that say it can't or shouldn't be done? The more they rail against it, the more someone will find a good reason that it could and that it should.
Let them fume and sputter all they want. Linux has already changed the world, and for the better too. Sun's self interested objections leave me unmoved.
Is there an MBA with a concentration in Competition?
Do you have to be veteran of an Olympic team?
Is a qualification for the chief competitive officer that he/she be loud and has to interrupt a lot?
Doing a quick Google Search, I see that Palm has one of these. The Sun guy didn't turn up there. Must be a new thing.
No need to start flame wars about how sun is trying to knock Linux (mostly because there isn't anything to knock).
It should be noted though, the fact that they compare pricing of a 1 cpu mainframe to a 1U rackmount is insane. What they don't talk about is the fact that
- NO ONE
buys a single cpu room sized mainframe (at least now that venture capitol has dried up).Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
The benefits of the mainframe are plenty. Awsome uptime, its in years, not months. Amazing I/O and storage capabilities. ESCON is unbelievable in the way it works, sharing I/O through timeslicing it. Time slicing CPUs. What you can do on the new Sunfires (Ex800 and E15K) are pretty minimal compared to the slicing and dicing of mainframe. Its more a story of hardware than software. The best solution would be Solaris on the mainframe :-)
I admit that I don't have any experience running Linux on Big Iron, but it seems that these custom, proprietary Unices always work great on their hardware.
Linux was originally intended to be a cheap way to get that UNIX-type functionality (running it on commodity hardware). Putting it on big iron seems backwards to me.
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Next thing to do would be to ask someone that recently switched to linux on the mainframe, like ebay... hope one of the links below still works...
http://www.cio.com/archive/010101_et_content.htm l
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/ib ml inux000517.html
http://www.zdnetindia.com/biztech/resources/ebusin ess/ecommerce/stories/45234.html
Only 'flamers' flame!
People these days seem to forget about the overhead of interpretters and virtual machines. If the article is correct, then the z800's running zVM emulate Intel x86 architecture in order to run Linux. Heck, even poorly written native compiled code generally has advantages over such a set up.
There are however, notable exceptions, given the nature of mainframe processors, if all of your apps are written unoptimized for such a system, then you would want to unify them in a familiar abstraction, given a close enough match, this makes Linux a natural choice. Of course, why would you buy an expensive mainframe and not optimize for it?
To the naysayers slamming Sun as merely trying to boost SunOS, well, yeah, they are, but lets look at the situation.
1) Sun still has SunFire servers, which are QUITE powerful.
2) Solaris is no longer competing with HP-UX, since HP-UX is no more. Sun sells windows and linux based solutions. In other words, Sun has no reason to just blindly nay-say against Linux. As far as exploiting Linux for being a hot technology, well, they're doing that too. That's business for you, you gotta do what you gotta do.
In otherwords, the z800 isn't exactly slaughtering Sun's business, but you gotta have whitepapers to back up your statements when you're bidding to large customers. Saying "just cuz" isn't good enough. Sun's scoring one for the people who want to buy their products. It's not "slamming linux."
I agree mostly with the article because I recently evaluated an IBM mainframe against an AIX SP2 and a Solaris 4-processor server. Most of the issues in the article, particularly performance, are right on.
The application we were testing was extremely processor and memory intensive. While there was a web component, the biggest problem was moving a large number of bitmaps in one format into the server, convert them from base 64 to a binary representation, rasterize them, and convert them to a "browser friendly" format such as JPEG, GIF, or PNG. We had to complete hundreds (> 200) of these operations per second.
I really wanted to use Linux because most of my staff is familiar with it and our customer felt warm and fuzzy about using IBM equipment. At the end of the day, however, the Linux mainframe only gave us 25% of the minimum speed that we needed for our process to be successful. IBM and a certain German Linux company tweaked everything they could but the performance wasn't there. The AIX vs. Solaris match was more evenly paired. My customer decided on Solaris because they offered a few advantages in Java tools that AIX didn't have. All vendor's boxes had equivalent processor and memory configurations.
I would like to spread the Linux credo as far and wide as possible. What we must understand is that, in order to make Linux a viable option in mission-critical applications (the kind of thing sitting on a mainframe), the performance and "hardening" of something like MVS must be present. Linux just isn't there yet.
Disclaimer: I'm under NDA so that's why some aspects of this posting are a bit vague. Drop me an email if you want more details regarding our experience but our conversation will be "off the record."
Have a nice wknd,
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Now, Sun offers up the ultimate proof: Linux is just fine as long as it impacts the x86 world - but don't dare put it on a platform that affects us.
To be fair, IBM's offering is not perfect - yet. What Sun is preparing for is a future Linux and Big Iron combo that will be. They are afraid, and this FUD is the proof.
I were in his shoes....
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
sounds like they have more of a problem with IBM than with linux.
-... ---
All seem to be rather moot points.
It's free layer on proprietery z/VM, no problem.
Linux is not as optimized as z/OS, well, it has other values.
VM and Linux engineers are different sorts - well, anynone can learn.
But what about this one.
Would it be true that disk cashing would be
counterproductive?
What about the cost issue: what is cheaper, faster, smaller, less power hungry and services more users: server farm with 100 servers or one mainframe?
They are not really saying much against IBM,
They keep shooting themselves in the foot wrt the Open Source crowd. Now the've reloaded and started shooting again. You'd think they would have run out of ammo by now.
One of the beauties of Linux is that it can be ported to so many different platforms easily. Sun uses it and then goes on to say IBM shouldn't? wtf? There are valid reasons to run Linux in multiple virtual machines. I even do it here on my PC.
Note to self: Must drink less coffee....
"VM/Linux combo isn't a very good match. What do the folks on Slashdot think?"
GEE I WONDER???? It's like walking into a church and telling all the people "My friend said Jesus doesn't love you. Do you all agree with that statement?" PLEEEEEZE!
Wasn't there a story not too long ago that mentioned how Sun was going to support Linux on lower-end machines, but NOT on the high-end Enterprise systems? (bah, I can't find the link) Anyway, people were saying "Well, Linux isn't ready for Enterprise-type systems yet, so keeping the proprietary *nices on these systems isn't a big deal."
/. Yeah, right.
Now, Sun comes right out and says this, and people start complaining? Sure, perhaps Sun is trolling for
You may think I'm biased: I work for Sun, after all. Don't get me wrong - I'd absolutely *love* to take one of the *THIRTY* E10k's I have sitting around me at the moment and install Linux on it. Or, rather - I'd love to TRY. But I don't have any real notion that any version of Linux, AS IT STANDS RIGHT NOW, will work as well as Solaris on that box.
Sure, Solaris isn't very user-friendly. GNU/Solaris (Solaris with GNU Tools) is better, but still not anywhere near what most Linux folks are used to when it comes to command-line fun. However, Solaris is *made* to work with Sun hardware. And it does, very well.
I doubt it highly that someone is going to go buy a US$4M E10k/E15k box and start porting Solaris tools and system utilities *just* so people can run Linux on those systems. Right now, the only reason people have installed Linux at ALL on those systems is for bragging rights.
If you want to outlay the cash and start-a-porting, I applaud you. I really do. But I won't hold my breath.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
I think this is just sour grapes - Sun didn't think of doing this on their Starfires or whatever they call their big(ish) iron, so they're bashing IBM.
Glenn
Hate to say it but they're probably right. Linux is 32 bit code made to run on a 32 bit processor. Remember when the 386 came out? DOS ran slower on most 386's, but the new windows ran much faster on a 386 than a 286. While I haven't personally ported linux to a 64-bit processor, it seems likely that you would have more performance issues with the "upgrade." Take for example these benchmarks from tomshardware.
These dual proccessor motherboards both scored worse in kernel compilations with both processors active! It was faster to run the kernel compilation on a single processor. While two 32-bit CPUs != 1 64-bit CPU, it does illustrate how a major hardware change can make linux (or indeed any OS) flounder around.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Sun is worse than even Microsoft when it comes to this kind of thing. They claim to be embracing Linux but make it very clear that its use is to be limited to end of network solutions and "real systems" such as those based on Solaris should be used for the real work. At least Microsoft's stance on Linux is consistent. Linux on the IBM mainframe is clearly an enormous danger to Sun, whose enterprise servers will be competing in the same space.
Right now I can see some reasons why people would want Solaris as opposed to Linux for various reasons especially in larger "enterprise" systems. Unfortunately for Sun, those reasons are decreasing on an almost daily basis. At its current rate of progress is would be quite reasonable to assume that the feature set offered by the Linux kernel will surpass that of the Solaris kernel within the next few years. I would love to see Sun either edged out of the market or forced to compete by doing something innovative besides talking trash and suing their competitors.
On the one hand, Sun appears to be lashing out at a competitor.
On the other hand, this article raises some legitimate concerns that IBM will have to address. But they don't have to convince me. They only need to convince their customers.
As far as I'm concerned, good business or not, running Linux in every possible context makes it stronger.
John McNair
Sun sells hardware and service/support contracts. They give the OS away for free. My guess is that they bash linux here because either it actually doesn't run as well on their hardware, or they don't feel like spending time/money training their support people to troubleshoot a foreign OS.
There's an article here on cnet news that explains the whole thing. They don't want you to go after the much more powerful and robust linux system that IBM has and go for their version of Linux for smaller systems. The alarming thing is that they are producing their OWN version of Linux, not using Redhat or another company. And also IBM I understand is doing this too. This can't be a good thing for linux at all. Proprietary versions of linux? Or perhaps some people think it'd be okay if its just branded, I just don't think its a good idea at all.
I think they want to utilize the benefits of linux however they do not want to allow Linux to creep into the larger servers where Sun dominates. And IBM which has AIX 5L (AIX w/linux compatibility) and now a special Linux for the mainframe it directly challenges their most valuable property, solaris which is valuable because all that software is made for it which makes people buy sun systems.
You find the program you need to run and then look at the systems running it, and unless you're already running AIX or HP-UX your first choice is probably Sun (and sun is usually always a choice). Now Linux comes in, becomes this pervasive server software and Solaris doesn't really look as hot as it did anymore.
Is that how it goes? The one minute they support linux and the other they bash it?
I think it is time to start learning C#. Java is slower than a mule anyways.
Like all the other alternatives. Linux is a solution. It's not the solution for everything, it's not the answer to lifes problems, but it's a solution in some cases.
I think Sun's is WAY out of line making such a broad and unqualified statement.
So if sun doesn't think that the VM in the Linux kernel isn't for Mainframes, I don't see them making a good suggestion for how to improve it, but just bashing the current philosophy. If you are going to crticize, at least make it constructive Sun.
