I work for a company that develops and maintains a commercial application on the IBM AS/400 platform. As far as I can tell, the AS/400 has one reason to exist: to host legacy applications. I don't understand IBM's strategy for Linux on the AS/400. Why would anyone choose to take an extremely expensive, proprietary system, and sacrifice disk space and processors to run Linux when they could get substantially better performance and reliability by running Linux on inexpensive commodity hardware? It seems to me that IBM could be making a huge tactical error by supporting Linux on the AS/400 -- it will expose the AS/400 for what it is -- an overpriced, under performer.
Don't misunderstand me -- I'm a huge Linux fan. I run Linux on personal systems at home and my workstation at work. I've replaced a number of Windows servers and offloaded several AS/400 tasks to Linux servers. I just can't imagine any sane motive for running Linux in an LPAR on a pig dog system like an AS/400.
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I work for a company that develops and maintains a commercial application on the IBM AS/400 platform. As far as I can tell, the AS/400 has one reason to exist: to host legacy applications. I don't understand IBM's strategy for Linux on the AS/400. Why would anyone choose to take an extremely expensive, proprietary system, and sacrifice disk space and processors to run Linux when they could get substantially better performance and reliability by running Linux on inexpensive commodity hardware? It seems to me that IBM could be making a huge tactical error by supporting Linux on the AS/400 -- it will expose the AS/400 for what it is -- an overpriced, under performer. Don't misunderstand me -- I'm a huge Linux fan. I run Linux on personal systems at home and my workstation at work. I've replaced a number of Windows servers and offloaded several AS/400 tasks to Linux servers. I just can't imagine any sane motive for running Linux in an LPAR on a pig dog system like an AS/400.