Paul Ferris: IBM’s zSeries Win at LWE in New York

By Paul Ferris,
LinuxToday

You can tell these are exciting times for Ed Gauthier, and his
enthusiasm is unmistakable. He’s Program Manager for IBM’s zSeries
and S/390 Marketing and Enterprise Server division, which just won
the Best Hardware award for the Linux World Expo 2001. If you can
see the picture, this ain’t the kind of machine you’re going to
find in your neighbor’s basement. That is, unless your neighbor has
some kind of serious computing to do, and some serious spare change
to accompany.

But it’s not meant to be a toy — it’s really a serious computer
for people who need it. The Linux ports to IBM’s S/390 and zSeries
are one of those “Whoda thunk it” things that I don’t think anyone
could have predicted.

But they’re here, anyway. So, what’s all the excitement
about?

Elliott explains to me that a lot of new customers are coming to
the IBM booth to see it with their own two eyes. The zSeries port
is generating excitement because it provides people with
large-scale computing needs that pertain to Linux with solutions
that simply haven’t existed in this space before. “They’re starting
to hear that we can do things very economically on a per-server
basis”, he says.

But it’s not just that, younger people who have come from a more
client/server background are getting a taste of the features that
only VM can provide. Things like being able to try out a new server
configuration on the same machine without affecting important
production servers. Things like using several distributions at
once. Things like having hundreds of virtual Linux boxes at your
beck and call. The demo in the booth is creating them at the rate
of one every 90 seconds. When Gauthier shows off the zSeries
features the feedback is generally very favorable. “They say things
like ‘baby where have you been all my life?’ — and it was Linux
that made things possible.”

But this isn’t new technology — it’s very well developed, over
thirty years old. Linux has added to the zSeries a component that
draws in a new market for IBM.

I still can’t help but kid around with Gauthier and Product
Manager Jim Elliott — I have to ask about a laptop version.

The reaction is a bit of a train wreck. Of course, you can
already get Thinkpads that run Linux from IBM. It’s just that 20
CPUs with what appears to be components made to withstand the brunt
of a nuclear blast are overkill for most people’s laptop computing
needs. Besides all that, there’s enough multiuser computing
potential to power the needs of the entire show floor at once —
let alone the game of Tetris or Quake that the average user is
going to need.

Ed explains that in many of the booths they’re using the
mainframe over Internet protocol. It’s merely a twist on the whole
blurred computing paradigm that IBM is now making available with
products like these. Ed laughs anyway — he explains that he loves
his job at IBM because “I get to play with the toys first”.

But, no — no laptop version of the zSeries in sight.

Regardless, Gauthier plays along and assures me of two things:
For one thing, if it’s going to happen, it won’t be for a few
years. And for another “If we do get a laptop version (of the
zSeries) — I get it first!“.