As for my thoughts on the issue directly and against Sun, if linux runs on a mainframe people will find the problems that exsist for linux on the platform and begin striding towards correcting those, the same way with any problem (I'll take the StrongARM processor that my linux iPAQ runs) it's not perfect but it's being worked on and thats why linux keeps going because people go "hey lets try and make this work on here because it would make job X easier" and they do it..... now if only I could re-program my toaster.
And it was a seriously easy. There were never a problem with the virtual machine suddenly giving up the ghost from underneath us, and we'd never loose a Samba process for any reason whatsoever. We had load averages that were very normal, and it was like we were always scrambling to find new reasons to use it, as opposed to setting it up and just having forgetting about it. We used to tell the students that the machine was seriously hot, and it would never fall-over. We were even thinking of doing up artwork -- AND STARTING A RELIGION!
All those impressive demos where they have 32 hojillion instances of linux running on a mainframe are so meaningfull. Sure, you can do without it, but it will do everything. If you try actually working with the setup, you never have to reboot your machine -- instead of doing it 10 times a day, and those other take forever to freakin' reboot.
But who are you going to believe, ummm, me or ummmmm, that other guy.
Sheesh.
Repeat 10 times: "I DONT CARE. I DONT OWN ONE OF THOSE. NEIGTHER DO YOU."
Good. Now the mainframe propblem, if there is a problem, is gone.
Sun Microsystems is just mad because IBM made it there before they did?
Sun brings up a few very valid points:
I don't think Sun is trashing Linux. I just think they are saying that Linux does not scale to Mainframes that great right now. Perhaps the only thing they aren't doing is saying that while there are issues with Linux now, the fact that Linux is FS allows those issues to be resolved in the future. Of course, why would a company endorse another company's product?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
by VM they mean the virtual machine in which linux has to run. Not linux's virtual memory system.
And they seem to make some good points about this setup not being optimal -- i.e. you don't get IBM's legendary stability, etc. by running linux in a VM. The only obvious FUD I picked up on was the business of applications needing to be certified before they would run. Since I'm assuming that the only *technical* reason people would run linux on an ibm mainframe is to use the apps.
Any IBM hackers care to comment? Anyone run linux on a mainframe?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
If the article is correct, then the z800's running zVM emulate Intel x86 architecture in order to run Linux. Heck, even poorly written native compiled code generally has advantages over such a set up.
That's not what IBM is doing at all. The version of Linux that runs on the 390 platform is natively compiled for that system and has been tuned to work with it. This is no different than Linux on any of the dozen or so other platforms it's been designed to run on.
Sun's FUD-slinger got his facts wrong more than half the time in that article, which in most places would get him grade of "F". I've been using and buying Suns for 16 years, and while I really like their products, I hope IBM takes every opportunity to point out what a nitwit he is.
The moral: Just 'cause it says "Linux" on the label doesn't mean it's running on an x86.
He basically has 1 valid point. Linux under VM is not as well behaved as it should be, for exactly the reason mentioned. Coming from the PC world where all hardware is real, it treats all memory as if there isn't anything else better to do that use it all for file buffers. Under VM, a better plan is to check to see if there is any memory pressure being exerted on the machine before using your entire memory allocation for buffering.
They're working on that.
As for the rest, it's mostly FUD. The endian-ness is not an issue for 95% (wild ass guess) of apps that I have seen. Maybe except for DB2. You have to plan your maximum capacity in a discrete server farm just like you do in a virtual one. You also get capacity upgrade on demand with a phone call with the IBM hardware. They dont even have to send out a CE to do anything. Let's see SUN do that.
You wouldn't want to use it as a compute farm, but as a database server or news server or something which is usually I/O bound. They ain't exactly ferraris, more like 18 wheeler big rigs.
You think emacs is evil?! You've never used VM's XEDIT have you?!! That's evil, baby!
As far as I know, Linux wasn't really designed to be a mainframe anyway... so whats the big deal really? Linux is a web server/ server system, great for apache and the likes, stable and a life saver for small companies. So Sun has the better equipment and software for mainframe. IF linux had been designed to do that then there would be a real contraversy in the situation anyway. Its an interesting article with lots of good points, but its like comparing tomatoes and oranges.
-- RJ
Linux isn't designed at all, which is good. Thats why its so flexible. There was already that debate a while back.
Oh please. Like your going to have an easier time compiling non-Linux software? Still think so given how open and portable most Linux software is? Is mainframe software as portable? Is there lots of free mainframe software to port? Thats almost as irrational as Microsoft's "Linux isn't free" TCO argument. Per that can-of-worms, because both systems have TCOs means NT itself *is* free?
Articles like this are interesting because Sun definitly has a conflict of interest with Linux. They need to appear as if they support it so new blood will buy SPARC hardware with Solaris, but they also don't want people 'liking' Linux over Solaris/SPARC.
Personally, I love Linux on SPARC. I would prefer Sun making Linux more 'Enterprise'-like instead of hawking Solaris as a big-brother. However, I understand that Solaris is a huge investment and one they probably will think is superior for years to come.
For their sake, I hope the Penguins don't squish them. But if they don't look both ways before crossing the street...
... Their competative edge. With the hardware issues on the Sparc II modules that affected companies such as e-bay (and the company that I work for), they have given alot of their customers black eyes. We are converting from a SUN E10K to IBM RS/6000's running AIX and Linux, because our clients can no longer tolerate the Sun crashing...
Sun is just trying to cover the ass, as they are losing a lot of business to IBM.
Pardon my ignornace, but can't you run Linux directly on IBM mainframe iron without VM between you and the hardware? How is the Linux solution in that case?
I don't know about ya'll, but he's got me convinced. Bow to the powers of coercive reviews ...and give me Solaris!
That is what I said and I am still at a 0. :( It is okay I suppose, I was a little vauge since it was a while ago that I heard about it.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
First you ask Bill Joy what he thinks of C#, and now this. A new low for Slashdot.
"What do the folks on Slashdot think?"
/. that has to do with Linux or Windowz will give you tones and tones of posting.
This is easy: anything posted on
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Why ask the average slashdot reader what he/she thinks?
The average slashdot reader is not in the market for a 400k$ server.
Friend or not, in the long run Sun will need Linux for Sun just to survive. So the question isn't is Sun sincere in their Linux efforts nor does this attack on IBM signal new antagonism between Sun's interests and Linux, but instead do we even need to notice Sun when it says things like this?
The answer is no, of course not.
We neither plead with Sun to get onboard with linux nor get angry and bothered by this kind of attack. It's 100% irrelevant.
It's up to Sun Microsystems to come to Linux and save itself; nothing we do or say can positively influence their intransigence/willingness, so we're best off ignoring them completely no matter what they say.
Think how absurd it is for Linux people to get upset or harbor paranoia about Sun!
Without doing anything hostile to target or hinder Sun, or Sparc or Solaris, Linux has compelled Sun to include linux compatibility runtime, to offer an official JDK for Linux, and to acquire a Linux on X86 hardware business and now, to expand it into the midrange of server offerings.
Linux is an irresistible force and, no matter what some dinosaurs over there may think, SUN is not an immovable object, it will orbit Linux or it will fall into Linux and burn up. Whether they survive the journey or not they will come. They are coming over even now.
This piece was so full of FUD that I could scarcely believe it.
Then why did IBM have to port the TCPIP stack from the VM world into MVS, if VM is so far behind?
Linux is "designed for Intel"??? What about M68K, PPC, ARM, Alpha, SPARC and others? (See the Debian ports page for a more complete list.)
Yes, MVS (z/OS) is rock solid reliable. But the machines don't bust either. CPU recovery has been an integral part of the architecture for almost 30 years. If a processor breaks, another takes over with no application effect, or a spare is assigned. Someone on the ibm-main list today mentioned that the processors are themselves duplicated on chip, with comparison logic to ensure that both sides are computing the same thing. Does Intel even parity-check their processors?
Small? Install a copy of SuSE SLES in a S/390 LPAR (logical partition, a hardware implementation of VM that is delivered on EVERY S/390... no z/VM necessary) and see how much software was delivered with it. You wanted OpenSSH and OpenSSL, though SuSE didn't deliver it? Go to the web, download it, and do configure, make, make install. The big problem with application portability is the proprietary vendors that ship binaries only.
What an amazing assertion. Wish Khan had provided a reference.
Merde. Why run it on a closed proprietary SPARCstation? Or a closed proprietary Mac?
Khan makes a couple of decent points, particularly regarding z/VM skills. But the hyperbole is way out there, and it's hard to take him seriously.
I fondly remember VM as the first operating system I ran into that embodied a really good idea.
There was a stage during the '80s when I was working more as an industry analyst than as a developer when Sun and IBM between them had become two of the then only four serious pillars on which the future of computing rested at a conceptual level.
At that level, Sun was the embodiment of Unix, taking evnagelical responsibility for the cause, and it is reasonable to assume that within their own envorins they genuinely see themselves in that position still.
From my own biased perspective, I felt they abdicated that authority when they allowed their elegant Network-extensible Window System (NeWS) to be rolled by a tide of industry resistance that mobilised against the upstart Sun and behind the then clearly inferior X.
But I'm sure in Sun's hearts they still believe they are the ultimate repository of deep understanding on all things Unix and are being genuine and honest in the technical basis for this critique.
The real problem is thay they can't see beyond their own world view. They do not have places in their heart for deep understanding of either the VM nor the Linux view or the world, let alone the two in combination.
Still Sun struggles to find its own identity and focus, to say nothing of a sustainable business model for the future.
From NFS to RISC, to industrial strength Web servers and on to Java, Sun has been a major contributor to the direction of mainstream computing, but now seems to be edging closer to following the fall to oblivion of that other former pillar of hearts and minds, Digital.
It will be a worse than sad day when we finally have to convey Sun to history, especially if that comes before Java gets to really stand on its own feet.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
why would you be a linux advocate?
Wouldn't it make sense to be an advocate of quality computing ? Or better yet and advocate of ROI, or better yet an advocate of quality research.
You go apply for a job and put "linux advocate" on your resume and I will put advocate of "quality computing" on mine. Guess who will look like the person who has nothing better to do that bash anything that isn't linux because they think MS has actually harmed them in some way ?
Come on folks. Do you think Sun, IBM or even MS is an enemy of the state or is "out to get you".
You linux advocate freaked because Media players caches it's requests and CD info. You ever look at how much info linux keeps, try everything and I don't think it informs you of all the info it keeps on the outside of a "insert any linux company name here" box.
Please get a life and move on to something that matters.
btw I have run linux on a ibm vm. Question is there is no real advantage to. I can do everything linux can on Solaris only in a bigger fashion and I get better more scalable system with a better support organization.
