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Linux From A CIO's Perspective
An anonymous reader writes "CIO.com has a story on Linux and OSS in the enterprise from the perspective of the CIO of Cendant Travel Distribution Services, Mickey Lutz. 'In the summer of 2003, Mickey Lutz did something that most CIOs, even today, would consider unthinkable: He moved a critical part of his IT infrastructure from the mainframe and Unix to Linux. For Lutz, the objections to Linux, regarding its technical robustness and lack of vendor support, had melted enough to justify the gamble.'
His organization saved 90% in costs in so doing. Read on if you want to see how the top brass views OSS."
Actually, all of those bright, shiny websites (Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz) rely on a GDS (Sabre, Amadeus, Worldspan or Galileo) to provide their content.
Because you can't spell "slaughter" without "laughter"
The sidebar indicated that he used Red Hat.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
ibm is his vendor. says in TFA. IBM was his mainframe vendor, and he moved to linux after IBM anounced its support to it.
What ? Me, worry ?
Seriously, the biggest problem with mainframes is that switching them off is a big problem. These are not boxes you can easily - or safely - reboot, if there is a problem. There usually isn't, because the hardware is usually of very high calibre and massively redundant, but scheduled maintenance of, say, an Amdahl or a (when they existed) a Prime was not a trivial affair.
"Routine" maintenance wasn't much better - DEC would charge the Earth (and Mars) to swap tapes on even a humble VAX, and apparently had contracts with some places (such as my old University in Glamorgan, Wales) where absolutely nobody else was permitted to conduct such delicate operations.
This meant that no sane person ever did anything, if they could possibly help it. Which is one big reason that Big Iron started sliding into unpopularity the moment clusters started appearing.
The other problem with mainframes is that the manufacturer usually has the purchaser over a barrel. You can't exactly walk to Fry's and buy a new RAID controller for a CM-5 Connection Machine, or a new processor card for that Amdahl mainframe in the corner. The manufacturers know they have an absolute monopoly on parts, so charge the absolute maximum the market will bear.
For large clusters, the situation is very different. You probably wouldn't buy commodity off-the-shelf parts, if you could help it, but you COULD. That keeps the price somewhat checked on the higher-end higher-quality parts, because you can do fail-over. If you have twice the reliability, but over twice the price, it becomes more effective to use redundancy and hot-swapping.
Software is another important consideration. If you upgrade the software on a mainframe, you upgrade the WHOLE mainframe. If you upgrade a cluster, then so long as there is backwards compatibility, you can roll out the upgrade a node at a time, keeping the system as a whole running.
True, you don't usually do major brain-surgery on an IBM mainframe, as IBM isn't stupid enough to make severe enough changes to AIX to force a major overhaul on a regular basis, but (a) that limits how AIX can evolve (which will eventually kill it), and (b) major overhauls are a part of the computer business and do happen - you can't avoid them.
In today's world, though, it doesn't make sense to use ultra-specialized hardware and software. It isn't cost-effective and it isn't maintainable. A glance at a number of mainframe manufacturers show many have SOME kind of Linux offering, which (to me) shows they feel the same way. Eventually, Big Iron will become just a very fast component in a much larger, much more powerful super-cluster, rather than something significant in and of itself.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)