IBM Entices Sun, HP Customers onto Linux Mainframes

"Hrm. I only see this useful for people who are existing customers and require mainframes for other purposes then what they need Linux or Solaris or whatever for. That way they can get rid of some servers and whatnot.

"Even then it's still not a easy thing to 'get'. So much mainframe software licensing is based on 'mips' and core count that having any excess capacity in CPU is a very bad thing financially. With mainframes you generally want to keep the CPU as slow as possible to reduce licensing and support costs... so if you have lots of cycles to devote to running a Linux web server or whatever then your probably doing something wrong."
The LWN comments are good complements to the article-- ed.

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Overunderdoing: patterns in Microsoft's interoperability stance(May 22, 2009)
• Open Source vs Proprietary Routing Rumble(May 22, 2009)
• IBM-Sun Merger Appears Near(Apr 04, 2009)
• Sun deal could make IBM unbeatable in Unix server market(Mar 21, 2009)
• IBM Sun acquisition : Good for Unix. Good for Linux. Bad for HP(Mar 18, 2009)
• Build an Available Linux Server Environment With IBM Blades(Dec 13, 2008)
• IBM Launches Linux 'Baby' Mainframe(Oct 23, 2008)
• IBM Brings 5GHz Chip to its Top-Selling Unix Server(Oct 08, 2008)
• SUSE-Linux-on-IBM-Loaned Mainframe Becomes Teaching Ground(Sep 11, 2008)
• IBM Ditches i and AIX in U.S. Open Systems for Linux(Sep 04, 2008)