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Sun Bashes Linux on (IBM) Mainframes

Posted by michael on from the these-aren't-the-servers-you're-looking-for dept.

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?"

5 of 513 comments (clear)

  1. I disagree by Starship+Trooper · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:I disagree by rgmoore · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    2. Re:I disagree by Skapare · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  2. Can't blame em... by iNiTiUM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

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    When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
  3. The FUD heard round the world... by Duderstadt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.