LinuxWorld: Weighing the Pros & Cons of IBM’s Mainframe Linux

“A few weeks ago, someone asked what I thought of using Linux on
the mainframe. I’d simply never thought about it all, and just
assumed it made sense based on IBM’s reputation and my own
experience with MVS/XA. Forced to think about it, I realized that
my MVS experience is 16 years out of date and that my perception
then that the 3084Q we were running on was fast relative to my
workstation (a Sun-160 with a 16-MHz Motorola 68020 and 2 megabytes
of RAM), was coloring my reactions now.

“Although it’s not really possible to set aside previous
experience and knowledge to fully evaluate something on its merits
only at the time of the evaluation, the questions raised by the IBM
move to offer Linux as a guest operating system (ghost) on the
zSeries are the same ones we should ask about any new Linux
product…”

Complete Story