linux on System z mainframe

Report: IBM, Novell to cut SUSE Linux price on mainframe

Timothy Prickett Morgan apparently got his hands on a Novell presentation about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), its iteration of Linux that is the most popular distribution running on the mainframe on top of z/VM.

Morgan reports that IBM and Novell are close to announcing a limited time slicing and dicing of support license costs for SLES, to the tune of as much as 50%. Here are the details:

The basic license cost for SLES 11 (and any SLES release for that matter) on IBM mainframes is $11,999 per engine for a one-year contract. That gets you installation support and Web support thereafter. A standard 9×5 business hour contract with human beings providing support for a year costs $15,000 per engine, and for premium 24×7 support, it costs $18,000. With this impending promotion, basic SLES 11 support prices per mainframe engine are being cut 40 per cent to $7,199, standard support is being cut 32 per cent to $10,200, and premium support is being cut 27 per cent to $13,200.

There is also another, seemingly separate promotion (it doesn’t look like the two can be combined):

If mainframe shops want to save some additional bucks after that, they can get a three-year support contract at 35 per cent of list and a five-year contract at 47 per cent off list. This can be some pretty substantial savings. A five-year SLES 11 premium support contract runs $44,999 per engine after the discount, which works out to $9,000 per engine. This promotion will be offered on the midrange System z10 BC mainframes (that’s short for Business Class, and offering from 1 to 5 mainframe engines), not the full-blown z10 EC machines (short for Enterprise Class, and spanning from 12 to 64 engines). This promotion will run until December 31, apparently. It is not clear when it will be launched, but probably this week or next.

In the presentation, Novell claims that it has 1,300 customers running Linux on 4,000 Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFLs), which is the mainframe specialty engine built to run Linux.

Mainframe revenue down 19%

IBM announced yesterday that its System z mainframe revenue had dropped almost 20% in the first quarter compared to the first quarter of 2008. Still, during a conference call with investors yesterday, IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge claimed that IBM “continued to have strength in the high end” of its servers due to virtualization, increased efficiency, and good returns on investment.

It’s hard to find a bright spot in a 19% revenue decline. Needless to say, Loughridge tried. He said the first quarter was the fifth consecutive quarter that there was double-digit MIPS growth on the mainframe. Numbers were particularly strong on the mainframe’s specialty engines, especially the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL).

“MIPS grew 18%,” he said. “MIPS from specialty engines were up nearly 20%, driven by over 50% growth in Linux MIPS.”

The growth of Linux on the mainframe is nothing new. Last year there were estimates that more than half the MIPS that IBM sold since rolling out the System z10 mainframe have been on Linux. With a more than 50% growth in Linux MIPS since last year, those estimates are becoming more and more plausible.

Linux on z/VM a big topic at Share this week

There are more than a dozen sessions here at Share in Austin this week on running Linux on the IBM System z within z/VM, big iron’s virtualization operating system. Nationwide, John Deere, the list goes on and on.

Yesterday I sat in on one of those sessions, where a systems engineer for a large financial institution (she declined to be named due to corporate policy) echoed the sentiments that Bhanu Rai from BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina told me in an interview the day before: Executive buy-in is crucial.

“Upper management buy-in is way easier than grassroots efforts,” the engineer said, adding that you need to “realize that success won’t happen until upper management buys in.”

This company started testing Linux on System z back in 2001, so they were early adopters. They run Novell SuSE 9 on top of z/VM 5.4 on their mainframes in two data centers, the primary in Minnesota and a disaster recovery site in Arizona. One of the major applications they moved to the mainframe handles ATM transactions, and the engineer said they shrunk response time at the ATM machines from “in the seconds” down to 156 milliseconds by putting it on zLinux and tuning it there.

Among a bunch of other applications, they also run a Web application on the mainframe that records secondary mortgages, which the engineer joked was “probably very low utilization right now.” Now, she says, Linux on the mainframe is the default, and if you want to do something else, you need to make a good business case for it.

At least part of that has to do with the increasing energy costs of continuing to build out a server farm, something they can stall with zLinux.

“We even have a power committee now,” she said. “If you want to put in a new piece of hardware, you have to go to the power committee to get it approved.”

Installing a new Linux image on z/VM requires no such visit.