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Red Hat Software Businesses

IBM Will Include Red Hat On All Mainframes 169

Posted by Hemos from the better-news-for-red-hat dept.
John E. Cosgrove writes "I read in this article that IBM signed a deal with Red Hat to include RedHat linux on all of their mainframe servers. It's a little short, but worth the look."
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IBM Will Include Red Hat On All Mainframes More

IBM Will Include Red Hat On All Mainframes

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  • They are just going to allow RedHat as an OPTION on all their mainframes and servers. Tony
  • Red Hat, but not Slackware? Why!?!?!
  • Why the hell would you run Linux on a mainframe?

    Surely the native O/S is going to be able to handle all of the resources a hell of a lot better.
  • Of course it has something to do with anything vs. Linux. If your buying a mainframe and linux is an option, then you're going to be thinking "what shall I run, linux or the O/S that was written specifically for this bit of hardware?".

    And I can't believe that anyone would choose Linux for this. No disrespecting Linux, but software that has been written specifically for one set of hardware is going to be a lot more stable and faster than a general purpose O/S like Linux.

    Witness VMS on Vax/Alpha, decent clustering has been around for >10 years now, and it's only just coming out on Win/Linux.
  • IBM has commited to releasing the code to everything that they "can". Yes, I mean as far as kernel hacks and whatnot.

    So yes, they are in essence giving everything back, except for the pieces of code like that dang soundcard with the Lawyers having such issues.
  • As I read the comments about what a crappy distro Red Hat is, and the 7.0 "fiasco", and how commercial Red Hat is compared to other distros, and brand name this-and-that, it becomes obvious that we're overlooking the obvious reason that IBM is working with Red Hat on this. Namely, that someone at IBM at some point decided that they were getting the best deal from Red Hat in terms of the combination of price and support. This decision is probably fairly unrelated to issues surrounding consumer-grade distributions for the x86 processor. Probably IBM could care less which brand of Linux they choose, since their decision does more for that brand than choosing a particular brand will help IBM sell this. Finally, Red Hat employs Alan Cox, who is a major figure in kernel development, which is the prime piece of any Linux distro that IBM is going to need (that and a compiler).
  • Yeesss, of course Linux is the best O/S in the world bar none. It's not just an evolved clone of Minix at all. It's obviously more secure than the BSD's and also more stable than MVS/VMS/AIX etc.

    Drop your blinkers, brother. There is more in the world than Linux and some of it os even better suited to certain tasks.
  • Moot Point.

    People are also forgetting the toilet the developers worshiped after last nights JD fest.

    UNIX by definition means very little.

    What the people believe UNIX defines is more important that you are willing to realise.

    My Dad still can't tell the difference between WordPerfect and the operating system. He just knows he hates Bill Gates because I told him to. Do you think he gives a damn about the C library? Do you think he would if it were part of the OS name?

    People who know Linux and know how to use it know what the GNU software is and where it comes from and at least for the most part, are grateful.

    -Nathan
  • And I can't believe that anyone would choose Linux for this. No disrespecting Linux, but software that has been written specifically for one set of hardware is going to be a lot more stable and faster than a general purpose O/S like Linux.
    While I'll admit AIX is very good at getting stuff done, many admins complain about it. Now if linux were ported to it many of these admins would probally be happier. Also Linux resembles Solaris, BSD, and other unix's alot more than AIX so they can better sell Mainframes to businesses running hetterogenous networks based on the fact that retraining IT is minimized. Not to mention the admins are happy and have less anger to redirect into there LARTS.
  • This is an easy one, backwards compatibility. Programs have been written to expect the system to work a certain way. How many programs have you seen break because the Windows directory isn't c:\windows\ How about Borland C++ 5.0). If programmers wrote their code strictly by the MS book, then the code might(probably not though) survive losing the drive letters. Same with the 8.3 limit. The system itself could probably handle long file names for system files, but old poorly written programs just might munch the names. It's safest for Microsoft to pull these features into new versions, than break a large base of existing software. It's baggage, but cause by bad decisions with DOS, not by a technological fault in Windows 2000.
    treke
  • True, but it Linux is still lacking in several areas, large memory support, large disk support, decent clustering support, over 99% uptime, journalling filesystem.

    Admittedly, work is going on in all of these areas, I predict that in 5 years it will make sense to run Linux on big iron in preference to all of the ol' proprietry systems, but at the moment Linux in all of these features is too experimental/non-existent to risk betting the farm on.

    Let's face it, if you're running a mainframe, you're doing it for a reason and you will want S/W that can keep up with your H/W.
  • Uptime of windows measured in days? I hardly think so. I keep a nice little advertisement run in the July 10, 2000 InteractiveWeek that has the following quote:
    With Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, we don't have to reboot. It's reliable and, with 100,000 users, it's going to make our jobs a lot easier." --Keith Foster, PC LAN Engineer, Wells Fargo Services CO.
    I put it up because we tried to use W2KPro here and it is just as unstable as anything else M$ has released. I've heard arguments along the lines of "you're using it wrong" but this machine is a developer's desktop computer and it crashes with clockwork regularity. I would accept that fact more if the person was writing software that ran on the machine, but other than the web browser and a copy of TextPad the computer is nothing more than a very expensive terminal with SMB mounts to the file server.
  • Now I may have heard wrong... but doesn't AIX-5L have a Linux core anyway???
  • Will there be ANY demand for this, unless there is some RPG 5250/3270 VM I am unaware of?

