Mainframe OpenSolaris Now Available

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."

Not surprised at all

[TheLink]

The way I see it, IBM is in the business of providing so much choice to customers that they need expensive IBM consultants to help them decide.

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 ;).

Re:This is EPIC because:

[Amarok.Org]

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?

Re:This is EPIC because:

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:IFL? Haha, what a joke.

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

[bws111]

Your laptop can meet or exceed the IO performance? How about the memory access performance? Your laptop has MTBF measured in decades? Or by 'every measurable way' do you mean simple CP performance? These machines are not about CP performance.

Re:IFL? Haha, what a joke.

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Stability and I/O (particularly disc) bandwidth. Very important.

Re:IFL? Haha, what a joke.

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Enough of the Slashdot Luddites

[BBCWatcher]

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!

Re:Enough of the Slashdot Luddites

[TheRaven64]

Even discounting all of the good points you've made, System/Z has one other advantage. It's a direct descendant of System/360 and still runs software written in 1960 without a recompile. The same mainframe can now also run virtual Linux and Solaris instances. Sure, you could run something like Hercules on your x86 machine, but who would support it, and would you trust it on that bit of critical software that has been supporting your business for almost fifty years?

Re:ok, and where's an app that runs on it???

[segedunum]

Solaris is nicer than Linux in a lot of ways. dtrace for example. Better performance under high loads. Better throughput. Linux was designed for consumer level x86 hardware and it's improved a lot since then (and will continue to do so) but Solaris kicks its ass on beefed up hardware.

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 compiler tools and runtime environment, as well as the applications, will need to be good enough otherwise this doesn't mean all that much. Applications are everything, which is where OpenSolaris is playing major catch-up.

People are not going to run Solaris on a zSeries for Dtrace or even ZFS, no matter how much people start jumping up and down and now matter how much Sun people look at you in disbelief that you might have other priorities. Your comment smacksof everything that is wrong with Sun for the best decade - the disbelief that you could run anything on a tin-pot consumer level OS and kernel like Linux, disbelief that anyone would not run a real Unix like Solaris or real hardware like SPARC and the mythical notion that although Linux might have claimed this area Solaris runs better on some undefined beefed up hardware.

• Linux runs on everything from consumer level hardware like x86 (the same hardware that has ate SPARC's breakfast for about eight years incidentally) right up to the very same mainframe hardware that Solaris has only now been ported to.
• Better under high loads and better throughput? Unsubstantiated and backed up with nothing, and it's the same old story Sun's consultants have been talking to a brick wall about since the turn of the century.

I would laugh if it wasn't so sad. The truth is, Sun has everything it needs to make as much money as it wants if it would only ditch this cultural nonsense about Solaris and SPARC that pervades it.