“Banco Mercantil, a consumer and commercial bank headquartered
in Caracas, Venezuela, has announced that Linux is being deployed
in production systems on its IBM System/390 mainframe. This marks
the first publicly-acknowledged use of Linux for S/390 in a
production environment at a large financial institution. The news
is being trumpeted by IBM as validation of the stability and
capability of Linux on IBM mainframes, a platform which critics
have said is not ready for the enterprise.”
“This victory for IBM’s S/390 architecture, and for the Linux
operating system, comes at the expense of Microsoft’s Windows NT.
Banco Mercantil has eliminated thirty Windows NT servers by
replacing them with SuSE Linux installed on a single IBM System/390
G6 mainframe. The current deployment is only for commoditized
services such as DNS, firewall, and file sharing, but a spokesman
for Banco Mercantil says the next phase of the project will see
Linux on S/390 hosting line-of-business financial applications.
Part of the company’s Internet-based customer access system is
already using a Linux-based web server on the System/390
mainframe.”
“The new Linux installation will complement, not replace,
existing OS/390 mainframe based systems running under IBM’s CICS
transaction management environment. The existing mainframe was
augmented with an Integration Facility for Linux (IFL) processor
node so that Linux could run in its own dedicated Logical Partition
(LPAR). The IFL is a full System/390 processor, but has special
firmware to disable its ability to run IBM’s traditional mainframe
operating systems. By using the IFL processor, Banco Mercantil
avoids paying larger software licensing fees for the other software
on the machine. Such software licenses are typically based on the
total processor capacity of the entire mainframe, regardless of how
that total capacity is allocated, because the customer can change
such processor allocations at will without telling IBM. There is no
software charge for the IFL processor, because it can run only the
free Linux operating system.”