Lou Gerstner, IBM’s chief executive officer, recently stated that his company will spend $1 billion on Linux in 2001. What’s IBM thinking? Are they doing this as charity, to give back to the community? I don’t think so. Linux just makes good business sense for IBM. As Gerstner says, “Linux can do for business applications what the Internet did for networking and communications: make computing easier and free from proprietary operating systems.” Today, you can run Linux on all IBM platforms, from a laptop to the S/390, be it the pSeries, xSeries, zSeries, or iSeries.

From Watches to Mainframes

Actually, the range of platforms is a bit wider than just the eSeries. At a recent trade show in Europe, IBM demonstrated Linux running on a wristwatch. The company doesn’t expect too many sales for these watches, but what it does expect is to use the tiniest of the Linux OS kernels to control small appliances like personal digital assistants. Linux was first developed in 1991 as a school project to create a UNIX-like operating system on the Intel platform. Because of its popularity, Linux was soon ported to other platforms. IBM has ported Linux to the zSeries (S/390) and the pSeries (RS/6000). Now, think about what I just said: Linux distributions—like those provided by Caldera Systems, Red Hat, SuSE, and TurboLinux— provide Linux as a binary that is platform-specific. For IBM to port Linux to the PowerPC chip of the pSeries, the company had to create a C compiler that would compile the open-source Linux code (which, by the way, is always on the Linux distribution CD). With that done for the PowerPC, Linux was also ready for the iSeries, which is also PowerPC-based.

Contributions

Corporations are reluctant to move to Linux because of their perception that Linux is not ready for business applications other than as an Internet server. IBM is flexing its muscles in a huge effort to change that. There are two major problems with Linux as a business OS: the lack of quality symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) to improve speed and scalability, and the lack of a journaled file system (JFS) support to improve recoverability. Among many other Linux projects, IBM has been developing Linux solutions for both SMP and JFS. Both of these projects require a huge base of code, and IBM contributed most of the code base required for JFS. (For more information on this, see IBM’s JFS white paper: www-
106. ibm.com/developerworks/ library/jfs.html.) Keep in mind that whenever IBM extends

Linux code, by nature of open-source license, this code is automatically open source. IBM is also working on a 64-bit version of Linux.

Making a Buck

Besides contributing to open-source Linux, IBM was one of the first major software vendors to create a Linux version of its product. Today, you can run DB2 UDB, WebSphere, Domino, MQSeries, VisualAge for Java, and Tivoli on Linux. And, IBM is making it quite easy for you to consider Linux. IBM’s Small Business Suite (SBS) bundles Linux versions of DB2, WebSphere, Domino, and email for $499. The retail price for these IBM products would be at least $3,600.

With all the contributed code and cut prices, how is IBM to make money off Linux? IBM does this by selling hardware to small businesses and selling DB2, Domino, and WebSphere to large businesses. Let me give you an example. Telia, the largest ISP and telecommunications company in Scandinavia, recently replaced 70 Sun servers with one S/390. The S/390 hosts more that 1,500 virtual Linux servers. With that one S/390, Telia is able to easily start a new server in less than 5 minutes whenever it gains a new client. The IBM-Telia deal is worth about $3 million. As another example, IBM signed a deal to sell 15,000 Linux computers, software, and support to Lawson, a Japanese convenience store chain. Clearly, IBM expects more deals of this nature. Keep in mind, however, that a good bit of IBM’s Linux push is simply to confuse the market in an effort to steer companies from Microsoft.

What’s in It for Us?

Someone recently stated to me that there weren’t enough business applications available with Linux to warrant the use of that operating system. But it’s not payroll, manufacturing, or sales that you’ll be running on Linux (those belong on OS/400); it’s server applications. This includes Internet servers like Domain Name System (DNS), FTP, Mail, News, Proxy, and Search Server, as well as file servers like Network File System (NFS) for Linux drives and Samba, a Linux-based Microsoft Windows Server Message Block file server. And don’t forget the Apache HTTP server.

You should consider Linux as a middleware option that communicates with your legacy applications. Load Linux in either a partition on an n-way iSeries machine or perhaps on a low-cost Intel-based box. On that Linux platform, you’ll run Linux’s integrated security features, the industry standard Apache Web server, SendMail, and either IBM’s WebSphere bundle or Apache’s open-source Tomcat product for your Web application server. You’ll be doing the right thing by having your Internet server separate from your database server, and you’ll also find it easier to procure Linux Internet experts than OS/400 Internet experts.

Consider for a moment where IBM would be today, in terms of competing with Microsoft, if it hadn't made its big push for Java. The IBM Java initiative of the late '90s threw a lot of confusion into the marketplace. Server-side Java helped sell big IBM iron. Now think about IBM's current Linux initiative. It very well may be that the billion they are to spend on Linux may be well-spent, if only to cause confusion. Personally, I am a Linux proponent—but I make this point so you can cut through the Linux "religion" and consider it only if you have a sound business use for it.

Don Denoncourt is a freelance consultant. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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