Sorry, but z/VM has nothing to do with emulation. z/VM is a low-level system that simply (or not so simply ;-) virtualizes the hardware by providing one or more virtual machines, each of which can run any native OS. As far as the client OS knows, it's running on the bare hardware. The z/VM layer provides the ability to flexibly divide the hardware resources between the VMs, and guarantees that each VM is completely isolated from all other VMs. In the case of Linux/390, the Linux kernel and applications have been compiled to run natively on the S/390 architecture. Check out this Linux for S/390 FAQ for more info.
The latest marketing gimmick that seems to be catching on is selling products by providing you with a trusted, informed, and seemingly unbiased opinion. Can you really trust the biggest competitors' opinions of anything? Sure, they may have valid points, but what are they *not* pointing out? IBM probably has just as many reasons as to why Sun's implementation is clunky, illogical, etc., but it really doesn't matter. What matters is if the tools meet the specifications that you, the consumer need. Maybe we can hurry and give this type of marketing a bad label so the suits can move on with their next gimmick.
The article states that there are problems finding mainframe staffing? I think this is totally unfounded. Many Many orginizations already have large mainframe implementations and want to roll the applications to midrange size systems. Converting to Linux would allow them to port the application but still use legacy hardware and legacy hardware resources (take a company like EDS for example, they have tons of mainframe operators already). So there is a vertain leveraging of resources (did I say leveraging?). But then again is Linux really a good mature midrange platform? And do you still really want to be tied to IBM, ie Big Brother, ie they may be cheap up front but they ALWAYS bill ya in the end.
READ: Of course, with an infinite amount of money, every business problem is solvable at the highest profit for the problem-solver...
READ: But Sun is of the opinion that it's proprietary servers, running with proprietary hardware (such as the special disk drives with the "magic" secret partition table, and the memory chips with the notch moved 1/10 inch) and, of course, running proprietary Solaris Operating System is the best solution overall, especially if you have an infinite amount of money to throw at YOUR problem...
READ: Definitely, here, we have a blatant attempt at fitting an hexagonal peg into a pentagonal hole. Linux was conceived to run on discarded low-end hardware in order to satisfy teenage-geek impulses, which is quite a different thing than to run on the Big Iron dinosaurs IBM is well-known for.
READ: You just can't run JCL and CICS and MVS and CMS and Assembler on Linux. Cobol (even GNU-Cobol) will make the kernel break into hysterics.
READ: On the other hand, Solaris is designed to run (well) solely on Sparc architecture that made Sun famous.
READ: Of course, you don't have any of those virtual machine nonsense with Sun products: you simply plug in as many boxes as you need of machines. No more software headaches for your operators!!!
READ: Why do in software what can be done far more profitably (and piracy-immune!) in juicy, expensi^h^h^h^h^h^h^h profitable hardware?
READ: Of course, you can dynamically add and remove ressources from a Sun cluster with the use of specially trained monkeys and servoids, which is a better proposition than software hocus-pocusery within the deep, dark bowels of an IBM mainframe.
READ: Of course, Sun cannot take advantage of Parallel Sysplex clustering either, but that's more alphabet soup to muddy the waters and instill doubts into potential buyers.
READ: Again, Linux fragmentation is a terrible tragedy that will never happen to Solaris.
READ: Even if " nobody ever got fired for buying IBM ", we whish the same could be said about Sun.
READ: IBM is double-plus uncool amongst geeks. SUN is the hip thing to use in IT!!!
As you wish! Check out http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/li nux/lcds/index.html and you can sign up for a chuck of a linux powered big iron... They even toss in some of their software. Very cool.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Ahh, that makes sense. Sorry, I am now familiar with what is going on. The Z800 is being multiplexed in the VM. DUH! Yeah, that does actually make some sense! Now I am feeling quite foolish. I remember reading of this system before. My apologies. Please mod the above comment down. This technology DOES make sense, because it would scale better than merely purchasing multiple rack units.
Solaris is only free on 8 or fewer processors. I don't know what they're charging above that but can only guess that after you've spent a cool half-million on an Enterprise server, the $5-15k for the OS is just a drop in the bucket.
...always safe to trust a penguin... no offense "other guy" but I hate er "strongly dislike" it when ppl bash things I support especially when they just yell rather than supporting their views with facts.
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
There is nothing wrong with paying for more performance. Plus, what would cost the customer more? Having a monkey come in and flip a switch, or having a new Mainframe made/remade for the extra performance?
Also, this way the hardware upgrade is basically instantaneous. IBM is just giving customers what they want.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Preach it brother
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
I don't see the problem having Linux running on IBM zSeries hardware (aka MVS, S/390, mainframe, etc.). If it works, it works. And I've never seen anything better than IBM's mainframes for parallel I/O activity on huge scales...
In that it doesn't make sense to spend all that money on a large mainframe ($400k was quoted in article) when you could get inexpensive (and fast) i386 boxes and a load balancer. Server management might be easier with the mainframe, but you could have a couple hundred thousand dollars left over to spend on additional console monkeys. Pardon me if someone's already said this.
I'm sure you mean "the single standardized Linux distribution."
No, grandparent referred to the Linux Standard Base.
To pre-empt the old joke: "All your Linux standard base are belong to the Free Standards Group."
Will I retire or break 10K?
$0.025 rounds to $0.3 ?? Wow. That's some serious rounding error. Or perhaps you meant $0.03.
Personally, I'd just chip in my $0.025 twice, and hand the guy a nickle.
Maybe Sun is jealous because they *still* have no real enterprise level HW/SW combination that can do real clustering and partitioning. Just compare the stuff Sun can offer with their competitors (HP and IBM). Sun-cluster has downtime (at least with certain applications) up to several minutes and that is not what I call enterprise level operating environment. With IBM HW you get partitioning and abstraction that will you replace every single component in the system with zero downtime. And what comes to performance, I'd recommend cheap Intel boxen to all customers instead of Sun, they're basically identical when it comes to capabilities and Intel just runs Java much better (just try WebSphere, ATG Dynamo or even Tomcat).
I know Solaris is something like the standard Unix in the corporate world and I hate AIX and HP/UX, but the HW just is so much better. Now, with the rise of Linux, you get the superior HW with decent Unix-like OS.
Read between the lines, this article is mostly anti-IBM FUD. It was written by Sun, so I'm not exactly surprised.
... unless IBM mainframe R&D is actually a computer camp for children with down syndrome.
... uhh basically they don't exist, because many of the commercial UNIX systems out there exist on top of big-endian hardware.
And Linux isn't designed to run in a virtual machine; implementation decisions that make sense on PC hardware don't fit well in a virtual machine(4). This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
First, let's check what his "(4)" reference points to:
(4) For example: Filling all available RAM with file buffers is great in a real machine (as it speeds I/O via caching with otherwise-wasted storage), but in a virtual machine doing that is bad (as it inflates the working set of the Linux guest, which is competing for real storage with many other Linuxes-leading to paging/swapping).
Uhh, I have never seen a VM implementation that did not give a RAM limit. So this guy is basically saying that a memory leak on one of your VM's will take down the entire mainframe. Somehow I doubt IBM's mainframe R&D staff would do this
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10)
(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
I challenge anyone out there to name any significant piece of UNIX software that doesn't have a big-endian port
Just the way he phrased that last bit about endianness convinces me that this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. I can't really know for sure though, since most of the stuff he talks about is beyond me. But, based on those few things he mentions that I'm familiar with, I'd say he's a typical manager who is loosely and incorrectly paraphrasing what some Enterprise developer told him, and decided to make a marketing advantage out of it.
Read between the lines!!
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10).
(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
Wait a minute... Isn't Sparc Big-Endian too?
Sun should rather worry about their own licensing issues and their own problems with open source. Java's broken community licensing program and Sun's inability to evolve the platform more quickly has basically killed Java for open source applications (that's why Mono is being written around .NET, even though .NET is much less mature and comes from Microsoft). Sun keeps equivocating on Solaris, Linux, and which one is better in their not-so-humble opinion.
Sun should address their own issues before putting down IBM. I'm sure ten years from now, IBM is still going to be around. I'm not so sure I believe the same thing about Sun.
The IBM architectures you decided on are exotic compared to the Sun Quad SMP box and don't sound like you benchmarked the appropriate tools, or even like against like.
Mainframe: I/O throughput, *massive* loads.
SP: *parallel* clusters, CPU, *fast* network.
You'd have been better with an S80... Sorry, "pSeries".
Deleted
call me naive, stupid, whatever.
other than backwards compatibility and data warehousing, what do you use these mainframe-class boxes for these days? Why run thousands of instances of Linux on one mainframe? the only reason I could think of would be a development environment, but if you're doing that much Linux dev everyone should have their own workstations..
Linux on mainframes is still running on top of a properitery VM. This kills the whole Free Software argument for using Linux.
Likewise, Linux on a PC farm is still running on top of a "properitery" BIOS (unless you're using something odd like LinuxBIOS). This kills the whole Free Software argument for using Linux.
But does it matter?
Of course, why would a company endorse another company's product?
When it sells products that are designed to interoperate with the other company's product perhaps? (That is, not in this case.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
somebody put Sun's spin on Linux against IBM's against ESR's against Microsoft's. Pick apart the so-called technical arguments and see how the Linux-in-the-enterprise battle is fought.
By itself, this is just the bulleted text on the back of the box the Sun comes in.
Applications that run on Linux for Intel need to be recompiled and recertified for each new platform; thus the application portfolio to run Linux on a mainframe is small.
Then later (as a reason Sun/Solaris is better)...
Linux compatibility features of Solaris
Perhaps this is just a strawman but just because IBM certifies programs and Sun emulates (but not certify) doesn't mean Sun's solution is more l33t.
In fact, in production environment would you rather run programs certified by IBM or trust Solaris to emulate linux well enough to run the same programs. No-brainer...
What do the folks on Slashdot think?
Well, I can't speak for others, but I think sun sells a competative UNIX on mainframe solution.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"Suited for Web delivery at the edge of the network, Linux servers offer an alternative to proprietary and closed environments such as Microsoft Windows"
.com is fast becoming a dud.
So linux is only good for light web serving duty?
"implementation decisions that make sense on PC hardware "
Read between the lines linux is for low end "pc class hardware"
"Applications that run on Linux for Intel need to be recompiled and recertified for each new platform; thus the application portfolio to run Linux on a mainframe is small("
here we see the time honored no apps FUD.
"Why put an open operating system such as Linux on a closed proprietary mainframe?"
cough....did he actually say that...cough
Sun loves to dam linux with faint praise. The only reason they even have a linux "strategy" is because of fear of losing market share.
