Mainframe support
Johnson David
DavidJohnson at Siemens.com
Mon Mar 29 10:30:28 PST 2004
On Sunday 28 March 2004 08:41 pm, Charon wrote:
> IBM is currently pushing Linux on its big iron offerings. What
> similar capacity options are available for FreeBSD based
> installations? Has IBM actually ported Linux or are they running a
> smoke and mirrors setup with Linux running in a vmware like
> environment?
IBM ported Linux itself to their mainframes. It wasn't a community
project in any sense of the word. We could do this, but I don't think
anyone here can afford an IBM mainframe. Heck, most of us couldn't
afford the real estate to house one :-)
There are practical and philosophical problems with Linux on their
mainframes. First, this is a niche market. The only customers are going
to be banks and other transaction-heavy Fortune 500 companies. It's a
"brownie point" for Linux, but nothing to be ashamed of if you don't
have it. Second, Unix and mainframes have completely different skill
sets. Going with this solution means you need both mainframe and Linux
administrators.
Philosophically, from the Free Software side of things, it's kind of
strange. You have a Free Software kernel running in a VM in a
proprietary operating system on proprietary hardware with only one
vendor available for support. Overall, there's few advantages for the
customer, but large advantages to IBM.
It would be nice if FreeBSD could run in the Z-Series, if only for the
brownie points we would earn. But it would be little more than an
experiment. You're not going to run a webserver on an IBM mainframe, or
make it your development workstation or desktop. The only applications
that would make sense could still be done cheaper on a cluster.
If FreeBSD needs to expand out of its workstation/server niche, the
logical area to expand to is not the mainframe market, but the embedded
market.
David
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