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Mainframe OpenSolaris Now Available
BBCWatcher writes "When Sun released Solaris to the open source community in the form of OpenSolaris, would anyone have guessed that it would soon wind up running on IBM System z mainframes? Amazingly, that milestone has now been achieved. Sine Nomine Associates is making its first release of OpenSolaris for System z available for free and public download. Source code is also available.
OpenSolaris for System z requires a System z9 or z10 mainframe and z/VM, the hypervisor that's nearly universal to mainframe Linux installations. (The free, limited term z/VM Evaluation Edition is available for z10 machines.) Like Linux, OpenSolaris will run on reduced price IFL processors."
Someone is already working on bringing Microsoft Windows to the mainframe. Who could have imagined.
I doubt there's a reason for the IPLs (reboots). If your mainframe operators are doing it, they're probably just doing it because (seriously) somebody had a memory leak 30 years ago and that was how they "fixed" it. And nobody bothered to update the procedures manual. Nor did anybody ask them, "Hey, can we improve the SLA (Service Level Agreement) here?" "Sure boss, I'll just stop IPLing. Let's try skipping the next one." That's usually how that conversation goes, seriously.
In fact, if you've got a Coupling Facility and two or more LPARs (partitions), even on a single machine, then you can reboot either of them as often as you want and no users will care. Transactions keep humming in CICSplex and IMSplex, databases keep running with DB2 data sharing, etc. If your operators haven't implemented that, that's their choice (or negligence?), not the technology's.