Me thinks the dot in
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
...there are other factors than performance, indulge me for a moment:
I work at a big corporation which relied on IBM mainframes for its whole business for almost 30 years until the PC and the high-end Unix servers shook up the landscape for good. I'm from the PC (IT) camp, which has been separate from the Big Iron (DP) guys in the organization since the early days.
DP, once very powerful, has lost a great deal of influence in the 90s, although they still run most of the mission-critical stuff, and the main reason for this were the high-end Unix servers, most of them Sun boxen running Oracle. Believe me, there's no love lost between those two fractions in our company.
Our mainframe guys see Linux as an opportunity to get better integration with the IT world, which was abysmal until now (3270 terminal windows, IMS/DB, TSO/ISPF and such horrors) and to better position themselves against the Sun/Oracle camp which is after their budgets and their butts. Today, we have Linux happily running on our mainframes (still in an experimental phase, not in production), serving up http and Samba shares without a hiccup.
If we're talking about bringing Linux into the large corporations, the crucial influence of IBM cannot be overestimated. We were a died-in-the wool IBM shop (S/390, Token Ring, 3270PC, OS/2, S/36, AS/400, the whole enchilada) and successfully trusted our business to IBM for 30 years (paid through our nose for it, too, I might add). IBM has lots of credibility and trust, so if they say Linux is cool, our CTO listens. Microsoft, on the other hand, is viewed with some "new kid on the block" suspicion. Our management doesn't like downtime and security breaches, and the memory of the ILOVEYOU aftermath is still very vivid, for example. Plus, we migrated to NT4 late (about 28'000 systems, ended September 99) and now Microsoft is practically forcing us into another expensive upgrade cycle sooner than we wanted and with IT budgets cut short on account of the less-than-stellar economy because NT4 support is withdrawn in 2003.
We thus have the following situation: IT and DP are up against the Unix enterprise server guys, all this with the backing of IBM. The astronomically high cost of Sun/Oracle solutions is being questioned more and more, and technologically viable low-end solutions (x86 multiprocessor servers, Linux) begin to rattle the foundations from below.
I don't want to make bold predictions here, but if I were Sun, I'd be worried. To me, it looks like interesting times are ahead.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Linux on the mainframe can't respond to the workload demands of Web serving with high utilization--something IBM touted at the time of its z800 announcement. Horizontally scaled Linux farms are designed to handle unpredictable demand with above average peak loads. As demand rises, a load balancer distributes the traffic evenly across servers, which increases utilization. Because design capacity needs to handle peak demand, server farms often have a low utilization.
If you have a VM system with two virtual machines, and one of them is nearly idle, and the other virtual machine is very busy, VM will automatically take resources away from the less busy machine and devote it to the more busy machine.
This means that you don't need load-balancing software. VM is the load-balancing software.
Given the relatively low cost of hardware, some organizations find this trade-off acceptable to ensure appropriate service levels. Contrary to what many believe, consolidating a Linux farm into multiple images on a mainframe would not change the demand pattern. Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand.
Of course it can! The VM kernel will parcel out memory and CPU on demand.
As a result, a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would;
All computer systems need to size for peak demand. The difference is that with a mainframe, you can size one machine for the peak demand of the busiest of a large number of virtual machines, and get rid of the overhead caused by the load-balancing software, because you don't need it anymore.
high utilization is a myth.
VM systems can utilize 90-95% of the native computer resources. The overhead on a VM system is very, very small.
This is nothing but marketing BS and FUD. Sun is loosing a great deal of business recently due to the introduction of Linux into the server market.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Firstly, the mainframe-with-lots-of-virtOSes is a much neater solution than chroot for making lots of boxes for particular purposes while using very little hardware. Chroot is fiddly to set up and maintain, especially if you have minimalist chroot environments, as is normal.
The "designed for Intel" argument isn't totally without merit, but mostly means that most of the really fine detail per-architecture optimisation effort goes to Intel platforms, not that the OS itself has much bias. After all, Linux runs on a scarey number of platforms. If there were strong bias this wouldn't be the case.
The virtual machine argument is similarly weak: the IBM hardware and supporting OS is designed for virtual machine presentation, and can be expected to be fairly good at it. It's not like the Linux instances are running in an emulator, with interpreter-type overheads.
Looks like FUD to me. It fairly shouts it at me!
Sun's rep is built on solid, standard, hardware and a solid, scalable, enterprise featured OS. Look at the way cool things you can do to an E10K machine: hot swap damn near anything, run multiple Solaris instances and move CPUs etc between them, on the fly, etc. This doesn't mean the IBM Way is silly. A different set of benefits.
Naturally this article is going to be met with some skepticism because it appears to be a self-serving marketing piece from Sun. This is unfortunate because the author makes several good points. I think it is important to note that this is more of an attack on mainframes and VM architecture than it is against Linux. It really does not make much sense to run 10, 100 or 10,000 copies of Linux on one super-duper computer. Sure it's neat, but we need to remember that computers are supposed to do useful things. What a collosal waste of cpu and memory to have 10,000 operating systems when the right one (yes, 1) would do the job just fine. Add to that the inherent performance hit from running on a "virtual machine" and it makes even less sense. I actually tend to think that IBM's use of Linux is more self-serving than Sun's attack. It's just an attempt to sell more expensive proprietary hardware by capitalizing on the intellectual generosity of others.
micorsoft appears to be another bloated amercan company that cant make reliabele product
microsoft is like GM , it dominated once, but it always made unreliable crap.
the japs should make their own OS. maybe they will finally get rid of the kludge knonw as
wintel once and for all
Au contraire, mon frere. If you read the article and sampled the footnotes you'd realize that the instances of Linux on these IBM mainframes are entirely virtual and lose the strangths of Linux running natively on the hardware.
The Linux PHILOSOPHY is great, but the implementation is (relatively) poor: native apps are much faster in this case, and more importantly, less dependant on a single point of failure. Virtual machines are neato when used intelligently, but I think the author is making a very strong point regarding IBM's over-dependance on Linux *at all costs* as opposed to choosing the best tool for the job.
Of course, IBM on the other hand, took linux seriously and now have a profitable product that is being very well received in the market and which *is* saving businesses lots of money.
Sun doesn't have anything quite like it.
Deleted
It seems lately with Sun floundering about the market and pulling silly moves re Java that all this really points to is that Sun really, really, really wants to be Microsoft.
.Net rules the world. Do you honestly think that this company would be any more ethical than Microsoft?
And they aren't. And they're pissed about it.
Imagine for a moment that Sun has the hugely dominant market share in server revenues that it wished it had, and that cross-platform Java programming and their version of
Given the way they've been acting, I think that Sun - if it had the opportunity - might even turn out to be *less* ethical. Much of what they've done lately reminds me of a five-year-old screaming "my toys are better than your toys! And they're my toys! And you can't touch them unless I say so, and only if you'll play with them the way I want you to!"
I don't trust IBM any more than I do Sun when it comes to their motivations re Linux, but at least IBM has some class....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Everyone seems to have forgotten the quietly mentioned announcement that was inserted in the big announcement about Sun selling Intel-powered servers running Linux. Namely, Sun fully intends to create its own distribution of Linux and to bypass RedHat and Suse.
Sun fully intends to hijack Linux, which is the core of the open-source movement. Seize the OS. Then, all the applications are at your mercy. (This whole thing smacks of Microsoft and its strategy for Windows).
Note that IBM is working fully with RedHat and Suse. IBM is not creating its own distribution of Linux.
Hmm? Can we, can we?
What d'ya think? Anyone want to post odds?
IBM are giving out VMs on some of their mainframes.
Deleted
Sun's big pitch is RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability), and they have got it absolutely spot on with the new F15K. The dynamic system domains on the 10K and 15K (and the next size down Serengeti machines) allow multiple Solaris instances to run on a single frame, and for processors, memory and I/O to be put into and taken out of a running Solaris instance. But unlike VM, the domains run in partitioned sets of hardware, so that (for instance) any CPU fault will only bring down a single instance, whereas with VM style logical partitioning you could lose a whole lot of domains with a single hardware fault.
No, this article is about the fact that "Linux Mainframe" sounds like the benefits of the Linux API with the RAS of a mainframe, whereas in reality you are getting something which is not as resilient as a E10K or F15K, and the Linux kernel won't linearly scale out to 72 CPUs and 500GB of memory as a Solaris kernel will.
GNU/Linux on mainframe has its place, all Sun are trying to do is point out the IBM might get a bit carried away by what they achieve, and try to pitch it into situations where a different system might be better.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
I've heard that Linux runs faster on Sparc hardware than Solaris... is there any confirmation of this?
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I see all these people flaming sun for "bashing" linux, i put it in quotes because I don't see it in the article anywhere _bashing_ linux, however, I doubt 90% of these people have _ever_ used a mainframe and are just sticking up for linux because they use it, some would call them zealots. In my opinion, I feel sun has made some very interesting and well-founded points that Linux wasn't created for the mainframe, it was created for x86 and not to run in virtual machine, etc. On the other hand, it's _your_ mainframe, and you can put whatever you feel like on it.
What serves Mr. Khan so well is his agenda (getting people to do things the Sun Way.) What does not serve him well is his implied ignorance of the kind of environment where Linux on a z-series might actually make sense.
That is, in mainframe shops, NOT where he supposes it will be introduced. He paints a relentless picture that a shop would purchase a brannu z-series JUST TO RUN LINUX. That might be true in a mainframe shop, with trained folks who are used to the environment.
A UNIX shop would probably not ever find itself in this position unless they have a particularly thick headed CIO who comes from a mainframe shop and doesn't understand the UNIX Way.
So the thesis of Mr. Khan's paper is bogus - painting a picture of painful adoption by an entrenched UNIX shop with architectures built to suit, and thus this paper is simply bogus as well. I would expect better of someone with such a lofty title. Perhaps he's embarrassed of this paper. But he's probably just another willing lapdog in the kennel of McNealy (whatever you say, boss!)
Appropriate technology applied appropriately, Mr. Khan. That's the way to gain credibility in IT shops, not trying to presuppose a scenario that's self serving, not to mention silly.
He says "Linux is designed for Intel" That is incorrect, Linux is designed as a mostly portable operating system that currently runs on several architectures INCLUDING Sun, IBM RS/6000, Alpha, Macintosh, and others.
He complains about recompiling your software to run on the mainframe. Well big deal, if you are running the same libs and same compiler with a same kernel then the compile will be relatively painless! Its like compiling Solaris Sparc software to Solaris Intel. Sun claims its easy.
And now I hear that they are going to sell Intel machines running Linux?!
Well thats going to be a bit trickier compiling Solaris Sparc programs on Intel Linux than Intel Linux on S/390 Linux.
Putting linux on a E10K is just as dumb as putting it on a mainframe.
Big irone are priced at a premium.