    Seriously though, anyone else work with some of the "green screeners" who are the ones that insist on the IBM Mainfr^H^H^H^HeServers?

    There may be a market for the RS/6000, but I know of very few people that run or program for AS/400's, of S/390's who can even really use the Internet, much less be the market Linux "targets." These are the people that need to be convinced to use these new VM's.

    I am wressling with some of these people issues right now, waking "green screeners" up to the fact that a Java Applet screen scraper does not make their RPG/Cobol an "internet app." They are scared to death of even learning html! I know for a fact only 1 of 7 can define what Linux is!

    Anyway, IBM needs to spend some time changing the mindshare in some of these people, if they expect these eServers to fly off the shelve.

    -Pete
  • Personally I feel this is the only way to go about it.

    Linux is just the kernel.

    GNU is just the compiler.

    When people ask me what operating system(or I like to call it operating environment) I run I tell them that I run Debian. Of course there is Debian with various kernels and for different hardware architectures that aren't binary compatible, so sometimes I may say I run "Debian Woody Linux on i386" Of course i use GNU tools also but everyone knows that so adding it is superflous and just makes the name longer.

    I fully support RedHat for trying to sell the qualities that make them unique among the Linux vendors.

    I also like the open source work they have contributed. We use some of it in Debian. At school we use RedHat. It is pretty good. I only wish I had root access to make it better. :P

  • More than up time is the kick ass I/O peformance that BIG IRON provides.

    Also BIG IRON has perfected disk and tape storage management far beyond that of other OS's. Like ten years ahead of everyone else.

    The BIG IRON has evolved into the storage server in our shop for all NT/AIX/HP/UNIX servers using ADSM get to the S390 and HSM for storage management.

  • On Big Blue's Coatails a Red Hat and Tux (Score:4)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @01:45PM (#716311) Homepage Journal
    This announcement, by a company like IBM which still commands respect, gives not only Red Hat, but Linux a huge boost in credibility.

    Last week, IBM said it will overhaul its entire line of servers and mainframes under the brand name eServer to meet the rising demands of the Internet.

    That Red Hat has performed so well, as to be accomodated as an option on the entire line of servers, by IBM no less, is a statement that Linux has arrived.


    --
    Chief Frog Inspector
  • You can find out a LOT more information about this by checking out the article at http://industry.java.sun.com/javanews/stories/stor y2/0,1072,28830,00.html and http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2585 859,00.html.
  • This is hearsay from previous /. posts, but the only way to get similar results from a HA cluster...

    Is to run something like a cluster of over 1k machines, I think.

    I remember reading about price/performance numbers, and doing some quick math on /., and finding than 1 IBM mainframe, the S390 I think, can run some 1300 copies of Linux reasonably, though I may get the number wrong. That would mean a price of about $400 per running copy of Linux(which translates to 1300 $400 PCs)

    So the mainframe, for some purposes, is *cheaper*, more reliable, has more bandwidth, has better IO, is more configurable, has less complexity, and is much niftier. Not to mention easier to manage than 1k machines in some room somewhere!

    The nick is a joke! Really!
  • OK... I was going to flame on about mainframes vs. servers... but I checked the IBM site and they call 'em all "Enterprise Servers". OK. But then I read this article [eltoday.com].

    I love this period of system evolution!

  • According to Slashdot (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    RedHat users are script kiddiez, at least thats what is says in a news story from the weekend.
  • Has there not been a bunch of talk lately, about how linux is not suited for the Big Iron in its current form? If that is indeed true, then this bundle may end up hurting linux in the long run (companies may decide not to use linux on their lower end machines after seeing it not scale well on the maineframes), unless they are releasing a specific version designed to run on powerful machines. In which case how far away are we from the dreaded kernel fork?
  • PowerX isn't part of the PowerPC family. PowerPC was based loosely on IBM's Power architecture. Then IBM came out with the Power2 and Power3 architectures (based on its Power architectune) which are not 100% compatible with PowerPC. They do, however share many common instructions between them, but there are PowerPC instructions that won't work on a Power CPU, and there are Power instructions that won't work on a PowerPC. (see the GCC info page for more info.)

    I've heard that IBM has been working on a Linux port for their 64-bit PowerX machines. They already have a port for their 32-bit machines.

    BTW, Debian also has a PPC port.
  • Don't forget Redhat's [redhat.com] own press release [redhat.com]
  • As an employee of good ol' big blue [ibm.com] (I love it by the way...) I will be very interested to see what this does for the internal legal standing. We have delightfully ambiguous policy about what programmers can and cannot do. (Examples: install linux at work, yes. Give it to co-workers, no. Fix bugs, yes, contribute the fixes to the tree, no.) More interesting will be the ramifications "cleanroom" policy. If I look at the source, I can't write code of the same nature for at least a year. The policy is standard for all outside software, Linux or otherwise.... Personally, I'm expecting good news, because in my experience so far, IBM has been very interested in "supporting" and contributing to Linux, and doesn't seem to be shy about giving it away...
  • IBM declared their support of Linux long ago.

