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Mainframe OpenSolaris Now Available
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Oct 17, 2008 11:27 AM
from the better-late-than-never dept.
from the better-late-than-never dept.
BBCWatcher writes "When Sun released Solaris to the open source community in the form of OpenSolaris, would anyone have guessed that it would soon wind up running on IBM System z mainframes? Amazingly, that milestone has now been achieved. Sine Nomine Associates is making its first release of OpenSolaris for System z available for free and public download. Source code is also available.
OpenSolaris for System z requires a System z9 or z10 mainframe and z/VM, the hypervisor that's nearly universal to mainframe Linux installations. (The free, limited term z/VM Evaluation Edition is available for z10 machines.) Like Linux, OpenSolaris will run on reduced price IFL processors."
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OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop? 223 comments
Ahmed Kamal writes "Is Linux getting too old for you? Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer? OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS — but how do you think it will fare on a laptop? Let's take an initial look at the most recent OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release on recentish laptop hardware."
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Outstanding! (Score:4, Funny)
I have a big old z in my basement that I've been itching to upgrade!
Re:Outstanding! (Score:5, Funny)
The Z10's have a cool look to them. I think they took styling cues from Cray. Not enough blinky lights on the outside, though. Everyone knows a mainframe is supposed to have blinky lights and tape spindles whirrying about.
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Blinking lights and tape spindles (Score:2)
Everyone knows a mainframe is supposed to have blinky lights
Is an array of 1,680 by 1,050 blinky lights enough for you?
and tape spindles whirrying about.
You mean like LTO backup [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Blinking lights and tape spindles (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Blinking lights and tape spindles (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe I'm missing the joke - but, I'm calling you out.
Lest anyone misconstrue this to be a factual writeup concerning what the future (from a 1950's perspective) holds, let me bust this photo all to hell and back.
This is a picture of a US Submarine Reactor Plant Control Panel. IAUSSSQ. (I Am US Submersible Ship Qualified - A US Submariner.) This pic is simply doctored.
First: This is a picture from a museum - not a computer museum, though - probably a maritime museum. Here's another picture from the same museum.
Ref 1: http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/maneuvering.jpg [typepad.com]
Here's a sailor tending to the RPCP - Reactor Plant Control Panel.
Ref 2: http://www.guardfish.org/history/mid_years/images/RPCP3.JPG [guardfish.org]
Second: The 'teletype' is from the 80's - certainly not the 50's. Gotta love the paper in the teletype, too. It just magically appears!! Don't even mention the numerical keypad to the right of the keyboard.
Third: I'm loving that late 50's era TV mounted on the wall where console TVs were designed to be furniture that sits on the floor. And, anyone having owned one of these behemoths can attest, one didn't want to carry those TVs any further than they had to, let alone lift it up over their heads.
Forth: The wheel on the 'computer console.' Home computer.....a wheel? Huh!? Inner wheel: Xloc. Outer wheel: yloc. (LOL)
Fifth: The unfortunate little person cut and pasted into the photo. His size is all wrong for this picture.
This is nothing more than a cut & paste job.
I know. "Buzz kill". "I'm a lot of fun at parties." "I suck."
Move along.
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Well, at least I called it. I was missing the joke! LOL
Thanks for the info! :P
or is that a Z80? (Score:3, Funny)
I have some Z80 boxes in my basement...
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As I recall, Z80 systems weren't all that big.
Okay... (Score:4, Funny)
And IBM mainframe running Solaris...
Now I have seen everything. Next AIX on the Sparc.
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
*According to this guy Darl I know. But then again Darl also says that Richard Stallman is a three inches tall and lives in a cigar box under his bed with his invisible unicorn Simon.
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Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
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I have a dog and a cat.
Hmm... Armageddon is nigh! Run!
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Not surprised at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft will sell you the Microsoft Way of doing things.
Whereas IBM will say "You want a Active Directory server, a Z mainframe with RedHat, OpenSolaris and Oracle, Cisco switches, and there must be full J2EE buzzword compliance? No problem, just sign here".
Careful to make sure they will actually do the job though, and not outsource it to a bunch of fresh PHP coders in India
This is EPIC because: (Score:2)
IBM has a strangle-hold on the high-margin mainframe world. This is causing issues in the Big Blue God Pod right now, be certain.
Re:This is EPIC because: (Score:5, Insightful)
How so? If customers have a need for Solaris, would IBM rather see them go buy some Sparc gear from Sun, or a few extra processors for their System z complex?
