z/Linux or Linux on the Mainframe Eric K. Dickinson Presenter
Agenda Biography Disclaimer The Mainframe Must Die! zLinux
What Qualifies Me to Present? Been a nerd since 1979 Fixed computers and radars in the army AT&T Computer Systems System 5v Became Richard Stallman fan 1989 Became Patrick Volkerding fan in 1993 Installed first z/Linux 2007 Became Government production 2009
Presentation Not sponsored by the Government Not connected with the Government Not endorsed by the Government This is purely presented as a hobbyist.
The Mainframe Must Die! Perceptions of the Mainframe Words Hurt Expensive Huge Dinosaur zSeries Servers Enterprise Scalable Velociraptor
zSeries Server Vocabulary LPAR FICON and FCP DASD Cryptography Accelerator z/VM 64bit Operation IFL Books
LPAR Hypervisor Virtualized Systems Physically Unconnected Hipersockets 60 LPARS Memory Isolation Variable Workload
FICON and FCP Both 4-8G 1600 MBps Fiber Connectivity Multiple Concurrent Additional CRC Same Cables as FCP Fiber Channel Protocol Switched Fabric SCSI
DASD zLinux uses Direct Access Storage Device ● CKD Count Key Data ● FBA Fixed Block Architecture FCP ● SAN ● NAS ● SCSI
Cryptography Accelerator Off-loads Cryptography Processing 128 bit AES DES SHA Independent Random Number Generator
z/VM Hypervisor Monitoring Tunable Isolated Memory Hipersockets
64bit Operation 31 bits? 64 bits?
IFL Integrated Facility for Linux Tuned to Only Linux Processor Instructions 256 Theoretical guests.
Books Processors and Memory are in “Books” Hot Swappable Add Processors Hot Add Memory Hot
z/Linux Is It Really Linux? Distributions Configurations Strengths Weaknesses Well Suited For Who uses it? How Do I do it?
Is It Really Linux Not Emulated Complete Native Operating System Formally Released 2000 Linas Vepstas Big-Foot, Think Blue Open Source Gartner Reports the Future of Government and Big Business Makes IBM OSS friendly
Distributions Red Hat RHEL6 Novell SuSE SLES 11 Debian Gentoo Slackware CentOS Fedora Etc
Configurations Just Like Real Linux Multiple Network Interfaces Logical Volume Management (Grow on the Fly!) RPM, APT-GET, YUM, YAST and Source LAMP Oracle, DB2, MySQL PHP, Perl, JBoss, Java, Ruby (This list goes on)
Strengths Costs (Most Important) Enterprise Class High Availability Standard Development High I/O Industry Direction Security Support Ubiquity
Weaknesses Processor Intensive Package Availability z/VM Knowledge
Well Suited LAMP Applications CMS (Content Management System) ● Wiki (Mediawiki, Twiki, Swiki…..) ● Blogs (WordPress…..) ● CMS (Drupal, Openpublic, Joomla, OpenPublish….) Databases MySQL, Oracle, DB2, Postgress …… Sendmail, Postfix…. Security Scanning (Nessus, Satan, Sara… Firewall – IPTables So Many Others
Who Uses z/Linux? CMS Center for Medicade/Medicare Services NIH National Institutes of Health SSA Social Security Administration State Farm Many others
How Do I Do it? There is plenty of help on the internet. Detailed instructions may be found Support may be found at
Greening the Data Center No Additional Power No Additional Cooling No Additional Floor Space Use Resources More Efficiently
Questions?