    C'mon, you know better than that. Declaring support and actually doing something are two completely different things.

    I may support Linux, but actually devoting my time and money to build hardware, provide Q/A, produce documentation and provide technical support, in conjunction with a vendor are far different from just throwing some money at that vendor's stock and/or paying them lip service.


    --
    Chief Frog Inspector
  • No, I think just native support for Linux binaries. The kernel is still AIX.
  • C'mon, you know better than that. Declaring support and actually doing something are two completely different things.

    I never said they were the same thing, you assumed/implied that. All I said is IBM 'declared' their support long ago. That is a factual statement. You can interpolate anything you want from that.
  • But that's what sells Big Iron to PHBs. Brands. You need to wake up and smell the Enterprise Java Beans.
    Buying brand names isn't necessarily irrational. In fact, there are plenty of rational arguments for buying established brands. i.e., less likely that it'll die out, better access to support, more people trained in using it, etc., etc. Try to lay off the demagoguery.

    If you want a PHB to buy it, they need a face, a brand, someone they can sue the pants off to get support.
    Tripe! Did it ever occur to you that companies provide support because they get hurt in the market place if they do not? Suing might play a role, but it's a very small one.

    Companies want support, not the right to sue. Support comes in all different kinds of shades and colors. Don't assume that the right to sue == good support, or that support = good support.

    Which is why some of us own stock in them - it's not that they're better, it's not that they're faster, it's that they will survive the marketplace.
    If that's what you base your investment decisions on ("survival") then I don't want to see your portfolio. Anyways, i'm skeptical about Red Hat. I question their ability to produce add a lot of value to Linux under GPL. I question their ability to provide support....lot's of questions.
  • After all, if IBM didn't include RedHat with every mainframe, people would be tempted to buy their mainframes naked and install a pirated copy of RedHat on it.

    - Joe

  • When you say UNIX, and UNIX enviroment, you almost definitly mean POSIX. And NT can be coersed into becoming POSIX compliant. ISTR that QNX is, and probably even VMS.

    While the RMS/GNU toolkit is what linux is generaly bundled with, dont forget *BSDs. While there may be an argument to be made that Linus diddnt start this therford shouldnt get the credit, you cant extent that to say that RMS should.

    RMS may have been the first person to sit down and go out of his way to write Free Software, and formalize a orginization around it with the necessary legal staff, but he did not invent Free Software. Knuth's TeX is a notable Free Software tool that predates GNU. But 'all' software was free at one point.

  • The title says it all, baby.

    I hope it's not RedHat 7.0 -- unless you're interested in watching dozens of RedHat instances die randomly.
  • Only SuSE has Linux running on AS/400(theis have some of the strangest hardware you'll ever see) and s/390 at this point. The s/390s' only just went to the RS/6000 they used to have a 31bit(with 44 bit addressing) in house job, I don't belive that the older systems will get a port.
  • At my last job (a stint as a network engineer at a _large_ healthcare/insurance corp), I was continuously evangelizing Linux. What did I hear? "Well, I'm sure it works fine, but who do we sue if it breaks?" This from a very not PHB, my direct report.

    Don't confuse him with the facts. Geeks don't grok facts of the marketplace - we want truth. Marketing and Sales don't want truth, they want image. Hence, the label sells, and Red Hat == Linux.
  • Windows NT/2000 might be a 32-bit OS, but Windows programmers are still 16-bit. Someday far into the future, windows programmers might realize they are no longer coding for DOS, and might even join Linux, mac, and all other programmers, in the 21st century. But until that day arrives, we have to put up with these idiots who can only babble in eight letter words.
  • Why get a mainframe... can someone tells me what makes them so much better? I know there are FAR more reliable... but they also cost a great deal more... why not get a HA Cluster?

    Just wondering... beucase I goto a school where we do JCL and mainframe shit all the time...

    Peace out.

  • HA clusters are great when you have 24 copies of the program which can work on individual sections
    of data and not have to report back or send results very often/fast, but they suck ass when you need the CPU's to be dependant on each other and what each other produces.

    No, that's High Performance clusters, HA clusters is when you need another machine to take over when the active one fails, thus making it appear that the machine never went down (or very briefly). Both are clustering, but with very different requirements & techniques.

  • Include RH 7.0 ? (Score:3)

    by oldzoot ( 60984 ) <morton.james@nOSpam.comcast.net> on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @01:20PM (#716332)
    I wonder if IBM will use RH 7.0 as their release version? That would be great for creating positive first impressions of Linux for corporate types !

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • > I've heard that sound won't work for this reason and IBM refuses to release specs.

    Talking to some of the IBM guys, the MWave (that modem thingie, also called a DSP, and much more than a modem) is jointly owned by IBM and another company. Thus, they cannot release the code without the other company's approval (and they're working on that, he said). What they can, they appear to be giving away. Check out JFS, Jikes, Linux/390, etc.
  • I didn't read the article. But it makes sense that IBM will push any OS that uses their hardware. So if Red Hat becomes the ultimate OS, IBM would be the ultimate hardware. The only question is.. why Red Hat?
  • Anybody who read IBM's prospectus saw this coming last quarter.

