Linux Bulks Up For High End

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June 21, 2000 (5:39 AM EDT)

By Lenny Liebmann,

Linux first infiltrated the enterprise world 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 Linux's move up the enterprise food chain is the debut earlier this year of Linux for IBM's (stock: IBM) System 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 even more cost-efficiently to meet the company's e-business requirements.

"When I learned last fall about the possibility that we'd be able to run Linux on our mainframe, my eyes lit up right away," recalled Rich Smrcina, systems software specialist at Grede Foundries, a $600 million producer of metal castings based in Milwaukee. "There's just so much that we can do with this."

Smrcina had been after IBM to bring some of its top apps, such as Domino and DB2 Universal Database to Virtual Machine, the operating system that Grede runs on its MultiPrise 2000 mainframe. But IBM never showed any indication of doing so.

"They have that stuff running on OS/390, but it just doesn't make economic sense for us to migrate to OS/390 just to get to those applications," Smrcina said.

Such a migration would mean expensive OS/390 licensing fees and force the company to repurchase OS/390 versions of many of its mainframe apps. The change in OS would have also resulted in steep retraining costs.

"It would be a financial nightmare for us," Smrcina said.

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 said. "I can download anything off the Internet, recompile it, and it works flawlessly most of the time."

Among the applications that Smrcina loaded on his mainframe soon after getting his hands on Linux for System 390 in January were Bind, a domain name server application; Samba, which lets Unix servers appear as Windows NT machines to Windows clients; and the popular Apache Web server.

Smrcina said he has good reason to run processes such as DNS and Windows NT emulation on his mainframe. First, they don't consume many processing cycles, so they ride for virtually no cost on the mainframe's spare capacity. Second, Smrcina gains all of his mainframe's reliability.

"It's the ultimate in high availability that you can achieve without actually moving to a clustered solution," he said.

Third, and perhaps most important, Smrcina can reduce the total number of servers on his network.

"Instead of having three additional machines that I have to configure and maintain, I'm just making better use of one that I already have," he says.

As he can bring more apps onto his Linux System 390 platform, Smrcina will continue to eliminate Unix, Linux and Windows NT machines. Such server consolidation does more than just reduce systems ownership costs. It also lets application processes communicate with each other over the high-speed internal networking within the mainframe, instead of over LAN connections.

"That architecture results in significantly higher performance and eliminates several potential points-of-failure," Smrcina explained.

Bill Claybrook, research director for Linux at the Aberdeen Group consultancy, echoes Smrcina's perspective on Linux for System 390.

"Server consolidation makes a lot of sense if you have extra cycles on your mainframe," Claybrook said, "and there may even be cases where it makes sense to actually buy more cycles for these applications."

Claybrook also pointed out that most enterprise data worldwide still resides on IBM mainframes.

"If you access that data from Linux applications running on that same machine, you'll get better performance and you'll have better security than you will if you're running that application on a separate server," Claybrook said.

In addition to finding a home on the mainframe, Linux has also become a popular OS solution for high-end clusters. At $25 billion defense contractor Lockheed Martin, Linux clustering technology has been used as an alternative to conventional supercomputing applications.

Jeff Layton, a senior engineer, is part of a core group that offers expertise in structural engineering, aerodynamics, and flight control to the company's various aircraft programs.

"We do a lot of very heavy computation," explained Layton, "and Linux has been extremely useful in accomplishing our goals in a fast, cost-effective way."

Among the calculations that Layton's team has to perform are a series of Navy programs that model lift, drag, and other pressures on an aircraft's structure. The Navy offered Lockheed Martin time on its own supercomputer to fulfill contract requirements, but Layton and his team were able to demonstrate that a Linux cluster was actually a better bet.

"The supercomputer time was too expensive, and they couldn't schedule us when we needed it anyway," he said. "So it was actually faster and more economical for them to just buy us the cluster."
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Lenny Liebmann is an InternetWeek contributing editor. He can be reached at ll@exit109.com.