* Share user group get ready for annual get-together in Florida
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Share, the independent IBM user group, holds its winter get-together in Tampa, Fla., this week. The event has been held for more than half a century and is aimed at giving IBM customers access to Big Blue engineers, partners, as well as fellow IBM customers to get an in-depth look at the technology that IBM is offering and how it can fit into their data centers.
This year’s event, which runs Sunday through Friday at the Tampa Convention Center, is offering more than 800 sessions and is focusing on areas such as software-oriented architecture and business resilience. Attendees also will get a first look at the new z/VM operating system for IBM’s System z mainframes.
The new version, z/VM 5.3, won’t ship until June, but IBM released information about the updates last week. The big news is that z/VM, which is basically the underlying layer that enables virtual machines to run on the mainframe and supports other mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, z/VSE and z/TPF, is getting a scalability boost.
While the old version of z/VM scaled across 24 processor units, the new version scales across 32. It also supports more memory – 128GB – and offers better memory management, specifically for Linux environments.
“There will be lots of nitty gritty details about the new of z/VM [at Share],” says Share President Martin Timmerman. “Linux on the mainframe is a very viable option, especially for organizations that want to run lots and lots of Linux images. … It’s becoming more real and we’re getting more customer success stories about using Linux in that environment.”
Executives from Nationwide, for example, will be talking about their experience running Linux on the mainframe at Share this week. Guru Vasudeva, associate vice president and chief architect at Nationwide, a $21 billion insurance and financial services company, also talked about using Linux on the mainframe at LinuxWorld last August. Check out a video of his LinuxWorld keynote here.
Adding fuel to the Linux on the mainframe fire: Forrester last month released a report talking about how Linux and virtualization are giving the mainframe a “new lease on life.”
While the trend during the last few years was to distribute enterprise workloads across multiple Linux or Unix systems, some customers now are starting to look at consolidating those highly distributed environments onto the mainframe, Forrester vice president Brad Day writes in the report.
“Often, these customers have already recognized the inefficiencies — in terms of cost, human resources, and capacity utilization — of their distributed Linux or Unix computing infrastructure,” he says. “The potential cost savings, operations staffing productivity gains, and improved utilization rates that can result from a project to centralize Linux/Unix workloads onto a System z footprint can be very appealing to firms when they have existing mainframe infrastructure that can support it.”
You can buy the full report here.
I’m curious how many enterprises out there are moving mission critical applications to Linux on the mainframe. Let me know.
