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

I disagree

[Starship Trooper]

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.

Re:I disagree

[meff]

True, Sun *isn't* too happy about IBM pushing the mainframes first.

I am pretty sure, whatever kernel IBM chooses to use on their linux mainframes will be THOROUGHLY tested and rigerously tortured and beaten to death until they know exactly how it's going to act. There will probably be a guideline to read for do-it-yourself people on how to make the most stable kernel for the mainframe you have.

Running linux on the mainframe has TONS of advantages, and they will become more pronounced as it gets more popular and more used.

Sun, give me a break, we know you have a big mouth but scaring everyone doesn't work all the time.

Re:I disagree

[rgmoore]

Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system...

As opposed to running on a Sun system, which lets you run on a ... oh wait a minute. Those alternatives from Sun are mostly expensive proprietary systems, too, aren't they?

You still get the man years of free testing, free software, interoperability, and speed.

You also get a system that lets you migrate from your existing Linux systems to the IBM system without having to learn the quirks of a different Unix variant. If you use a supported distribution, you don't even have to learn a new distro. And if/when you decide that IBM isn't where you want to be, you can switch to many other hardware platforms with nothing more than a recompile. Sounds like you still get the key freedoms that Free Software is supposed to provide.

Re:I disagree

[Skapare]

Sun's pissed that they can't run multiple instances of an OS on their E15K systems. You might get Linux running on it, and Solaris is the champ OS on the big Sun machines ... but they are not virtual machine systems. IBM's hardware design lets them run multiple operating systems in parallel on one machine, and even dynamically share processor between them. And then with the VM operating system loaded, you can create multiple virtual machines and run Linux in each one. And VM is very efficient at that. I once ran 6 instances of VM inside itself, nested all the way down. Surely you've heard of the case where IBM tested running 41,000 instances of Linux under VM. It can do that, though that many seems rather pointless. It does let you partition off the resources so you can give each service function you need to run with its own virtual machine, and thus it's own Linux. And on the larger S/390 and zSeries machines, you can even run OS/390 (of MVS legacy) in those virtual machines, and mix/migrate between them all one a single mainframe piece of hardware.

Now personally, I wouldn't do exactly that. That's an awfully big basket with an awful lot of eggs in it. IBM hardware is quite reliable, but not so reliable that you can depend on getting "five nines" on one single machine. Sometimes there are reasons to take the whole machine down. IBM comes from legacy enterprise worksystems and usually early morning Sunday can be scheduled for maintenance purposes. In these days of e-commerce, you don't have such luxury. If you want to be up all the time, you need redundancy, and that machine way back in the corner of the room where "all the servers are gone" isn't redundancy (virtual redundancy, maybe, but you need real redundancy). You need several machines.

That said, there are pluses to IBM's approach as well. If you need to add another class of service, or partition users apart from each other because one needs to do stuff that needs root access? Give them their own Linux virtual machine.

OTOH, well managed, rows and rows of racks with 40 1U servers in each one, running Linux or BSD or NT or W2K or whatever, can be just as effective, if not more so. You can put dual 1.X GHz CPUs in those 40 machines in one rack ... that's 80 CPUs. That's quite a lot. The IBM zSeries can certainly compete, as can the Sun E15K. But those are going to be physically big, and power hungry, machines, too. Take your pick. There's no simple best answer; certainly not for everyone. All this is about is marketing, anyway.

Re:I disagree

[phajek]

"Sun's pissed that they can't run multiple instances of an OS on their E15K systems. "

Hello? You obviously have never used an E15K or even a E10K with *does* domains for over 5 years now. Want some companies who use this? Ebay for one done. And they would be crazy to use Linux on it.

Activity and mud throwing may be a good thing.

[suso]

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.

Can't blame em...

[iNiTiUM]

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

The FUD heard round the world...

[Duderstadt]

As the infamous Halloween Documents stated, Linux is primarily a threat to proprietary *NIX setups.

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.

Re:Of Course not!

[afidel]

The add that the server can't dynamically create more utilization capacity (extra hardware) dynamically.

Actually IBM's regular mainframes can. When you buy one of the higher end zSeries servers you get a box fully populated with ram and cpu's. If your liscense is for something less than the max # of cpu's and you later need to add capacity all you do is call IBM and they happily take your money and dial into your mainframe, they set a couple registers in the controller board and viola near instant hardware upgrade.

IMHO, this guy has no clue ...

[x mani x]

Read between the lines, this article is mostly anti-IBM FUD. It was written by Sun, so I'm not exactly surprised.

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 ... unless IBM mainframe R&D is actually a computer camp for children with down syndrome.

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 ... uhh basically they don't exist, because many of the commercial UNIX systems out there exist on top of big-endian hardware.

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!!

I side with Sun on this one.

[duffbeer703]

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!