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IBM: Linux can take on the world
By Stephen Shankland, News.com
January 31, 2002 8:00 AM PT
URL:
NEW YORK--IBM, having embraced Linux, now is on a mission to
convince others that the operating system is worthy of real-world
use.
To further its cause, IBM put on display at the LinuxWorld
Conference and Expo here four big-name Linux customers--clothing
retailer L.L. Bean, digital animation studio Pixar, department
store chain Boscov's and financial services giant Salomon Smith
Barney.
"Linux readiness is far ahead of the world's perception of it,"
said Steve Solazzo, vice president of Linux operations at IBM.
Harry Roberts, Boscov's chief information officer and a Linux
convert, backed up that view.
"Linux was scary. We're old mainframe guys," Roberts said.
But the open-source operating system worked well, and Boscov's has
been moving more and more functions to its mainframes, which can
be "partitioned" to act like numerous independent servers
simultaneously.
Solazzo acknowledges that Big Blue has a selfish interest in
promoting the operating system it has adopted so enthusiastically.
IBM likes Linux because it runs on numerous different types of
computer systems, including IBM's four server lines, whose
differences can be diminished by running the same operating system
atop them.
It is a problem not faced by rival Sun Microsystems, which has
only one chip line, UltraSparc, and one operating system, Solaris.
IBM committed itself to spending $1 billion on Linux in 2001, and
said Wednesday that it recouped almost all of that investment the
same year.
Solazzo said Big Blue sold hundreds of millions of dollars of
Linux-ready products during the year both in its xSeries Intel
server line and in its zSeries mainframe line. He predicted that
the iSeries special-purpose server line for smaller businesses
will see a similar surge in interest this year as happened on the
mainframe in 2001.
Three of the four customers who spoke Wednesday to IBM business
partners at the Linux show used Linux on their mainframes, which
are powerful but expensive servers once expected to be rendered
extinct by Intel and Unix servers. But mainframe usage is
increasing, and IBM server chief Bill Zeitler said "almost all" of
the mainframe processing capacity IBM sold in the fourth quarter
of 2001 was for Linux.
Pixar was the lone company of the four that didn't have a
mainframe story to tell. Instead, it was advocating Linux on the
workstations its teams of animators use to create their digital
characters and complex effects such as animated facial features.
Pixar so far has installed about 175 of a planned 400 Intel-based
IBM IntelliStation workstations running Linux, said Darwyn
Peachey, Pixar's vice president of technology.
"By the end of March, we'll have essentially phased out our SGI
(workstations) and replaced them with IntelliStations," Peachey
said.
Hewlett-Packard, which won a similar deal at DreamWorks SKG, had
also bid for the Pixar account, a source familiar with the matter
said.
L.L. Bean began sampling Linux in April 2001, said senior systems
engineer Patrick Carroll, who bought a copy of SuSE Linux at Best
Buy for $60 and applied some mainframe updates from IBM to get it
working for testing purposes.
"Things ran so well, we decided we needed to port something over
there," he said. The company began with an overtaxed e-mail system
that sent messages to customers about their orders.
"The trial started on a Monday, it went into production on
Thursday afternoon, and it has not failed since," Carroll said.
The older Sun system could send five messages per second, but the
mainframe sends 30 per second, he said.
L.L. Bean will move many other jobs to Linux mainframe partitions
in the future, he said, including the WebSphere application
server, the WebSphere commerce suite and a communication channel
to the DB2 database.
_
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