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Linux is becoming a viable high-end computing platform
Linux first infiltrated the enterprise as an Internet workhorse, offering a reliable platform for infrastructure needs such as Web and DNS servers. Then commercial applications appeared, and Linux proved itself as a viable Unix alternative. Now, Linux is bulking up, showing signs of becoming a viable high-end computing platform that combines mainframe-quality performance with a breadth of application support and Net-friendliness that no conventional legacy platform can match.
The most dramatic example of the open-source operating system's move up the enterprise-computing food chain is the debut earlier this year of Linux for IBM's S/390 mainframes. With IBM's blessing and support, corporate IT departments can now run Linux apps on their big iron, using the available mainframe processing cycles to cost-efficiently meet their companies' E-business requirements.
"When I learned last fall about the possibility of running Linux on our mainframe, my eyes lit up right away," says Rich Smrcina, systems software specialist at Grede Foundries Inc., a $600 million producer of metal castings in Milwaukee. "There's just so much we can do."
Smrcina had been after IBM to bring some of its top apps, including Domino and DB2 Universal Database, to Virtual Machine, the operating system that Grede runs on its S/390 MultiPrise 2000 mainframe. But IBM never showed any indication of doing so. `Whey have that stuff running on OS/390, but it doesn't make economic sense for us to migrate to OS/390 just to get to those applications," Smrcina says. Such a migration would mean expensive OS/390 licensing fees and would force the company to repurchase OS/390 versions of many of its mainframe apps. The change in operating system would have also resulted in steep retraining costs. "It would be a financial nightmare for us," Smrcina says.
With the availability of Linux for his IBM mainframe, Smrcina now has access to all the applications he originally wanted-and more. "The fact that Linux for System/390 is source-compatible with Linux's existing software base is a tremendous benefit," he says. "I can download anything off the Internet, recompile it, and it works flawlessly most of the time." Among the applications that Smrcina has loaded on his mainframe: the popular Apache Web server; Bind, a Domain Name Server application; and...