For one thing, resources are shared among CPUS, so you can't scale linearly, giving you less bang for the bux, the bigger the box.
What is worse, is that the price tends to cale almost exponentially.
For example a beefed upentry level server with the same performance as a half full mid-range/enterprise server typically costs only the third of the bigger box.
Why would anyone want to buy such expensive boxes to run linux? The only reason I see is that they think they can save money by having fewer linux admins. Me, I think you can buy a lot of linux admin payroll for the 5-10$ million premium you pay for a big iron. I also think that an operation with some big iron tends to require a higher head count than the same computing power on commodity servers.
The only places I see a market for the big iron, is where they're just ading software and capabilities in an operation where they already have big iron. I.E IBMS's and suns goal with this, is to stop existing customers from throwing out their existing machines.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Did anybody else catch that bit about linux being only for Intel?
/usr/src/linux/arch | wc counts 15 different architectures, not to mention all of the other architectures not in the main kernel.
A quick ls
-
Linux on the mainframe is actually hosted by
another proprietary operating system, z/VM.
-
The optimized operating system for IBM
mainframes is z/OS, formerly called MVS(2).
Compared to z/OS, z/VM is a niche operating
system with virtual machine (VM) support for
new hardware features added late or often not
at all(3).
- Linux on the mainframe is complicated; this
isn't Linux running on a two-way Intel server. Despite
IBM's claims of easy management(5), customers still
need a special machine room and specially
trained staff for both z/VM and Linux.
-
Finding mainframe staffing is an obstacle
in many organizations(6); combining mainframe
and Linux staffing further complicates the matter.
-
Running multiple Linux images still requires
administration that needs to grow with the
number of images being run.
-
...there is little incremental RAS benefit.
Although IBM claims "zSeries servers inherit
the legendary IBM S/390 strengths in the
areas of fault avoidance and tolerance,
recovery from failures, and concurrent
maintenance and repair for "always-on" availability"(7).
We don't believe this to be true for zSeries
servers running Linux. The "legendary" IBM
S/390 strengths IBM references are the result of
decades of development work on IBM's flagship
mainframe operating system, known today as
z/OS. The fault recovery features of z/OS are
not found in Linux. z/VM does have some fault
recovery features, but it is not nearly as
resilient as z/OS. For example, z/VM cannot
take advantage of Parallel Sysplex clustering,
and VM hypervisor is an added single point of
failure(8).
-
Consolidation without application availability just can't happen...
-
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe
applications makes porting difficult(10).
-
The economics just don't work. IBM claims it is
financially justifiable to consolidate as few as 20
Linux servers on a z800(11). With an estimated
starting price of $400,000 for a z800(12) with a
single CPU engine enabled, that claim seems
exaggerated compared to Linux servers that hover in
the $1,000 to $2,000 range. Sun's rack-optimized
1U form factor servers start at list prices under
$1,000.
-
Customers such as Nielsen Media Research, A.B. Watley,
Cognigen Corp, and Littlewoods have chosen Sun and
realized up to $1.5 million in annual savings
-
[out of order]
This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not
tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
Don't get me wrong...I love Sun, have an Ultra 5. But a lot of this is obfuscation. There is a lot of value in Linux on the mainframe for the huge organizations which are, in the main, already IBM customers.Not necessarily, you can boot Linux as a stand- alone operating system. It's just more convenient to develop and implement under VM in many shops.
There is a grain of truth in this. Some printers, for example, were supported late in VM. I think the same is true of some tape libraries. However, it's a real strong niche, and usually this is not an issue.
Linux on anything can be complicated. If it follows the historical path of IBM products, it will get both (a) more complicated as IBM adds options and (b) simpler to administer as they clean up the packaging. But the real problem here is the specially trained staff...you need a trained staff no matter where you are running Linux...or any operating system. The same is true of Solaris or Windows servers.
This is a good point. Mainframe skills are becoming rarer, older, and grayer. But...once you have the VM systems programmer, the rest of the Linux staff can all be new hires trained for IBM Linux. However, finding good Solaris skills can also be a challenge.
No. The strength of IBM is scalability. The strength of IBM customers is organization and procedures - you might see it as bureaucracy, but it has gotten the job done for two generations. And, if I am running thousands of Linux virtual machines, I will be able to automate the management of these with existing MVS mainframe tools.
There is a lot of machine check recovery processing in MVS. However, over the past decade a lot of that has moved into the hardware itself, and into the Hardware Management Console (HMC). So, this was certainly true in 1990, less so today. Ditto the hypervisor comment IMHO.
Unless you are writing the applications yourself, as many potential IBM Linux customers are.
Little-endian vs. big-endian. Hits Solaris too.
Just looking at hardware and/or software costs isn't the right analysis for most of these customers. You also have to factor in the cost of support staff; comparing z/VM and Linux to a corresponding Windows NT server farm becomes more competitive as the size grows. And factoring in the cost of downtime, which is the real driver for the very large companies who benefit the most from this combination, usually makes the hardware costs insignificant.
Neilsen is a household name, haven't heard of the others, but...these are hardly huge DP shops. The real benefit of z/VM and Linux is going to be in the Fortune 100 manufacturers, insurance companies, banks, and stock brokerages whose IT budgets approximate $1.5 million per week. Or day.
This is Linux. It's designed to be open. It's tunable for any hardware.
Why tune if another thng runs better ?
No bloody manager would decide to do that.
And he would be right. it'll cost him a lot of money to modify the source and money is all they care about (mostly).
I do agree that they can change the source and in the long run they might decide to do that. But, it's not a short term option.
In our company we have pretty much gotten rid of Sun hardware & software and replaced those with mainframes running Linux. We've been very satisfied. Just like Telia - we do not need 70 Sun servers if we can replace those with one single IBM Linux mainframe which is easy to manage and which can handle the job. Business is business. I can understand if Sun gets mad about this, but I couldn't care less. Our Oracle server runs on Linux platform (it used to run on Solaris) and we have not had any problems with it ever since we switched from Solaris to Linux.
I don't get it. I don't get it at all. .. I /know/ that there are people out there that have been using linux since version -0.004 .. this isn't a p155ing competition you know ...).
/still/ not a p1ssing comp.) systems with gigs. I just really fail to see why people expect linux to scale both ways. Desktop users have very different needs to embedded users, as do mainframe users. I see so many posts that are automatically hostile to the "maybe Linux isn't the best choice" point of view ... did you ever acutally think before you but your postings in gear?
First of all, don't start slating me as an 'enemy'. I think Linux is great. I've been running it at home for 5 years (yes, yes
Having said that, I've had experience with a wide range of computer systems ranging from embedded with a couple of K ram to larger (look, it's
Why do people have such a problem believing that one shoe can't fit all? I'm not saying that Linux is cr|p on mainframes, but I am speaking out against the knee-jerk reaction which says "if it's Linux it can't be wrong!".
This isn't flame bait, it's a realistic view. If you can't hack it, don't hack it and don't inflict your unfounded views on others.
But as linux is pretty stable in comparison to Windows it cant be that bad to run it on a mainframe. Sun has to jump onto the linux train to be able to compete with IBM but they dont seem happy about it.
I wonder why, is it because they are behind in emnrading linux?
Tossed the windows partition out today and i feel free. Never ever going back!
HTTP/1.1 400
..'cos I think if you filtered it and thoyght about it you could make quite a good case as to why Linux on a mainframe such as this is probably not the best idea in the world at the moment and has some way to go before it becomes a really good OS for such a machine.
Instead the author seems to have got rooted into the idea that Linux is only for Intel processors really and can't handle things like big/little endian swaps.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Sun is just jealous because solaris sucks!!! And I base this on my actual experience for using both solaris and linux. And I can say from my experience solaris sucks!!! I figure this is just SUN fud.
Open sorcers have annouced that money is no longer needed in the open sourced world and are giving all material belongings away for free. Free rent on all open sourcers real property is the first evidence that these money haters are putting there dollars where there mouths are! Also up for grabs are their bank accounts. We have finally reaced either the twilght zone or the outer limits. The commodity know as cold hard cash has finally become meaningless. Everything is free!
Open Sourcers will soon announce the code for digital molecular reoraganization allowing all human beings to have any food or beverage or any materila thing they they reqiure therefore negating the environmental collapse our overpopulated world is racing toward.
Long Live Linux!!!
they probably have/had the potential to be really great, but then have to make changes or statements along the way that leaves people shaking their heads.
I'm admittedly a Sun bigot of sorts, but articles like this are pretty uncalled for and make them look like schoolyard brats.
Grow up Sun, you guys have great hardware and a great OS (in my opinion). Stop being stupid in your attempts to get ahead...
Linux on mainframes kills the serverfarm, be it Solaris/Sparc, Linux/x86 or WinNT/x86 it is a simple calculation of how many people you need to babysit hundreds of machines, the space you need to put em and cooling requirements in comparison to a single zSeries mainframe.
There was a recent study that stated that you can reduce cost for dayly operations in your datacenter by up to 90% simply because one mainframe uses a lot less power than 500 Solaris/Sparc servers and doesn't require such a large air conditioning system (after all energy costs money, too). Of course this also means that most things that are beeing moved over to the mainframe used to run on some comercial unix and not, like most of us would prefer, on WinNT which makes it clear that Sun is not happy about that.
And while the Linux S/390 combination might not be completely on par with Solaris/Sparc it sure is not that far of so I guess Sun is extremely worried.
--Ulrich
On no accounts allow a Vogon to read poetry at you
Intel has them beat on the workstation end, slightly in absolute performance, and massively in price/performance ratio.
Microsoft is about to give Java a major ass kicking with .NET.
They aren't in danger of going under or anything like that, but they've got attacks coming in on all fronts, so should be getting a bit nervous.
~~~
System partitioning isn't the same as IBM's VM technology.
With your E15K, you're dividing up processors and memory between various partitions, each running an instance of the OS.
IBM's running multiple OSs as virtual machines on the same system.
With Sun, if partition A is really busy, and partition B is idle, you can't make use of those idle processors unless you re-allocate your partitions.
With IBM, the processes in VM1 can use all the processors of the mainframe, unless VM2 also needs processing time.
With either one, if one OS instance crashes, it shouldn't affect the other instances.
