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?"

Comments

IBM milking mainframe monopoly

[ChrisRijk]

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...

Hands-on experience with Linux on a mainframe

[ciurana]

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,

E