    -The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
  • Mainframes are used in banks in big big institutions and companys like citybank, they have been using for a long time. Mainframes handle loads and loads of transactions.
  • Isn't one of the big problems -- as far as most /.ers and the DoJ are concerned -- with MS is the use of bundling to further a monopoly? Is Red Hat following the Redmond Brick Road?
  • I know what you are saying. I am a Slackware fan myself, and it can be hard when programs specify "Red Hat 6.2 or better"--what the hell does that mean??? SuSE has a neater logo.
  • I believe that problem would occur if you wanted to use the Linux kernel as the MAIN kernel of the machine. This is talking about a bunch of VMs, which don't necesarily have access to ALL the RAM in the system. But, I could be wrong...
  • Yeah, if you read the ZDNet article you'll find that Red Hat is not the only Linux that is now being supported. Caldera and SUSE are also mentioned.
  • Red Hat because IBM already has a buisness relationship with Red Hat.
  • You will have the support of SuSE, Turbolinux and now the latest addition RedHat. Any distro that considers itself a server contender is going to want on board...

    I hope you are aware of what the next generation mainframes are all about. IBM last week decided to rebrand the whole server lineup as eServer. So what used to be the S/390 is now the zSeries of eServer. The newest model which should be there in time for Christmas if you order now is the z900. Check it out at http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserv er/ zseries/ [ibm.com]

    This is going to rock and Linux is going to be one of the first OS's that will take full advantage of it's 64-bit goodness! With the 2.4 kernel (which we also will hopefully have for Christmas) the 16 processor (+4 others dedicated to I/O or clustering or hot spares) SMP design is going to set some new benchmark records for Linux scalability.

    Worth every penny. Believe me this is the dream machine. And Linux is going to achieve it's server destiny here.

  • Now I can't tell my P's from by B's...sorry about the accidental shouting.
  • That does not stop people from adding a patch that address linux issue on the big iron machines. I do remember for intance the big memory patch. Linus did not want to put it in because it would not be as good for machines that have a small amount of memory. Even though Linus has not blessed does not mean people can not use it. As long as they distribute the source that will I do not see the problem with this.
  • I hope they won't run out of file descriptors [slashdot.org]...
  • Well, Either if the PowerX is a member of the PPC family or not, they're in the same kernel port, which is good enough for me.

    And yes, I know there's a debian port to PPC, but I only mentioned linuxppc and yellowdog because they're both RPM-based, as is redhat.
  • ot to gloat or anything, but these are bad times for Microsoft.

    I really wouldn't say that. With the economy still expanding in spite of the stability in the stock market, good news for Linux isn't necessarily bad news for Microsoft. Both platforms are attempting to grab pieces of the pie, but the pie is getting bigger, and quickly.

    Microsoft has had a lot of positive news as well since the summer. It's pretty clear that the anti-trust litigation is losing momentum on the government side, and as far as platform expansion goes, Microsoft has made some major steps, the first being the release of Datacenter Server [cnet.com], their attempt at challenging Sun's dominance for midrange databases. This is the first release where Microsoft is guaranteeing a support organization for its product.

    In addition, Microsoft has launch a slate of back-end enterprise applications, [microsoft.com] notably Exchange 2000, which add functionality to the platform, so a comprehensive web or ebusiness infrastructure can be built around Microsoft products. Of course, M$ isn't the first to offer the functionality, but they do offer relatively easy integration, something purchasing decsions tend to be based around. For example, Exchange 2000 adds instant messaging, VoIP, and Multimedia Conferencing to the base email server

    That said, I'm no Microsoft fan, but I do feel that the holy wars and score keeping do undermine the image and goals of Linux and Open Source.

  • Yup - My 2003 multiprise (or, er, my employers..) has six processors in it. We only paid for one, so thats all we get. We did upgrade from 16 to 24 mips shortly after we bought it. CE came in with a floppy, zapped the firmware (Changed clock oscillation rate), IPL'd, and bingo! He said the procedure is the same for changing the number of processors active also. Same box can go to 127 mips via same procedure. I want all six! Now all I need is about $50k
    .
  • My point wasn't that brand matters the most, just that it does matter. Any company that doesn't do it won't be around too long.

    I don't believe that a highly visible brand means that one company will rule the market. Take the Mac when it was first released, amazingly strong brand (Apple), huge marketing blitz (superbowl ads etc.) but after the initial buz it failed in the market because it was an inferior product (single floppy, no harddrive, not enough ram etc). It wasn't untill they fixed these things that the Mac took off, no ammount of marketing make up for the a product.

  • Well, tripe to your tripe. At my last job (a stint as a network engineer at a _large_ healthcare/insurance corp), I was continuously evangelizing Linux. What did I hear? "Well, I'm sure it works fine, but who do we sue if it breaks?" This from a very not PHB, my direct report. From the CIO or a director level person I could understand it, but from a geek turned manager? Very frustrating...