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Re:This is EPIC because: (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually they are jumping for joy.
Now if a Solaris shop needs some big Iron IBM can walk right in and sell a Z to them.
If an IBM shop wants Solaris then IBM can say hey no need to by Sun hardware just put in on your Z.
This is a happy day in Armonk.
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All spelling and grammar errors are intentional. Grammar Nazis' need entertainment.
That should be "grammatical" and "Nazis" (no apostrophe).
Thank you for the entertainment.
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Bingo.
This is a way to migrate away from Z's - not to them.
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I'm glad someone gets it. Cheap beige boxes can't be all things to all people.
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Exactly. IBM mainframes just run and run. You can swap out memory and CPUs without taking the system down. You measure uptimes by the year not by the hour or day.
People don't buy a mainframe because they are stupid they do it because they have looked at the options and this is the best solution for their problem.
Of of the errors that IBM made was when they thought that the PC was an experiment. If they had only known that it would be a standard I would bet money that it would have used the 360 ISA and not t
Windows for System z: Coming 1Q2009 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Windows on the mainframe (Score:4, Funny)
The killer app will be the Big Blue Screen of Death.
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Enough of the Slashdot Luddites (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time a mainframe story comes up on Slashdot we seem to get the skeptics who point out that an X86 processor core can add or multiply two numbers (stored in registers anyway) about as fast as a single System z10 core, at least as long as they're integers. (z10s have hardware decimal floating point.) Based on this brilliant SPECint-y observation, combined with the fact that a System z10 EC Linux processor has an advertised one-time charge of $125K, these "experts" thus conclude that no one could possibly buy a mainframe because it's just so darn expensive. (Note that's one-time charge, folks: if you do a hardware model upgrade typical IBM practice is to charge you something for the frame swap but not to charge you again for turning on the processors.) Of course, in the same discussion people don't bother to explain why the same argument also holds for SPARC CPUs. Heck, why not run business applications on Sony Playstation 3s or ARMs? They're even "cheaper."
May I humbly point out that IBM just posted (yesterday) another record quarter for mainframe sales. Revenues were up 25 percent, with double digit growth in every region of the world. Because prices are higher? No, the opposite: shipped capacity was up 49 percent; specialty capacity (including Linux processors) was up 120 percent. And IBM has been posting quarters like this for years now. This mainframe stuff is wildly successful and gaining marketshare.
Why? Because, with all due respect, you're an idiot if you stop your careful business case analysis at the first sentence above. Unless you're running SETI@Home, rendering the next Pixar movie, or simulating nuclear explosions, business applications across many users just don't run that way. Companies (particularly CFOs) and big data center managers are not (generally) idiots. They buy this stuff because it works wonderfully and because it's cost-effective, taking all costs into consideration. Think $125K (once) is a lot of money? What's your salary, dude? Who are the richest single human beings in the software industry, and did they get that way because software is free? And how much did it cost the London Stock Exchange when they couldn't trade? Are you the guy who wants to explain why you have to build another $20M data center because you can't power or cool yet another X86 chip? In the real world, there are single companies running hundreds of these mainframe CPUs. And they run at 80%+ busy 24 hours a day, by the way.
Honestly, there are way too many Slashdotters who are much more the stubborn non-thinkers that they probably accused mainframe-skilled people of being a few years ago. It's a different world: grow up. The boring but wonderful truth is that -- surprise! -- different servers are good at different things! Intel/AMD X86 servers are useful in certain ways, and so are System z servers. Even in the same data center. Wow, what a concept!
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I wish Unisys had the foresight of IBM when it comes to running POSIX software on their mainframes. Or maybe they do and I just don't know about it. They are seemingly a stealth company, after all. But they still manage to sell some very good mainframe server hardware (Clearpath Dorado and Libra servers running OS2200 and MCP respectively), and both of those OSes run fairly old software as well (the 2200 stuff requires a recompile as of some point in the 1970's when the ABS format changed, but I'm not as
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Decent analysis, apart from this one tiny flaw. SPARCs have traditionally competed in areas where there is a lot of crossover. Indeed, a lot of SPARC's business post-2000 has been eaten for breakfast by x86, and x86 running on Linux. This is why Sun has suffered more than most at the hands of x86 and Linux. SPARC simply cannot keep up with x86 for performance, and although PowerPCs and other pro
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Trust me they will not get it.
Mainframes are dull. They just work. Most people on slashdot have only used PCs. They can not imagine a computer that you never have to shut down. That you can upgrade CPUs and RAM with out any downtime.