Published Today by Gartner. Quote
IBM surged in server market share in 2001, gaining at the expense of Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer as the overall market shrank, new figures show. IBM's server revenue decreased from $13.9 billion in 2000 to $13.6 billion in 2001, according to figures from market researcher Gartner released Friday. But because the overall market shrunk faster--down 15 percent, from $55.6 billion to $47 billion--IBM actually gained share. Big Blue cemented its first-place spot in the worldwide market, increasing its share from 25 percent to 29 percent. The increase mirrors similar changes in the North American server market. IBM has benefited from resurgent sales of its old-guard mainframe line, spurred in part by the new ability to run the Linux operating system. But demand for servers in general dried up, with companies worried about the recession and overcapacity left over from the Internet spending spree. Worldwide, second-place Sun dropped 2 percent, to 15.4 percent, while third-place Compaq dropped 0.9 percent, to 13.9 percent, and fourth-place HP dropped 0.1 percent, to 12.8 percent. Fifth-place Dell Computer eked out a 0.1 percent gain to 6.4 percent. In the key Unix server market--a sweet spot with a good balance of server power and price--IBM also gained, increasing share 2.3 percent, to 20.3 percent, with sales of $4.2 billion. The Unix server market dropped 18.7 percent, from $25.3 billion in 2001 to $20.6 billion in 2000, Gartner said. The Unix server market is the biggest single segment of the server market, accounting for 44 percent of total sales. But IBM's gain wasn't enough to topple No. 1 Sun, whose share shrank 3.1 percent, to 35.2 percent, with sales of $7.3 billion. And No. 2 HP, after a concerted effort to stanch losses, rose 1 percent, to 20.5 percent, with sales of $4.6 billion. Dell gained the most in the Intel server market, increasing 0.5 percent, to 17.6 percent, with $3.1 billion in sales. No. 1 Intel server seller Compaq lost 1.6 percent share, dropping to 26.3 percent with $4.5 billion in sales. The overall Intel server market dropped 16.2 percent, from $20.5 billion to $17.2 billion, Gartner said.
Help fight continental drift.
not that they might not have some technical backup this clearly is an attack. I'd be curious to know if they'd say the same about *BSD.
.NET/#C has per default replaced that... it's really sad
Like someone said on another thread yesterday or day before: Sun just can't let go
That's so true.. and they have this jewel called Java but they'll probably hold on to that until
This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
Wow. In one whole sentence this fellow managed to slap the face of just about every kernel developer since the 1.0 days. A vast amount of the effort over the past 7 years has been dedicated to making certain the kernel can run on as many architectures as possible. Apparently, Sun has decided to pigeon hole Linux as an intel only kernel.
So, what you're saying is that less distributions are better? Suppose Sun actually makes a distribution that rocks and blows Red Hat and friends out of the water? We shouldn't have it because you would rather see companies working with Red Hat and Suse? Sun actually has a good patching and patching tracking system in Solaris and Linux would only benefit from it. Solaris and Linux already share a common open source application base, so they are being blurred more and more.
Frankly, I'll take Sun hardware and Solaris over Linux on any Intel box any day. Sure, you can throw Linux onto these super boxes that have been custom built to supercomputer stats, but most sysadmins are not the University of So-and-so to build your own servers and the Linux business app base is still too small for me.
Less=Better sounds like something Bill Gates might say.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
This is no different than those pain reliever commercials / styles. Both play with this 'Active Advertisement' games and just prove that they are no better. All they do is say just how bad the competition is but never truely help their case at all. You know ... there is something to be said about those that promote themselves; acknowledge their strengths & weaknesses, and let everyone else know... now they are truely favorable in the public's eye.
Every vendor that has gotten into Linux has
gotten out or regretted it---Corel,
VA WhatAmICalledToday, SGI, Dell, Red Hat My
Stock is Worth Less Than Toilet Paper, etc.
Sun is right that *linux on mainframes is the
dying gasp of a dying operating system on a
dying hardware dinosaur of a platform.
So what if Linux isn't hosted natively? OS emulation has existed for a long time elsewhere. And yes, implementation decisions can rarely be made with foresight into the hardware platform and/or operating system that an OS might be coerced to run on. Sun is just pushing [their] native solutions.
Sun doesn't realize that an IT organization that already has the skill set (mainframe + Unix), is well-suited to Linux on the mainframe. And for an organization whose skill set is primarily in mainframe support, Linux offers skill development/upgrading in Unix.
System performance monitoring and notification, and some well crafted scripts would allow an organization to increase or decrease the number of images running to reflect demand. And if utilization is measured in this way, utilization is kept high, and it scales with workload demand.
WTF?! However, upon further reading, it's really z/VM which Sun argues is an open system. Well, neither is Windows. What does that prove? This does not preclude IBM from making later advancements to z/VM ... transparently to Linux.
And his point is --- ??? This is not new. Our applications have to be recompiled and recertified for AIX, HP-UX, Linux (on Intel), and (ta-da) Solaris. If I want cross-platform binary interoperability, I'd use something like Java. Is Sun saying they'd refuse to certify a Java VM for Linux on the mainframe?
The point is, an organization with existing mainframe applications either (1) has an existing mainframe (that maybe under-utilized, and could thus run some Linux images), or (2) is upgrading to another mainframe (to preserve their software investments).
And if we're talking about the cost of support and services... well, arguably, that may be the future of our industry.
I found it amusing that the article comes under the heading "Reality Check". This isn't an opinion. It's marketing hype for naive media "reporting" and baseless hooplah for the clueless investment community.
Sun is beginning to remind me a lot of Apple. Their hardware is way overpriced and they refuse to accept the fact that commercial proprietary *nixes are quickly dying out, being replaced by Linux and *BSD. Instead, they're sinking large amounts of capital into maintaining their own closed operating systems. It's a shame, really, because they both make well-built hardware, use non-Intel cpu's, and have a solid customer support record. They could be making more money and doing the OSS community a great service by helping out if they'd just wake up.
Nearly every linux runs in a VM of sorts. The bios initialized your super weird ram bus meemory and other exotic hardware to look more or less like a real fast 486. Claming linux was not designed to run in a VM shows a prety fundemental lack of apreciation of modern computer archatectures.
In my experience it's about 1/2 of their R&D.
I will never forget how they wanted my project to use E10Ks instead of Sequents a few years back. The Sequents beat the bajesus out of the E10Ks for scalability, so Sun kept telling folks that they had some breakthrough documents that really dispelled the NUMA architecture. When forced to reveal them they were 4 years old and described the alpha imlementation!
BTW, I've never worked with a hardware vendor who stooped that low before or since. Of course, database vendors are another story thanks to Oracle and Sybase!
Let's face it -- few organizations have people with mainframe talent, and those who have them don't have enough of them.
So you are going to have to "engage" IBM Global Services to run the thing -- probaly a project manager @ $275/hour and a one or two consultants @ $200/hour.
Add to this the INSANELY expensive hardware and software maintenance charges every year and you are talking about a serious amount of cash for little benefit
When you consider the alternatives, it makes even less sense. You can buy 100 Sun E220's or 2-processor intel 4U servers for the cost of one mainframe that lets you emulate 20 Linux boxes.
Mainframes have been on the wane for the last 20 years for good reason -- they are too friggin expensive!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I think that when I read a report from someone without a vested interest one way or another, there may be a believable word in it. Until then, I choose to do the typical
Sun releases story stating their stuff is good and the competition are poo poo heads!
All the stuff about Linux being and intel operating system and performance is just FUD. I think the fact that Linux runs on anything from a palm pilot to a z800 is proof of porability. If raw performance were all that mattered, it's really tough to beat Linux on 1-2 processor intel. In fact go to spec.org and compare for yourself. But raw performance isn't the only thing. Neither is bang for your buck. If I bought bang for the buck I wouldn't buy SUN or RS6000.
One reason to have multiple boxes is separate environments. This is exactly where the z800 solution is great. I give a set of applications and environments (DEV, QA, INTEGRATION, PROD) their own virtual linux boxes. I don't have to maintain a rack of machines, I just have to maintain 1 machine. In fact I probably don't even maintain that because somebody like PRC does it for me.
The real problem for SUN is that their 1-4 processor line of machines is in danger of being swallowed up by Linux on Intel. Or in this case Linux on z800 as companies swap out a rack of (mauve?) boxes for 1 black box from IBM. With intel hardware I can get it shipped overnight and with mainframes capacity is a phone call away. Anyone else had the pleasure of waiting 4 weeks for a SCSI disk from SUN?
This is also why SUN wants to make people think that Linux is okay for "edge environments" where people really weren't buying SUN hardware in the first place. Sun wants to keep it out of 'serious' computing because they realize they 1) don't make intel chips and that's going to be the lion's share of the Linux server market and 2) why pay premium SUN prices if it's just another Linux box?
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Since nobody on slashdot has a mainframe, and MABYE a couple of them ever worked on one, I'd say what slashdoters thinks about linux and VM combo would be of fucking little value. However, that does not mean that Sun is something other than a lying, FUDing bunch of self-serving microsoft-stype monopoly wannabes! (with a fat kernel and sludgy OS, a circa 1992 desktop, who's only saving grace is that they produce quality hardware, grossly expensive but you get what you pay for)
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
1. Hard to find techs
Yes it harder to find technical people who know sun over windows or linux.
2.Web serving on sun box is a waste of money
Why buy one big box when many cheaper ones will do...? Save the big box for the Database server. Tux is much faster than anything from Sun.
3. Not many applications available
Most of the good sun stuff is the ported open source stuff that you have to go to ibiblio to download. Applications were mostly written on intel (SAP, Oracle) on linux and then ported to sun. Free stuff is almost all available for linux first.
4. Incompatibility across versions
The linux distros now have more in common than the big linux distros. They are more posix compliant as well. For example Sun threads and sun libraries are not portable to AIX or any other OS.
5. Propretary hardware
Yup - have a look at Suns network cards... nice but they ain't standard pci cards. 5,000 each for the nice ones. I have found the big vendors scr*w you at every turn. Memory upgrade - 50x the x86 price...
6. OK for database servers I still see the need. That is until postgresql or some other db vendor supplies fast distributed rdbms.
Actually I don't have anything against sun - they are probably one of the more "open" unix vendors. But they play the game just like everyone else.
my 2 cents worth................
Actuall, Solaris is free, as long as you run it on a box with 4 or fewer CPU's, and since Solaris 8 will run on Intel, it's nearly as good as Linux. And if you've ever run Solaris 8 (or 9), you'd almost think that it was a Linux machine (unless you run uname). Solaris 9 will even run Linux binaries (even on Sparc). Oh, and perhaps the reason that Solaris 9 isn't made for x86, is because it would be Linux. So instead of spending $$ to develop something that they can't sell anyway, they suggest that you use Linux on your x86 boxes, (and then buy an e10k to stick in the middle of your Linux cluster). Sun is a big supporter of Linux, they just can't get it to work on their big boxes. IBM has clearly done their homework here.
what this is really about is solaris. Who wants solaris when you can have linux? I wouldnt take competitor's opinions to heart. But anyways, I actually do like sun, and their products. They make good shit.... Still, who gives a fSck what sun thinks?
