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The Pros and Cons of Mainframe Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the rolling-out-the-big-iron dept.

magellan writes "There is a good article on LinuxWorld.com that goes over some of the pros and cons of Linux on the mainframe. The author, Paul Murphy is an old mainframer and current UNIX user, as well as a frequent contributor to LinuxWorld.com, so he has some good insights. "

4 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Is not better than solaris by superpulpsicle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Besides pricing, the more high end the server goes... the more I will lean toward solaris.

    I am linux-biased folks are going to / me for this.... but I am speaking from experience.

  2. Report roasts Linux by Smackmaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Funnily enough I just came across this article on ZDNet that talks about how Linux isn't a very good long term server solution. Its here at http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-909084.html

  3. Sun FUD Campaign by myst564 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First of all, way to go Slashdot, this article has been out for quite some time. It's received a lot of attention on the Linux 390 mailing list as a Sun FUD campaign as it places a fully loaded z900 on par with 80 Dell servers and the zSeries in general on par with mid-range Sun equipment (and others).

    First, I'm fairly qualified to talk about what the zServer can do. For those of you who don't remember, I'm one of the guys that helped win a z800 for Clarkson University that will be used in our Open Source Institute. I'm also the technical lead for COSI (whatever that means ;) so it is my job to know about what a z800 can do for us.

    Some history, Clarkson University has always had a very good relationship with IBM: they employ a large amount of Clarkson students and graduates (including me, in the Extreme Blue program. So if you think that biases my opinion, well too bad as I've talked with the guys making sure that Linux runs and is fully integrated on the Linux platform and one of the original Linux S390 authors Boas Betzler.

    All of these people have real experience with what the zSeries can do, as do I since I've seen it in action. A zServer is unique in the sense that you can (with the right model) run Linux S390, VM, zOS and other guest operating systems in Logical Partitions. These all act independantly of one another just as if they were seperate machines on a network. This is great if you have DB2 with maybe a web frontend because both of those machines can talk at memory speed via HiperSockets and the only outside link is the network connection to the web server, which is at Gigabit speed (did I mention that you can do full speed gigabit with one of these things on multiple interfaces?).

    This article basically says that you can take a midrange Sun server and do everything that a z800 can do but much better. I don't know of any Sun Server that can run N Linux clients in a VM at full speed.

    They aren't the solution to every problem, but a zServer certainly is a better solution that what is presented in the article. I really don't have the time to go in to detail with everything as it's a lengthy article but suffice it to say that this is no where near 100% accurate.

  4. Re:OLTP for Linux by skidrash · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You're looking for 'pinning' or 'the sticky bit', the ability to tell the OS,

    "load this executable image in memory and keep it there, next time someone asks for this program use the loaded image, DO NOT LOAD A NEW IMAGE from disk"

    This was a manual optimization for early UNIXes. I don't think any modern UNIX uses the sticky bit in this way because that's an optimization that naturally falls out of the page aging algorithms.