“A 36-year-old institution, the venerable IBM “Big Iron”
mainframe was buried with few tears and no ceremony last week, as
IBM announced its replacement server, the zSeries 900. IBM launched
the general-purpose computing server with the System 360 in 1964;
the current System 390, Generation Six, stands as the last model in
a direct line of descendants from that launch.”
“The zSeries is not another System 390 mainframe with a coat of
marketing frosting, said Pete McCaffrey, IBM’s zSeries program
director. … In place of its highly proprietary MVS operating
system, the zSeries will run both z/OS and Linux. The Linux move is
aimed at online hosting services, such as Internet and applications
service providers, as much as enterprise data centers, said William
Hurley, an analyst at The Yankee Group. The Linux card will give
IBM better footing from which to compete with Sun Microsystems’
successful Enterprise 10000 line.”
“The S/390 is also able to run Linux, but it is typically
run as a guest under a proprietary IBM VM operating system. It
may be partitioned into 15 separate Linux servers in that
arrangement, McCaffrey said. Under z/OS, no host IBM operating
system is needed, and the machine may be partitioned into hundreds
or thousands of Linux virtual servers.”