Nice to see Sun squirm. I won't miss them when they're gone.
Ok this is very very offtopic, but since your email is @bioware.com,
How's Neverwinter Nights coming?
Still March 1 realease date?
Linux version gonna come packaged with the win32 version?
News for Nerds werid sex fetish.
"Recently, IBM announced a new 'Linux-only' mainframe, the z800, which IBM is promoting as a way to consolidate multiple Linux and Unix[r] servers(1). Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system, defeating the whole purpose of introducing open standards like Linux. Although it's technically possible to configure such a system, the question remains, "How well-suited is the system to the task?"
--snip--
When I can run something other than Slowlaris on one of Sun's E(pick a number) behemoths, I would be more inclined to take this missive seriously.
There's a story from the '89 quake that somebody placed a service call to Tandem after the quake. (Tandem, later bought by Compaq, made highly reliable fault-tolerant machines with N processors, disks, backplane busses, etc. backing each other up.) The machine had fallen over on its face. It was still running just fine, but they wanted Tandem to come put it rightside up just in case anything went wrong in the process... (Also, they were big heavy machines....)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Sun Broadens Support For Linux" how do they manage to be both for and against, you'd think they'd make up there minds!
The fact of the matter is that the VM in the Linux Kernel (2.4 specifically) is "broken". How many different variations of a VM are we going to code? No one can decide which path to take, and it only harms Linux AND The Open Source Movement as a whole. You can't deny the fact that the Linux Kernel is becoming outclassed because the develpers aren't working together to find the best solution to the problems that we face (VM, etc.).
It sucks, I know, but we need to move past all the petty bullshit and work as a Team, utilitzing all of our resources to create a better Linux Kernel. What that means to me is that every Open Source developer who is devoted to the Linux platform needs to give their input and ideas to the Kernel developers, if not their own code. Otherwise the Linux kernel will continue to fall behind. Guidence is key!
Don't ignore these facts! Benchmark the latest Linux Kernel against other operating systems and you will see that Linux is no longer ahead of the game in a lot of ways.
The Open Source movement relies on innovation from anyone and everyone, but at the same time, if developers can't work together then Open Source hinders our cause.
www.news.com published an article about Virtuozzo technology of www.SW-soft.com - http://news.com.com/2100-1001-843544.html - seems to be similar to IBMs Linux on the mainframe, yet not so expensive and without many of LinuxOnMainframe pitfalls - f.e. it is on Intel hardware, it is managed in the same way, all of the compiled for Intel software just runs, effective sharing of resources and so on. They claim to run over 2000 Linux instances on the conventional 8CPU box from Dell
[yes, I should look up my account one day]
;)
.... in the last 10years I haven't seen z/OS (aka OS/390 aka MVS) running without VM underneath it; but wait there are usually multiple z/OS under each VM, so yes, there are more z/OSs running than VMs.
... for z/OS VM looks like the raw hardware, so how is that possible ?
... and 11.500 of them are hello world variations.
....
Do they know what they are talking about ?
Note: loads of sarcasm, so think lots of
>Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system
Yes, I need some staff (around 1 person per 50-100 z800s) that knows how to handle VM. But on top of that I could run hundreds of linux images (per box -> 50.000-100.000) that could be adminstrated by dummys (hey, every student today has his own linux box at home and most of them know what they are doing.)
>Compared to z/OS, z/VM is a niche operating system
hmm
>with virtual machine (VM) support for new hardware features added late or often not at all(3)
hmm
IMNSHO hardware features are implemented in VM long time before z/OS folks even know about them.
>This is Linux. It's designed for Intel.
Oh ? That's knews to me.
If linux was designed for (instead of on) intel, I'd never even think about using it.
(Hey. Even my carradio runs linux and that's not Intel, but wait it's strongarm. OK.)
>It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
It isn't today, but the guys in the IBM boeblingen lab are moving at a very fast pace. Just look at their kernel updates. And I'm sure there is lots more to come.
>Despite IBM's claims of easy management(5), customers still need a special machine room and specially trained staff for both z/VM and Linux.
A server room. Ohmigod. I always have my rack of sun servers under my desk. Makes it warm even through our siberian winters.
>Horizontally scaled Linux farms are designed to handle unpredictable demand with above average peak loads. As demand rises, a load balancer distributes the traffic evenly across servers, which increases utilization. Because design capacity needs to handle peak demand, server farms often have a low utilization.>Given the relatively low cost of hardware, some organizations find this trade-off acceptable to ensure appropriate service levels.
Could someone (a native (sun-)english speaker) let the air out of this and tell me what's the point ?!
>Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand.
If you run out of CPU-power, call IBM and let them enable an additional CPU ? Usually takes a few minutes; And if you have a good contract they'll do it on the fly, without you calling them...
>and there is little incremental RAS benefit.
Reliability. I never saw a full break down of a zServer.
Availabilty. After you saw an IBM tech turn up at the same time as the UPS truck, telling you: "Ahh there are the replacement parts for your broken hardware..." - "We had broken hardware ?!". You know SUN is bsing.
Security. They are the last ones to talk about security.
>For example, z/VM cannot take advantage of Parallel Sysplex clustering, and VM hypervisor is an added single point of failure(8).
>(8) According to Sun technical experts
That's a good reference. I guess Sun (/solaris ?) experts know what they are talking about.
>Applications that run on Linux for Intel need to be recompiled and recertified for each new platform; thus the application portfolio to run Linux on a mainframe is small(9).
Yes. A recompile for a different hardware-platform takes so much longer than a port to a totally different OS (Solaris). Maybe if you don't know how to write code/portable code. But then, who wants to run his server on some VBS-Kiddies code anyway ?
>Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10).
>(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
Little versus big endian makes porting difficult ?
Did they ever _do_ a port ?
In our code we don't even care if the data is represented in 0s and 1s or apples and oranges.
>Additionally, different applications are ported to different distributions of Linux (for example, Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux). Getting applications to run on the mainframe might require supporting multiple distributions of the 'same' Linux operating system.
Everybody who ever wrote a linux (intel) application will know that this is hot air.
Sometimes dynamic linking makes things a bit harder, if you require bleeding edge libs, but that's your fault anyway.
>Sun's rack-optimized 1U form factor servers start at list prices under $1,000.
I've been searching for a 1U box under $1,000 for quite some time now. This box they are talking about couldn't even handle my server at home (2 persons, firewall and answering machin, plus some fun stuff.) Talking about apples and oranges again ?
>Thus, when considering consolidation projects, why consider putting workloads onto a completely different and more expensive architecture?
No, use solaris intel. At least it's the same hardware. erm....
>Why consolidate on a system with limited application support and one that demands a rare combination of skills?
And I thought they wanted to sell those sun boxes.
>Sun provides:
> * Binary-compatible architecture
Binary-compatible with what ?
> * Over 12,000 available applications
hmmm
> * Servers that scale vertically to 106 processors and are sized and priced to fit any task
huh. 106. That is even more than an intel wolfpack, isn't it ?
> * Support for open standards and Java[tm] technology
Oh yes. And the linux/390 vm is just slightly faster, but that's not open standards, since it runs on closed hardware....
> * Linux compatibility features of Solaris
Yes, linux compatibility is much better than native linux.
> * World-class dynamic provisioning capabilities and management tools
Ever saw them in action ?!
> * Dedicated Sun Professional Services consolidation practices
Go and ask their customers about this one
Note2:
This is just my personal view. Not that of my company.
And not that of my Manager. (BTW: I don't work for Shahin Khan).
anti
...when Dell's plain Intel SMP box could run 2000 copies of Linux? Check this - http://news.com.com/2100-1001-843544.html.
It looks much more clever and efficient than VMware virtual machines, even if it "limits" you to one OS - Linux.
I'm not saying I agree with it, frankly I don't have enough mainframe exp. to be informed, but as a supported argument it's compelling.
Its hard to refute that the solution is a young one. I would love to see a technical support of the VMos that orchestrates all the virtual machines.
$400k and expensive repairs for a mainframe verses around $20k for 20 linked 1u rack mounted computers is pretty compelling too.
Size of installation doesn't seem much of an issue with stuffed racks of 1u boxes. I'd love to see a measurement\visualization.
The author of the report, footnoted all his points and gave much better technical support than 90% of the posts here.
Honestly, the reply posts overall, with some exceptions, don't speak well of our little forum: too many people posting flames, ignorant posts from people who probably have no mainframe experience, and a definite "my OS is bigger than your OS" mentality. -- This makes me sad. We are better than this, and more useful when we want to be.
Bo
I do this every day of the week. All the multi domain Sun boxes are quite happy running whatever version of Solaris you want and there is no technical reason why you couldn't mix Linux/Solaris/(some other Sparc64 OS) on different domains at the same time.
Since when did the "Marketing" lot, ever really know anything anyway?, its all fluffy footballs and lovely girls isn't it?
Sun does have a point, with regards to maintenance and support for an expensive platform, but don't they shoot themselves in the foot?...they aren't selling cheap boxes anyway.
If you have an old mainframe (wink), and want utilise it better, and VM will run on it, that sounds more cost effective. Although if you company is paying for maintenance/support etc, then I doubt they would mind upgrading.
Could you imagine someone hacking into an IBM Linux/VM box?, the power, the control!!
This article is interesting, if not completely biased due to the origin of.
:)
I don't know either way wether mainframes and Linux mix, at least in this manner, but it's not a bad thing. Nothing that pushes linux further is a bad thing.
I read through so many posts on Slashdot, and I see a lot of people that just don't seem to "get" it.
Linux is great for the computer world in general. It's free, open, and powerful. It's gaining new ground and userbase by the day.
It scares the crap out of the competition. How do you compete with something that is free? That is open source to everyone? And what happens because of this? You have to make your offerings better, cheaper, etc. to keep up. That's good!
Most of you don't need to run it. You can run Windows XP and be happy. That's fine! Run whatever you want to run, it's your machine.
So many people say "Linux is for this." "Linux is for that." Well, it's for whatever you want to do with it. You want to run a small web server on Linux because of the robust and flexible nature of UNIX? Do it! You want to run a powerful 8-way SMP machine to do heavy processing? It's being done now. You can do that too. Want to run Linux as a workstation? You can do that too.
If you want to run software that is not designed for Linux, well, too bad. Just like anything, use the system that suits your needs. If that is a Mac, use a Mac.
I agree that Linux isn't as user-friendly as a Windows or MacOS based machine when it comes to the workstation side of things. It's not there yet. Boy, has it improved on that front though! Someday a first time computer user will have just as many problems, hopefully less, than someone who is trying to install Windows.
Anything that pushes Linux further is a good thing. I hope someone does feel that this product from IBM is useful to them, and promote more innovations in the future from IBM.
