By Linda Leung, VNU Net
IBM has announced the availability of Linux for the S/390 server
as it ships the mainframe system without its native operating
system for the first time.
Linux for S/390 will be available from SuSE in Europe and
TurboLinux in the US. The open source operating system will be able
to run natively in the machine or alongside OS/390, with the S/390
hardware partitioned or with Linux running as a virtual
machine.
The announcement is part of IBM’s bid to capture a piece of the
Linux market and to push S/390 as an alternative to servers from
Sun Microsystems for hosting web applications.
However, some analysts questioned how well Linux for S/390
supports all the third-party software that can run on the IBM
environment.
By the end of the year, IBM will port its range of middleware
software to the platform to allow Linux applications to connect to
DB2 and third-party databases, such as Oracle, as well as to Big
Blue’s IMS transaction environment.
But Stacey Quandt, an analyst at researcher Giga Information
Group, warned that further technical work may be required if
customers want to run Linux and Oracle natively on the S/390
without the help of IBM’s own operating system or
database.
She said IBM has failed to confirm whether it will port its
Workload Manager software to the new platform, which is necessary
for managing this type of environment.
“The announcement is of significance to IBM in the short term
and in the long term it could have implications to the Linux
market,” she said, adding that existing customers could use the
port to consolidate their servers onto one machine.
According to Rich Lechner, vice president of ebusiness for
S/390, one unnamed telco has thrown out 400 Sun web servers in
favour of using Linux virtual machines running on one S/390.
He claimed that one IBM server could support up to 41,000 Linux
virtual machines.