    Dive Gear [divingdeals.com]
  • One of the significant advantages that mainframes provide is large CPUs. Instead of 1000 small CPUs, you have 8, 16, ... large engines. The difference is a function of the workload. If you have a processor intensive workload that is not divisible into multiple processes (or not many), the larger the individual CPU the lower the elapsed execution time. Even with smaller workloads, a smaller CPU will cause an elongation in the elapsed execution time. For tasks where this is important, mainframes do the job. The I/O subsystem has been mentioned, but the architecture is impressive. All of the CPUs in the machine have access to the IOPs (I/O processors) -- multiple SEPARATE CPUs that are dedicated to only processing I/O operations, spread over as many as 256 (512? - it's been a while) Ultra-SCSI bus equivalents. Each of these I/O channels are then in turn controlling up to 16 I/O controllers. These are essentially powerful minicomputers that offload much of the I/O handling from the IOPs. The I/O controllers are then directly connected the I/O devices (up to 32 each). To summarize, 1 mainframe, multiple IOP driving potentially thousands of I/O controllers and 10's of thousands of I/O devices all AT FULL SPEED CONTINUOUSLY. Truly awesome. :-)
  • I know this is getting tricky, since IBM decided to rename everything. Follow this chart.

    zSeries = S/390
    pSeries = RS/6000
    iSeries = AS/400
    zSeries = ? (Maybe the NUMA systems)

    What this really means is that Linux will run on all of these platforms. The S/390 port was done mostly in house. The AS/400 port is based on the LinuxPPC work as is the RS/6000 port. More work had to be done on the AS/400 port since the hardware is different than a 6000, although the processors are the same. I would really like to see Linux running on a 400, the hardware kicks ass.

  • Not to gloat or anything, but these are bad times for Microsoft.

    First they have poor sales of Win2k, ME, or whatever they call it due to the reputations they've built screwing people.

    Next we see that stupid "naked pc" page. All that tells me is that dealers are looking to get out from under the MS thumb, and are -gasp- considering other OS options. Hopefully, the trickle will become a flood and the extortion of one copy of Windoze per PC will die.

    Now IBM has taken this up a Linux with their mainframes. Sure, we've seen the demos with thousands of virtual machines and we know that some of the bussiest sites run Linux (HOTMAIL), but now PHB will know it. It's going to come to him in glossy adds with great graphic design and skinny young people, circus acts, blah, blah, blah. PHB might even lean why free software works and embrace it (well, ok maybe not) stanger things have happened.

    Die you source code horading, lawsuit wielding monster you, die! May the sins of your past haunt you. IBM may get the last laugh on you yet, Bill Gates. For every user that's lost work to a format change or broken program, for every poor sucker that thought it was cool that you could "pirate" windows so easily only to suffer it, for every legitimate user who has suffered the same after plunking down hundreds of dollars a year trying to keep current, for every dealer forced to carry that bloatware against their will, Die Bitch Die!!

    Poster is mild mannered in real life. He is, however, still angry that his quick window routines and FORTRAN were broken between Windows 93 and 95. He also feels for all those people screwed much worse than himself by Visual Basic. He also has to use NT at work, and hates it. OK, that's enough now.

  • Truth in advertising/journalism: I work for IBM, I do NOT speak for IBM, IBM does NOT speak for me; it's better that way. I also own stock in both companies involved.

    Here's the real story as it is told within the blue halls.

    RedHat will produce distros for the new iSeries(AS/400) pSeries(RS/6000) and zSeries(S/390) server families, in addition to their existing xSeries distro; this is not an exclusive thing either, SuSE is already on the zSeries. These distros will be based on work being done within IBM to make Linux run, and run well on this hardware, as well as work done throughout the community. IBM will offer these distros preinstalled and will also offer support services and contracts.

    IBM will *NOT* discontinue the existing operating systems for these products, that simply isn't an option in most cases; anyone who takes the idea seriously has no grasp of the consequences. AS/400 still has the pristine security record, OS/390 still has the records for txproc, tpf is still in use in far more datacenters than anyone cares to admit.

    Why you ask? Well, let's look at the logic behind last weeks unified rebranding. The stated purpose is just that unification, where there were four or five overlapping, and sometimes competing IBM server brands there is now one. In order for that to really truely be the case there needs to be something powerfull to tie these families together.

    One ring to bind them all.

    That thing, most logically, is the operating environment. IBM has tried that before, and failed every time out for the same reason - they choose something from within. By embracing something from the outside much of the nasty old politics (hopefully) get flushed down the drain.

    Why does it matter though? Because we have a huge disadvantage to Sun and Microsoft. Both of them have ONE environment on ONE architecture (Slowaris/sparc, winblows/x86). Now some may say that only one architecture is all you need - I think they're wrong, so do a lot of others. Let's take a look at TWO machines, ASCI White and my thinkpad. The two are about as far apart as you can get in every conceivable measurement. ASCI White is the extreme limits of the S80 architecture, which is the cornerstone of the highend pSeries family of RS/6000s. My thinkpad is a t20 running a Pentium III. Could you make a thinkpad with the S80 architecture? I doubt it, even if you could would anyone besides Bill Gates be able to afford it? Could you make ASCI White with the x86 architecture? LOL... HELL NO! Thus I say one architecture IS NOT the answer... we need several, and they each need to find their own niche. Once that's done, then we need a common interface to them, and common tooling, and common applications (with at least api level compatibility, if not binary).

    Where is this going to come from? Linux. GNU. IBM.

    ----

    now the forces of openness
    have a powerful and
    unexpected new ally
    http://ibm.com/linux/

  • Last week Big Blue announced this (Score:3)

    by WillSeattle ( 239206 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @02:04PM (#716358) Homepage
    Last week, IBM said it will overhaul its entire line of servers and mainframes under the brand name eServer

    Note the key phrase last week. I have no idea why, but a number of us submitted the news item last week on slashdot and it got rejected.

