IBM Saves $250M Running Linux On Mainframes

coondoggie writes "Today IBM will announce it is consolidating nearly 4,000 small computer servers in six locations onto about 30 refrigerator-sized mainframes running Linux, saving $250 million in the process. The 4,000 replaced servers will be recycled by IBM Global Asset Recovery Services. The six data centers currently take up over 8 million square feet, or the size of nearly 140 football fields."

Comments

Proof of Linux's Environmentalist Friendlyness

[flayzernax]

This proves Linux has a smaller carbon footprint then other OS's!

Of course they're saving money

[Trailer Trash]

Because they're using all that Microsoft IP without paying for it....

(it's a joke)

A pleasure to work with, as well..

[bigattichouse]

We (Bigattichouse's Vectorspace Database) went through their Linux certification (as well as Grid cert), and they were a pleasure to work with - providing expert advice and patience in every step of the process. Not exactly on topic, I guess, but I thought I'd share. They really seem to embrace the engineering and spirit of Linux.

2000 sq feet per small computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says that the data centers required for the 4000 "small computer servers" aggregate to about 8 million square feet. It takes IBM 2000 square feet to house a small computer? Also, saving $250 million suggests that it costs them something over $60K per "small computer" even ignoring the price of the new mainframes. Amazing.

My employer recently 'consolidated' too.

[MarcQuadra]

My employer recently 'consolidated' their server farm too. We used to have a room with fifty aging Dell PowerEdge servers, each running independently, requiring massive support, cooling, and electricity.

Now we have ten VM servers running all the migrated services, PLUS a room with about fifty aging Dell PowerEdge servers, each running independently, requiring massive support, cooling, and electricity.

I never thought 'consolidation' would require so much more space, electricity, air conditioning, and upgrades to core switches and UPS units.

Re:My employer recently 'consolidated' too.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're supposed to turn off and sell off the servers you replace. (Score -1: Obvious).

(Strange thing is, I make a good living replacing aging mainframes by linux clusters. mainframes are fine when you're doing transaction processing. But for cpu-bound stuff, you're better off with a room full of opterons).

Re:System z Mainframes

[BrynM]

It's kinda hard to find technical specifications on these mainframes beyond marketing fluff.

Part of that is because IBM will customize the machines to your heart's content. The sky and your budget are the only limits. They leave a good many of the loadout details (xGB/TB of RAM, DASD storage size, # of CPUs per card, # of CPU cards, even number of mainframes - they can be chained in parallel). You should look at the Z series hardware specs for the general details and look up what details you don't know.

If you're looking for benchmarks or comparisons to x86/x86-64 or other commodity architectures good luck - they are nearly impossible to find. This is due to the implementations being on entirely different scales. The best comparison you an find is the MIPS per CPU. You can find some slightly stale numbers here (BTW: an LPAR is something that's been around on mainframes for several decades - one LPAR can run up to several hundred x86 VMs concurrently).

IBM's been doing this for-ever, dude.

[crovira]

I had to maintain some software that was running on a aging 370 mainframe. The 370 was emulating a 360 which was emulating a 1401.

It was pension and payroll software and it was legally blessed.

It was such a frigging song and dance trying to get anything done that it was cheaper and faster for the company to emulate their butts off rather than trying to go through the management and the unions and the employees.

But I did learn about optimizing instruction fetches by scattering the compiled code around the circumference of a magnetic drum so that the drum would have rotated around beneath the read head in time for the next instruction.

Try and tell that to the young people of today, and they wont believe you, eh Obadiah?

Re:IBM's been doing this for-ever, dude.

[tuomoks]

Hi, yes and no. 370 runs 360 code but, as too often even today, people coded to bypass the OS. Old devices, drums, paper / magnetic card readers, terminals, channels, etc. Even todays systems have the idea, VM especially, of 80 column cards, punches, readers, etc and if used correcly they work wonders, trust me, 360 architecture is one of the best even today. The problems is that not too many people any more want to learn the basics, i.e. Priciples of Operation ( any 3xx, a good book to read, required reading, IMHO ). Search on which OS version macro libraries Linux ( 370 HAL ) was first compiled on 360/370, you will be amazed. Emulations in 360-xxx mostly mean address space differences ( 24/31/32/64/.. ) and some added machine code / functionality, done by OS/hardware. And of course a long time trapping the floating point was/is(?) one if you didn't have the fp hardware installed.

Re:$250M??

[Anonymous Coward]

They're probably computing cost over the expected lifetime.

Combine IT salary for 3-5 years, power over 3-5 years, etc. etc. and that number makes sense.

It's just an endless cycle

[ogren]

I still haven't seen any conclusive evidence that Linux on mainframe is a good idea. I'm sure running 30 new mainframes is going to cost less than 4000 aging servers. Just about anything would be less expensive than 4000 aging servers.

But I bet that a small farm of modern medium sized servers running Linux on VMWare would be even less expensive. Or Solaris/Niagara. Why would you want to run an open source operating system, whose major benefits are openness and affordability on the what is literally the most expensive and most proprietary computing platform in the world!

These server consolidation projects are just giant boondoggles spawned because the server sprawl finally got insane. It's an endless cycle:

A. Giant server consolidation project that takes 4000 servers down to 30 servers.
B. Department B complains that Department A's application keeps hanging and consuming all of the CPU. They demand their own hardware "for availability reasons".
C. Vendor C demands dedicated hardware for licensing/capacity planning/supportability reasons. Rather than constantly bicker with the vendor over supportability they get dedicated hardware.
D. Department D complains that the IT department is charging outrageous prices for time sharing on the mainframe. After all a dedicated server only costs $XXX.
E. Suddenly there are 4000 servers again.
F. IT department spends some insane amount of money on infrastructure to manage the 4000 servers.
G. IT department budget gets insanely large trying to manage that much stuff.
H. Some CIO gets the idea that all of this money managing servers is ridiculous and we should do a server consolidation project.
I. IT department spends an even larger amount of money on the latest super high availability gear and consulting services so that the can run 4000 commodity servers inside a few big servers. All because it will "cost less to maintain".
J. Go back to A.