Linux became available for System/390 in December 1999. In the 13 years since, customers around the world have found novel ways to exploit this technology. From sites with a single IFL running just a few Linux images to sites with 100s of IFLs running 1000s of Linux images, the variety of implementations is dramatic. The early use was primarily edge of network where today usage is for mission-critical applications including SAP, IBM DB2 and Oracle DB, IBM WebSphere and Oracle Application Server, IBM Cognos, and 100s of other applications.
Users today have to decide on where to approach datacenter design as scale-out with rack-optimized servers, to scale up with large SMP servers, or a combination of the two using large SMP servers and virtualization to run many images on a single server. Jim will describe how Linux on System z, combination with z/VM, provides a robust and cost-effective Linux environment which integrates well with z/OS and provides for consolidation of distributed platforms.