    Guess it's not news until it's stale: right?

    Oh, news flash, Al Gore will debate George Whats-My-Sign Bush last week.

    And in further news, Slobodan Milosevic is certain that he can stay in power. Oh, wait, he's been overthrown already.

    Never mind.

  • I tend to agree, RH is not my idea of a releiable, stabel and secure OS. I think I don't need to quote (as others may do because of lacking arguments), but it is understood among most of us, that RH provides quite a lot of exploitable binaries, and misconfigurations out of the box. Not even thinking about the "non-standard" issues in placing configuration files were no non-RH guy will search for them.

    Never the less, RH does have certain advantages in comparison to other so called "free Linux distributions", its widely known, and supports poppular OSS projects. Those may be a few of the reasons, IBM choose RH instead of choosing Debin or Suse or just Slackware.

    Personaly I thing IBM will take RH, and compile everything from square on, then calling the compleatly new distribution something like "RedHat 7.1 IBM Edition 1R4"
    --
  • The RS/6000 does indeed run PowerPC chips, and recent AS/400 have as well. They used to use in-house IBM CISC processors. Most of the 6000's will run Linux, (I've used Yellowdog to test a couple B50's), but the PPC AS/400 is pretty damn well unsupported at this point. I've heard hearsay stories of IBM demo'ing a few running Linux on the bare hardware, but have not seen it. The CISC machines are not running Linux at all, but talk of a port to their HAL of the MMU-less Linux variant found on the Dragonball processors was running around the mailing lists for a while.

    Hard to find HW info on? Whaddya wanna know?

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @02:06PM (#716361)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • From what I understand, Linux just runs on top of the core OS. It doesn't actually run the entire system (I don't think that Red Hat Linux would be all that good at 640-way SMP). It's not like IBM is dumping their current OS, they're just adding Linux as a very good thing to run on the system -- up to 16 copies running all at once. This Enterprise Linux Today article [eltoday.com] has more info.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Simple, compare the bandwith between CPUs on a 16xSMP system to the bandwith between servers in a cluster. To get information processed between those machines, you have to be able to send items to them to be computed and get the results back dang quick.

    Gigabit does not compare to a motherboards bus.

    HA clusters are great when you have 24 copies of the program which can work on individual sections of data and not have to report back or send results very often/fast, but they suck ass when you need the CPU's to be dependant on each other and what each other produces.

    -Nathan

  • What is the point of this? Whilst the IBM Unix's may not be the most popular, they are still damn solid and there are ALOT of applications out there that just plain won't run on linux (and perhaps won't due to age and such). The way I see it, if this rumour were to turn out to be true, IBM would be shooting themselves in their foot as customers will look at it and say "Hell, I can get an RH system anywhere, and for a helluvalot less" Sure, it may not have the same guts in there, but you won't be paying nearly as much. Would someone drop $15,000-$20,000 on an RS/6000 (which my company is currently looking at) when they find out it comes with a free OS? Hell no, I will put together my own dual or quad intel box and pop FreeBSD (or atleast Debian) on it and take the rest of the cashish and head on vacation. Or maybe a dual/quad G4 on OSX

    Something about this just don't sound right. IBM can't be that friggen stupid. Linux support on lowend servers would be great, but I am not willing to set my entire network up on Linux *JUST* yet.

  • What about RS/6000? 'Zat still running on AIX?

    Professionally, I'm still reeling from how IBM shafted CompUSA on the POS terminals (Point of Sale or Piece of S@&#, translate it as you will). These things were basically dumbed down Aptivas with a fancy keyboard (K6-2 300, 32 MB of RAM, NT4 SP4, POS terminal programmed in Java and executed through JGui). Boy, those things are laggy as hell. The keyboard has an acceptance rate of the PCJr. keyboard, the barcode scanner won't scan serial numbers, the 2x20 LED display was the only useful output of the computer (the monitor just shows an overview of the receipt and incessant ads), the printer stutters due to the Javalag(TM), the cash drawer has a 2500ms lag, and the check printer sometimes eats checks! Furthermore, the system setup looks as improvised as a Tinkertoy: once NT is booted, an FTP session starts to download the ad JPEGs, then an unknown piece of hardware is detected (every time, and every time I have to close that damned window without a mouse), then the "SurePay" program starts up. I wrote a sternly worded comment to IBM; after which I was almost fired for opposing a contractual partner, therefore jeopardizing the bottom line. The terminals were Y2K compliant, but they certainly aren't Win2K compliant, so what happens if they need to be upgraded? Guess we'll have to contract out to a POS company that doesn't suck as much as IBM.

    DISCLAIMERS: Javalag(TM), Java®, and Sun® are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc., LLC, CRAP, ETC, Ltd. in trust.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • See this kuro5hin thread.

    Or, just read a Slashdot response [slashdot.org] to the errant Slashdot story [slashdot.org].

    I do believe there were many posts at the time (on Slashdot, no less) pointing out the same gross errors in fact and problematic reporting. Why go elsewhere when you can get your criticism at home?

