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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."
I have a big old z in my basement that I've been itching to upgrade!
This is my sig.
And IBM mainframe running Solaris...
Now I have seen everything. Next AIX on the Sparc.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The way I see it, IBM is in the business of providing so much choice to customers that they need expensive IBM consultants to help them decide.
;).
Microsoft will sell you the Microsoft Way of doing things.
Whereas IBM will say "You want a Active Directory server, a Z mainframe with RedHat, OpenSolaris and Oracle, Cisco switches, and there must be full J2EE buzzword compliance? No problem, just sign here".
Careful to make sure they will actually do the job though, and not outsource it to a bunch of fresh PHP coders in India
How so? If customers have a need for Solaris, would IBM rather see them go buy some Sparc gear from Sun, or a few extra processors for their System z complex?
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Actually they are jumping for joy.
Now if a Solaris shop needs some big Iron IBM can walk right in and sell a Z to them.
If an IBM shop wants Solaris then IBM can say hey no need to by Sun hardware just put in on your Z.
This is a happy day in Armonk.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Someone is already working on bringing Microsoft Windows to the mainframe. Who could have imagined.
I have some Z80 boxes in my basement...
The killer app will be the Big Blue Screen of Death.
Seriously, I've run Suse 10 on an IFL engine. It's so slow, I don't know how anyone could run anything serious on it.
That's why their called 'z's zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz....
No, seriously, mainframes aren't about performance. They're about stability. Think about 16-core server with 40 GB of RAM running Solaris, AIX or Linux as a Ferrari Testerosa, while the Z10 is more like Abrams M1A1. Not as fast the Testerosa, but pretty quick for something that weights over 60 metric tons....
My blog
No, he means more like this.
Stability and I/O (particularly disc) bandwidth. Very important.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Maybe I'm missing the joke - but, I'm calling you out.
Lest anyone misconstrue this to be a factual writeup concerning what the future (from a 1950's perspective) holds, let me bust this photo all to hell and back.
This is a picture of a US Submarine Reactor Plant Control Panel. IAUSSSQ. (I Am US Submersible Ship Qualified - A US Submariner.) This pic is simply doctored.
First: This is a picture from a museum - not a computer museum, though - probably a maritime museum. Here's another picture from the same museum.
Ref 1: http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/maneuvering.jpg
Here's a sailor tending to the RPCP - Reactor Plant Control Panel.
Ref 2: http://www.guardfish.org/history/mid_years/images/RPCP3.JPG
Second: The 'teletype' is from the 80's - certainly not the 50's. Gotta love the paper in the teletype, too. It just magically appears!! Don't even mention the numerical keypad to the right of the keyboard.
Third: I'm loving that late 50's era TV mounted on the wall where console TVs were designed to be furniture that sits on the floor. And, anyone having owned one of these behemoths can attest, one didn't want to carry those TVs any further than they had to, let alone lift it up over their heads.
Forth: The wheel on the 'computer console.' Home computer.....a wheel? Huh!? Inner wheel: Xloc. Outer wheel: yloc. (LOL)
Fifth: The unfortunate little person cut and pasted into the photo. His size is all wrong for this picture.
This is nothing more than a cut & paste job.
I know. "Buzz kill". "I'm a lot of fun at parties." "I suck."
Move along.
Every time a mainframe story comes up on Slashdot we seem to get the skeptics who point out that an X86 processor core can add or multiply two numbers (stored in registers anyway) about as fast as a single System z10 core, at least as long as they're integers. (z10s have hardware decimal floating point.) Based on this brilliant SPECint-y observation, combined with the fact that a System z10 EC Linux processor has an advertised one-time charge of $125K, these "experts" thus conclude that no one could possibly buy a mainframe because it's just so darn expensive. (Note that's one-time charge, folks: if you do a hardware model upgrade typical IBM practice is to charge you something for the frame swap but not to charge you again for turning on the processors.) Of course, in the same discussion people don't bother to explain why the same argument also holds for SPARC CPUs. Heck, why not run business applications on Sony Playstation 3s or ARMs? They're even "cheaper."
May I humbly point out that IBM just posted (yesterday) another record quarter for mainframe sales. Revenues were up 25 percent, with double digit growth in every region of the world. Because prices are higher? No, the opposite: shipped capacity was up 49 percent; specialty capacity (including Linux processors) was up 120 percent. And IBM has been posting quarters like this for years now. This mainframe stuff is wildly successful and gaining marketshare.
Why? Because, with all due respect, you're an idiot if you stop your careful business case analysis at the first sentence above. Unless you're running SETI@Home, rendering the next Pixar movie, or simulating nuclear explosions, business applications across many users just don't run that way. Companies (particularly CFOs) and big data center managers are not (generally) idiots. They buy this stuff because it works wonderfully and because it's cost-effective, taking all costs into consideration. Think $125K (once) is a lot of money? What's your salary, dude? Who are the richest single human beings in the software industry, and did they get that way because software is free? And how much did it cost the London Stock Exchange when they couldn't trade? Are you the guy who wants to explain why you have to build another $20M data center because you can't power or cool yet another X86 chip? In the real world, there are single companies running hundreds of these mainframe CPUs. And they run at 80%+ busy 24 hours a day, by the way.
Honestly, there are way too many Slashdotters who are much more the stubborn non-thinkers that they probably accused mainframe-skilled people of being a few years ago. It's a different world: grow up. The boring but wonderful truth is that -- surprise! -- different servers are good at different things! Intel/AMD X86 servers are useful in certain ways, and so are System z servers. Even in the same data center. Wow, what a concept!