Stayin’ alive: Ten years of Linux on the mainframe

” It would be hard to find two technologies that would seem to
be more diametrically opposed in the data center than the IBM
mainframe and the open source Linux operating system. But the
combination of the two, which then-IBM president and now IBM
chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano championed (or more precisely, gets
credit for championing within Big Blue regardless of whose idea it
may have been), saved the System z mainframe business.

“Saved it from what, you ask? Well, not from immediate economic
oblivion. Given the entrenched nature of COBOL and CICS transaction
processing applications, batch workloads, and DB2 and IMS databases
underpinning heaven only knows what at some 6,000 to 7,000
mainframe shops worldwide, it would be very hard to replace
mainframes. As the proprietary and Unix system vendors who have
been trying for decades have learned. But they have crunched the
mainframe hardware business, which accounted for $13.1bn in
revenues in 1989, before the bottom dropped out thanks to a
recession that in turn caused a mainframe consolidation and Unix
frenzy.”

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