  • Re:True, and also.... (Score:3)

    by darthpenguin ( 206566 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @02:54PM (#716384) Homepage
    Although I personally think that Slackware is a superior distro to RedHat, you have to look at it from the corporate point of view. When I first decided to try linux, I went to a local computer store where they had a bunch of those "budget" CDs, and looked over the options for linux. The two main ones were Redhat and Slackware. I, being unexperienced with linux at the time, chose redhat, because I simply liked the name better! CEO's wouldn't like to run a business dependent on something called "Slackware". Plus, the corporate support that Redhat offers probably is another plus in using them, but on purely technical merits, I think that slackware would be the best choice.

    Of course, others would like to debate that with me...


    -MSD.dyndns.org [dyndns.org]
    "Sucks to your ass-mar"
  • Your quad intel box will not have anywhere near the reliability of a true piece of hardware like an IBM or HP server. These guys use redundant power supplies, ECC memory, redundant SCSI busses (not sure linux can support these, though), etc. The newer server offerings support hot swap of components to minimize system downtime. All of this, and at the same time a good system busses (note plural!) with serious bandwidth and a support network that understands a 2-hour response time.

    By the time you build your intel box with all of this, your price advantage evaporates.

  • Yes, Actually (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @03:03PM (#716388) Homepage Journal
    While I was working at IBM, mainframe dude got Linux booting on it. Then he compiled bochs and successfully booted Windows 95 on that. So yes, if you use Linux on your mainframe, you can also boot Windows on it.

    Presumably he could have then installed Lotus Notes and brought IBM full circle, since they first started using Notes to get away from the mainframes.

  • Re:More RH Branding (Score:3)

    by Overnight Delivery ( 239468 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @03:08PM (#716391)
    I take it that you've never worked for a company that failed to create brand recognition.

    I work for one now and let me tell you it sucks!

    You work your guts out to see competitors with inferior products kill you in the market, you tell people what industry you work in and they say "oh, I didn't know company X did that", but most of all it sends moral to the shit and good people leave.

    I'm glad Redhat understands the need for branding, if nothing else it means the distro I'm using now IS going to be around in 5 years (and despite the opinion on /. it is a fine distro).

    Having the the technical goods is the start of the process, not the end.


    Cheers

  • Wow.. this is freaky (from that article):
    The hardware itself, in the z900 machines, can actually be field-upgraded by using an IBM-supplied software key to unlock additional processors. It turns out that each z900 includes a full complement of CPUs inside the multichip module, and the customer can purchase additional capacity over the web. This practice of software-enabling features that are already installed has been common in mainframe environments for decades, and in fact IBM has used the same technique in some of the laser printers made by their Lexmark subsidiary. The concept still seems a little alien from a PC-oriented viewpoint, though.
  • Gee, anybody think this IBM/Red Hat partnership mighta had something to do with last week's story, "Red Hat Abandons Sparc [slashdot.org]"? Nah, IBM doesn't think of Sun as a competitor, do they?
  • Well it seems you are mistaking the RS/6000 series with IBM's S/390 which is a platform that allows many OS partitions via MVS on a single machine (kinda like VMWare just that it is trully at native speed). Besides Mainframe are usually used for databases and standard apps like SAP but could with one or two linux timeslots also be used for e-commerce (Intershop supports dirct acces to a SAP R/3 database) so everythinnk can run on a real HA system without getting in each others way.
    --Ulrich
  • http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/linux config/

    So IBM's own webpage lists the price as about $500 per copy of Linux installed on their S/390, with about 2500 copies of Linux being run, for a base cost of $1.2M.

    This is a hard number that *IBM* is providing on their site, not just educated guesses on my part. They are actually willing to support that many copies, evidently.

    The price varies with how buff a machine you want, I assume, but again, this is one of my baseless guesses.

    Are we at least willing to grant that IBM does have expertise in their own hardware, and that their numbers aren't baseless and useless?



    The nick is a joke! Really!
  • I don't know if this is still true, but last I heard IBM is not giving it all away to the Linux community. Aren't the sound systems in their ThinkPad notebooks still that proprietary thing tied in with the modem that doesn't work with Linux? Maybe not, but I've heard that sound won't work for this reason and IBM refuses to release specs.

    Sure, it's great that they are offering linux on their mainframes, but it would be nice to be able to have a choice between major OEMs for Linux laptops (Dell is the only one I would fully trust, and the small linux-only companies are *expensive*!)
  • Red Hat is the most commercial of all distros, and arguably the best tuned to servers. I mean, what other distro can you buy at Best Buy with almost everything you need to set up an e-buisness webserver? Granted, it's way too expensive to buy the boxed professional edition, but it comes with support, and that's what companies like.
  • Red Hat Inc., the top distributor of Linux operating-system software in the United States, said yesterday that IBM's new server and mainframe computers will run Red Hat Linux.


    Does that mean that Linux will be the only choice, or that they will be Linux-capable?


    Micro$oft(R) Windoze NT(TM)
    (C) Copyright 1985-1996 Micro$oft Corp.
    C:\>uptime

  • Big Iron (Score:3)

    by jjr ( 6873 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @01:25PM (#716413) Homepage
    This will allow mainframe users to create different services on thier servers without tring to port it that platform. Also it would cutback on amount of resources needed to maintian it.