All they know is that it will not transcode any faster than their X86 and costs as much as a house.
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And if you are running them, you still might want IBM hardware:
"Hello IBM? I need a Cell based cluster." or if you need it really cheap and don't need a HUGE amount of processing power.
"Hello Terrasoft? I need a 8-Node PS3 cluster."
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Solaris only works on Apple Mac Supercomputeres.
No, that'll only be true after Apple buys Sun, which by my calculations would require approximately 15 minutes of iPod sales revenue.
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Seriously, I've run Suse 10 on an IFL engine. It's so slow, I don't know how anyone could run anything serious on it.
That's why their called 'z's zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz....
No, seriously, mainframes aren't about performance. They're about stability. Think about 16-core server with 40 GB of RAM running Solaris, AIX or Linux as a Ferrari Testerosa, while the Z10 is more like Abrams M1A1. Not as fast the Testerosa, but pretty quick for something that weights over 60 metric tons....
Re:IFL? Haha, what a joke. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That having been said, the next logical step would be to compare the amount of compensation that mainframe operators are getting versus that of other server operators.
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Got any data to back this up? Usually I find people who say such things have a distorted view of reality. Not saying that you do, but I hear people say that and almost none of them have real evidence with which to backup their statement.
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From what I've seen, weekly IPLs seems to be close to standard practice within the mainframe world. With a reboot frequency like that you're not going to even see most stability issues.
Has it even become possible to switch to and from daylight savings yet without rebooting the mainframe?
almost none of them have real evidence with which to backup their statement.
Yes, well, rather like mainframe benchmarks, eh?
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I doubt there's a reason for the IPLs (reboots). If your mainframe operators are doing it, they're probably just doing it because (seriously) somebody had a memory leak 30 years ago and that was how they "fixed" it. And nobody bothered to update the procedures manual. Nor did anybody ask them, "Hey, can we improve the SLA (Service Level Agreement) here?" "Sure boss, I'll just stop IPLing. Let's try skipping the next one." That's usually how that conversation goes, seriously.
In fact, if you've got a Couplin
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If a mainframe doesn't have damned near 100% uptime then someone needs to be fired. Those things just don't break. Hell, they phone the service engineer for you *before* they break and you suddenly get the IBM guy turn up on the doorstep with a replacement CPU (which is hotswapped.. no downtime).
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Ahh. Well then that is your problem. That shouldn't happen at all. Also when you talk about through put you should look at strengths of the two systems.
If you are doing anything with a lot of floating point. The Zmachine will lose to Intel every time. If you want to do that then get one of the Big Power boxes, a bunch of X86, or one of the big Itantium boxes with a lot of cores.
If you are doing millions of database transactions and you want to make sure that it NEVER goes down. Get a Zmachine with an applic
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If this is true then your mainframe guys need to be fired ASAP.
It used to be a standing joke that nobody got fired for buying IBM but they did if it EVER went down unplanned.
Also the throughput on a mainframe is truly astounding. I hate to think just how bad the software must be for a mainframe to be considered slow!
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From what I've seen in a SAN in a mixed environment, it certainly isn't the mainframe that's exposing the FC bottlenecks. It's a long time ago that the mainframe had any special hardware.
Frankly, I've heard so many sales pitches for so long that there's only one thing that matters. Publish the benchmarks or it's just hot air.
In the case of mainframes I haven't seen any serious benchmarks for more than a decade. I expect performance to be entirely predictable from that point only.
You Recompile Anyway (Score:2)
SPARC and X86 are recompiles from each other already, never mind 32-bit v. 64-bit. z/Architecture is now another choice. Which is why OpenSolaris for System z will be of primary interest to companies that have their own in-house applications available to recompile. (Vendor applications are another question, at least initially.)
Yes, you could move from Solaris to Linux, and many people do. Some people don't want to. This is another choice. You can run multiple operating systems (including Linux) concurrentl
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Sine Nomine isn't a terrible consulting company, either.
I worked for a company that used their services to help us design and implement a fairly major project. They had one guy come to us onsite and another guy help him out with the planning. Their solution wasn't the flashiest. It wasn't the newest tech. It probably wasn't the absolute fastest, and certainly wasn't the most vertically scalable. It scaled really well horizontally, though, and was really reliable.
Despite a higher hourly rate and higher trave
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This is the problem I have had with Sun, and Sun consultants trying to talk to me, for the past ten years. You have refuted nothing of what was written. The answer is yes, you will need to recompile, and support for the compil
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