Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @04:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the bringing-the-mainframe-into-the-21st-century dept.

IBM Introduces Two Open-Source-Only Mainframes

IBM is introducing two mainframe servers that run only on the open-source Linux operating system.

The new hardware will make it easier to run technology like the MongoDB database and the open-source software Spark. Presently more than a third of IBM's mainframe clients are running the Linux operating system. IBM also said it will release mainframe code to the public and join a new cohort of less than a dozen academic, government and corporate entities in what's called the Open Mainframe Project, an open source endeavor devoted to helping companies using mainframe computers.

IBM is sweetening the pot by contributing 250,000 lines of mainframe code to the Linux community, hoping to attract a new generation of developers to their platform. To help coax new users, IBM will be offering free access to the LinuxOne cloud, a mainframe simulation tool it developed for creating, testing and piloting Linux mainframe applications.

Some of the specs for the machines can be found in this article from Reuters, including a partnership with Canonical Ltd. to distribute Ubuntu on the LinuxONE and zSeries systems.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:00PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:00PM (#224483)

    Are they charging for "MIPS" for using your own processors or requiring you to buy their IFL processors? There are very good reasons why many people don't use mainframes any more. Both up-front costs and operating costs are utterly ridiculous. They are very fault tolerant, but almost all business are way better off just getting three or more of whatever hardware you're running and using and handling it that way. Running Linux instead of zOS goes a long way towards making them usable though.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:31PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:31PM (#224498)

    I don't think pricing has been announced, but no one who isn't already a mainframe shop would buy one of these. Name any new company since Amazon or Google that has adopted a mainframe platform. There aren't any that I know of. New companies use redundant commodity hardware that's cheaper and easier to deal with. Amazon has made a business out of supplying computing power like this.

    But mainframe shops will. Most true-blue IBM shops are using their mainframe as a data warehouse and transaction processing back-end, and writing a lot of stuff in J2EE. They'll eat these machines up if they're cheaper and faster than running Websphere on a z/OS instance. Anyone who already has IBM hardware will love this to move processing off of their mainframe. It could save them a lot of money.

    My guess is IBM is doing a controlled burn. They know their big clients are using J2EE on Intel commodity hardware, and don't want them to abandon the mainframe, so they're selling them what amounts to an Amazon cloud in a box.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:10PM

      by frojack (1554) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:10PM (#224553) Journal

      The new mainframe is explained (somewhat) here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/13/the-new-ibm-z13-is-not-your-fathers-mainframe/ [techcrunch.com] and more detailed specs here: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z13_features.html [ibm.com]

      Its not what you think it is. It is a massively parallel processor platform with a chipset of their own design, and huge numbers of cores per processor (up to 141 cores per processor, but each machine can have many processors of different types).

      And its pretty small compared to the mainframes of yesteryear. Its heavy in Cryptographic processing at every step in the transaction process, on each core in the machine.

      It is designed for a different work load than Google's concept of massively parallel cheap computers.

      Contrary to the summary, these things are not Linux only. There are a bunch of different OS's that it can run, including Windows Server 2008 and 2012, and AIX.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:19AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:19AM (#224696)

        Good stuff from frojack. Continue to mod him up.

        these things are not Linux-only

        It appears that patella.whack is trying to steal away my Linux Fanboy crown.

        a chipset of their own design

        ...but I see nothing that says the processors have an architecture that is not x86-compatible.
        ...though, if they were to stop funneling bucks to an outside silicon vendor|"intellectual property" gatekeeper, that could do good things for IBM's bottom line.

        I had heard rumors that Visduh10 would drop support for ARM(v7).
        While M$ appears to be distancing itself from its ARM-using Surface line, "10" still appears to support ARM.
        So, even if IBM had gone with ARM architecture for this, Windoze wouldn't be aced-out.
        Supported architectures, Windows NT [wikipedia.org]

        ...and for comparison: Supported architectures, GCC [gnu.org]
        The line above 3.18 in the ToC is the nugget.

        There are a bunch of different OS's that it can run

        z13 Features (your 2nd link)[1] [ibm.com]

        Through its hybrid computing capability, IBM z Systems with IBM z BladeCenter® Extension (zBX) also supports IBM® AIX® on Power, Microsoft Windows® and Linux® on System x®

        Now, IBM -has- been playing down the Windoze angle for quite some time.

        [1] IBM needs to use HTML accessibility features in their pages to make them more useful.

        -- gewg_