  • More RH Branding (Score:4)

    by Zalgon 26 McGee ( 101431 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @01:26PM (#716416)
    Once again, Red Hat is successfully creating brand recognition - it's not Linux that IBM is selling, it's Red Hat Linux.

    It's appropriate that this is with IBM - another company that got big on selling its name, regardless of whether they provided any compelling technical advantage over their competitors.

  • GNU is just the compiler.

    No, GNU is also the ls, the tar, the gzip, the /bin/sh... infact, most of you're operating environment.

    - Aidan

  • Gee, anybody think this IBM/Red Hat partnership mighta had something to do with last week's story, "Red Hat Abandons Sparc"?

    Nope. It's been pretty obvious for some time that the market for Sparc Linux isn't big enough to justify such a big investment from Red Hat. Even cheapbytes haven't found the market big enough to justify pressing CDs for RH/Sparc. For recent RH releases, they've been doing limited runs of CDRs rather than pressing full CDs. It's purely down to market demand, and has nothing to do with this IBM deal.

  • An important factor is that we have developers in different areas (compiler, kernel, glibc) and thus can offer porting to new platforms etc. Noone else can offer the same.

    Another is of course the level of support Red Hat and partners can provide.

  • Linux for System/390 can run native, without a hypervisor. Most of us mainframe geeks think there are serious advantages to running it under VM (the hypervisor), but if you happen to find a box by the side of the road and don't have the bucks for software, Linux will run on it.

  • Well, let's see. At Best Buy, you can get RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera, TurboLinux, and my personal favorite, Slackware. All of these come with what you need for an "e-business webserver," which is a kernel, a shell, and a webserver. Any company who needs anything else surely has high bandwidth to download whatever else they need. Such company should also have a Linux admin on hand that wouldn't need support anyway. They aren't really that hard to find.

  • Linux on a huge 512 processor with a terabyte of ram big blue iron clad warship of death taking up a room by it self... let me clean myself...

    This is great for Linux. This is the best news about Linux I have heard since I started playing around with Linux in 1996.

    With this, out the door with "Linux is a toy os." Along with "Linux is for small machines". Considering all the other UNIX and Win2k, I could see a point where you by the best hardware you can, and put linux on it, and know it's going to work. No more of this OS for Hardware stuff, Linux for everything!!

    OS's is to computer as gas for cars. Think about, when cars were first invented, you had crude oil, gasoline, diesel, steam, wood, and coal powered "cars". Of course, some rich guy had billions control over the oil refining plants, so we use gasoline now.

    The expection here is Linux is free and open. Anyone with skill can do what ever they want with it. Now, I not going to say linux will power 90% of every computer on the planet, but look like it might be the diesel of the automotive world powering the big trucks and cheap cars.

  • Last week, IBM said it will overhaul its entire line of servers and mainframes under the brand name eServer After reading /. for just a little while, and seeing tons of posts contradicting this story, I'm left wondering: When is Slashdot going to get a story right, on time? Seriously, I think that I'm about ready to switch to reading my local newspaper. At least the stories are current, and they occasionally walk them by a fact-checker. Please UP THE QUALITY...

  • IBM WILL NOT "Include Red Hat On All Mainframes" (Score:4)

    by pnatural ( 59329 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @01:30PM (#716439)
    read the frickin article. it says "will offer" not "will include".

  • "Can your Windows do that?"

    didn't think so... Add it to the list: reliability, included source, no legal hassles, no license fees, no viruses, no snoopware, no untrusted code...

    IBM is turning out to be one pretty hip company. Java, Linux, Thinkpads, Mainframe. So strange that this is the same company Steve Jobs called 'evil empire'. My how things change!

  • Try to explain that to your PHB, voila, you just answered your own question.

  • debunk a /. myth (Score:5)

    by Barbarian ( 9467 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @01:35PM (#716460)
    See this kuro5hin thread [kuro5hin.org].

    Specifically:

    A quick check on RedHats Bugzilla the day of the Slashdot post revealed something on the order of 120 bugs relating to RH7 directly. Most were low severity. Even today checking RedHat 7 with all packages only yeilds 269 bugs total (no enhancement or translation requests).
    The 2500 bugs quoted in /. was including all apps, all versions, and included feature enhancement requests etc. Basically whoever did the search on Bugzilla didn't know how the search form worked and didn't bother to figure it out. (Giving the benefit of the doubt that they were not being malicious.)

    The posting up there is relevant (if mis-sectioned maybe even belonging on scoop) because this whole episode shows that these community news/discussion sites have some pull in real world news and events. The story there did some real damage to Red Hat (at least PR wise) and it's basis was in inaccurate data that could have been easily checked (took me 2 minutes) If it had been checked at all (by the original poster or by the reviewer) it would have been prevented. It is something that must be considered when designing site review and submission issues as well as the whole culture bit. I think in this case slash should help Red Hat cover the PR damage done either via a story, interview or retraction.


    --
  • A bit needs to be said regarding this bit of "exciting" news. This article DOES NOT say that Red Hat will ship with every IBM mainframe. It says that Red Hat will work on those mainframes. Red Hat is actually far behind on this one. SuSE has run on every IBM offering including the S390 for at least 3 months. Just because Red Hat thinks this is exciting news doesnt mean it is.

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