So why do people use Linux? Because they choose to. It suits their needs, or they like the control over their systems that UNIX provides. Someday, I hope that the average computer user will also use it because the software they want to use runs on linux, and it's easy to use.
Why is it good for the industry? It's free, powerful, and only going to get better. Linux is obviously getting huge. Isn't it wonderful to see products from so many different competitors all sharing a common system? Who knows, it could even lead to true compatibility some day.
Well anyways, think twice before you judge anything. Whether you run it/like it or not, you can't ignore what could be the biggest evolution in the computer industry. And the evolution isn't even Linux itself, it's the idea of free, open, and very good software that works.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Scary thought, maybe, what if you hack VM, and take control of the mainframe. The power!, through Linux.
That said, anything that will compile and run properly on ppc (big-endian) as well as x86 (little-endian) should be endian-clean, and hence should run fine on a mainframe.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Please... Do you really think IBM would emulate x86 Linux on a mainframe? God, I thought I was a cracker. Anyway, it's called OS/390 Linux. It's made for... OS/390's and you can pick it up at SuSE or RedHat's website. The great thing about these systems is that you can run many operating systems on one box. I'm not too sure, but I'm guessing z/VM is what allows this. And no, it's not an emulator. Why would you emulate x86 Linux anyway? Why not LinuxPPC for that matter? x86 Linux is like DOS made to run on dirt cheap hardware. Would you like to see what Linux can REALLY do? Check it out on an os/390...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Mod the Parent *DOWN*.
I've developed Linux on the mainframe, and none of this is true. It IPLs very quickly, and is just as easy to use as any other Linux. That post ought to be (-1, Troll), not (5, Informative).
Here for proof that I know what I am talking about (down toward the bottom).
_sig_ is away
I'd hire the Linux Advocate because at least he doesn't have his head up his ass so far that he can't see out (ie no delusions of grandeur).
Many, even most quality systems suck like a Kirby: they fail to deliver on their promises, introduce significant overheads, and cost heaps. It's a good way to dig yourself into a hole with confidence.
Quality Consultant is usually resume code for ``I'm useless in my industry, so the only job I could get was as a combined critic, form-herd and bullshit merchant.''
The Linux Advocate will actually have some focus, and will be more likely know enough of the details of what he works with to be useful.
Really? Write or do significant modifications to a device driver then, go on! A driver for Conexant WinModems would be a good place to start...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Imagine a CIO of a Fortune 500 company, planning a new web project. For the hardware he has two options:
/1/, if the software guys are saying that it will work. Probably they will have all a Linux partition on their PC :-).
/1/ Add a dozen or more CPUs and some RAM to the existing mainframe infrastructure, to support a number of Linux images. (His data center probably runs a number of several MVS, OS/390 and maybe z/OS images in parallel.)
/2/ Buy and install two new Sun Starfire 15K.
Obviously his choice would be
If costs is the strong argument in the situation, Sun will have only a chance with large discounts.
I think Sun's strategy to build the next mainframe with the 15K backfires here, because for web servers the Intel rack hardware running Linux is the better option and IBM's virtual OS images will use CPU and RAM more efficiently than Sun's domain per 4-processor cartridge by definition. The nightly mainframe batches map well with the usage patterns of online services.
So Sun's revenue is now attacked by Linux from below and from above. These guys are forced to love Linux. Remember Linus's joke about world domination?
I took a quick look at the article and was astounded. It's to the point and seems to address real concerns - at least to one like me who has no opportunity for first-hand testing. /. frontpage soon :)
:) Kudos for the writer. Bashing, but informed instead of empty FUD.
;) ), compartment servers, home machines, firewalls or embedded solutions. Even more, it feels to inversely prove their fittedness for such tasks, as they're obviously "by their very nature" more geared toward such environments.
These points really require addressing from IBM's side, I think. Well, waiting for that to appear on
There was no article rating system available on Sun's page, so I had to write this here
On the other hand, free OS'es certainly don't grow on mainframes; they grow in the wild, so it's natural they're more fitted to the small-to-medium size HW. It doesn't lessen their absolute importance as cost-efficient clusters (Imagine a Beowulf of these!
OT: It's been a nightmare with the Kernel of Pain for me even on Intel hardware trying to put up some more serious servers (I wont' go into that in length, but reiserfs/RAID losing content still in 2.4.17 - blah!). I'm sticking with 2.2 stables and taking time to apply frisbee on server side in the future.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
and they're great:
http://www.cobalt.com/
their web server times out on me. Why?
Because Sun's firewall is broken and drops TCP connections using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
How stupid can a single company be? I bet that article goes to great lengths to say how well suited Sun is to provide scalable web servers. And they can't even get their own web server configured properly!
What a buch of losers. ECN is, by the way, an official internet standard (RFC3168), which happens to be implemented by Linux.
The best place for information is still on our webpage, on our forums. I don't actually work on the Neverwinter project myself, so I can't really answer your questions. In any case, I don't think we ever promised a March 1 release date...not in recent history, anyway.
While it is true Sun seemes to have pioneered many of the technological advances in Mainfraim computing. They have not gone far enough. You dont stop and say.. There .. i'm Done when you have doubled the abilities and then bash on the competition hoping to create doubt with ill concieved references and incomplete information.
That is what almost landed IBM in the doghouse and sent Digital to visit the briny depths.
Who cares what they "Did" it's what they are "Doing" that counts. The 64 bit architecture cannot stand up to todays base 32 bit architecture in business applications unless you use a proprietary OS and maintinance is maintained through a costly contract.
IMHO Sun put together the idea of sticking an off the shelf Distrobution into a mainfraim service and found it wanting. The best part is the fact that they did this.. it demonstrates the versatility of Linux and the concept of open source, by proving that it can be done without proprietary equipment.
Lets also add. that In a hands down test The linux based Beowulf Clustering system witch can be labeled "mainfraim" as the concept of mainfraim verses super computer is a matter of orgonizing the equipment has been able to best most of SUN products in the big race for computation and these systems use a combination of older 32 bit based machines.
IMHO Sun stopped.. they have run into a wall and are not looking for a way over it.. they are looking to add the same wall to someone elses landscape and dont realize how Ironic that is.
Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand. As a result, a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would; high utilization is a myth.
Is that true? And, if it is... it's a good point I would think. If multiple linux server images are to be the new fashion of servers, what would be involved in having resources such as ram and diskspace allocated dynamically based on demand of one of the linux images running?
On a final note, I'm starting to really think this whole multiple linux images running on one machine trend to be just a "fad". In most cases (granted not all), isn't it just as effective and easier to have all the services running under one linux server? maybe some extra magical software to control resources etc?
--Me
Microsoft claims Internet Explorer is superior to Netscape Navigator.
You also get capacity upgrade on demand with a phone call with the IBM hardware. They dont even have to send out a CE to do anything. Let's see SUN do that.
Sun does that too with their big machines. The scheme is called COD (Capacity on Demand) and works the same as IBMs plan. Also, to reply to the other reply to your reply (confused yet?), Sun machines are rather unique due to the fact that they can run both endians, big and small. I've never actually heard of anyone DOING something with that feature, but it does exist none the less.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
To someone with a cursory exposure to mainframes running z/OS and z/VM, it's blindingly obvious that Sun's web page is just an attempt to FUD the mainframe. One of its base assumptions is that z/VM is supposed to be an OS for serving applications, ignoring the fact that on zSeries, z/VM is practically relegated to the narrowly-defined role of "hypervisor."
This kind of FUD, with all its half-truths and ignorant assumptinos, is almost worthy of Microsoft.
Song: Pote boudas pote koudas
Artist: Nikos Papazoglou
Pote Voudas pote Koudas,pote Ihsous ki Ioudas
Exw katalavei hdh ths zwhs mou to paixnidi
Exw katalavei hdh thw zwhs mou to paixnidi
Pote Voudas pote Koudas,pote Ihsous ki Ioudas
Olo idia kai ta idia tou myalou sou rokanidia
Vre den einai edw to Souli,edw einai tou Rasoulh
Vre den einai edw to Souli,edw einai tou Rasoulh
Olo idia kai ta idia tou myalou sou rokanidia
Sto 'pa mia kai sto 'pa dyo,sto 'pa xilies deka-dyo
Allo o anoixtomaths ki allo o avgoulomaths
Allo o anoixtomaths ki allo o avgoulomaths
Sto 'pa mia kai sto 'pa dyo,sto 'pa xilies deka-dyo
Pote Voudas pote Koudas,pote Ihsous ki Ioudas
Exw katalavei hdh ths zwhs mou to paixnidi
Exw katalavei hdh thw zwhs mou to paixnidi
Pote Voudas pote Koudas,pote Ihsous ki Ioudas
I am into the copy and paste.
while ebay has, instead of running away at one bug on the sparcII hardware (which is fixed in the new mirrored cache modules, and doesn't exist in the sparcIII CPUs), stuck with Sun and is now highly pleased with their systems.
It's also interesting to note that the SRAM chips that were buggy on the ultrasparcII CPUs were made by IBM, and that IBM employees know about this little bug when they sold them to Sun... funny they didn't mention it, no?
Sun is taking full blame for not checking it out better, but I think it's a pretty interesting situation.
Firstly, I have to modify Linux source code very seldom (maybe one system in thirty), and when I do it's for very obscure reasons, and it's good (yea, verily, even great!) to have the choice in that circumstance - especially since I specialise in odd systems (the kind of stuff that the MCSE brigade don't even dream of doing (and when they're stupid enough to try anyway the resulting house-of-cards heap of VB makes Heath Robinson look positively conservative)).
If I installed ``cookie-cutter'' Office+Web+Email desktops all day, and servers to suit, there's no reason I'd ever bother working with source. Or for that matter, for dirtying my hands with media, since net boot ROMs have become common.
The alternatives are:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Some drivers, yes. I shouldn't have been quite so specific.
Amen, brother, amen... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Whereas a quality zealot will bury you in mostly-useless paperwork instead. Great choice.
But Advocate != Zealot. I'd avoid hiring a zealot of any kind, if I could, they're more trouble than they're worth. This is not to say that strong personal preferences are bad (they generally aren't), but that monomania is.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Looks to me like there is an ongoing war between the SUN article editors...
Reality Check: Linux on the Mainframe--Not a Good Idea
This article discusses the recent IBM Linux-only mainframe announcement, and the complexities this z800 introduces into your IT environment.
Feature Story: Sun Broadens Support for Linux
Aggressive new program expands the role of Linux on entry-level servers.
April 21-27-- Slashdot Blackout: Do your duty.
Hmm... And here I thought the T-68 looked so nice.
Guess I'll have to stay with handsets from that gum-boot factory in the Eastern Half Of The Realm, then.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here