Yesterday, IBM took a bite out of Sun by replacing Scandinavia's biggest telecomm and ISP Telia's Sun Web-hosting servers with a single IBM mainframe S/390 G6 enterprise unit running SuSE Linux under the hood. Today, Big Blue is announcing that it's bringing both its DB2 DBMS Enterprise Edition and Web application server software, WebSphere Advanced Edition, to mainframe Linux.
Scott Handy, IBM director of Linux Solutions Marketing, explains, "IBM has moved into Linux because of customer demand." He adds that "traditionally, ISPs have used racks of servers," like those from Sun, and "by addressing this with Linux Virtual Machines on a IBM mainframe, IBM will impact Sun."
By bringing both DB2 and WebSphere to mainframe Linux, Handy points out that this brings e-commerce and e-business power to the mainframe. Specifically, he notes that on the extremely stable underpinning of the Virtual Machine operating system, those Linux driven applications enable developers to build complete soup-to-nuts e-solutions on a single machine. With one mainframe, a customer could run thousands of Virtual Linux servers that use WebSphere to design their Web interfaces, while using DB2 and IBM's new IMS Connect to pull data directly out of DB2 databases, mainframe commercial-transaction systems, and older databases.
