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Introducing the 6th IBM Mainframe Operating System: Solaris?
The Associated Press reports on IBM and Sun's new collaboration announcement concerning the Solaris operating system. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz called this announcement "a tectonic shift in the market landscape."
As most of you know, the IBM mainframe currently has five widely deployed and supported operating systems available: z/OS, z/VSE, z/TPF, z/VM, and Linux on z. A single machine can run all five, in any combination, in multiple secure instances dynamically responding to business demands, at the same time with the highest service qualities.
Next up it appears: Solaris on System z. In fact, Sine Nomine Associates already began work over one year ago to bring Solaris to the IBM mainframe, so maybe OS #6 is a lot closer to delivery than anybody knew. It took a little more than one year to bring Linux to the mainframe, for comparison.
Solaris is particularly popular among telecommunications companies who have racks and racks of smaller servers, typically running C and C++ code, to perform tasks such as call accounting. There's a lot of Web hosting on Solaris. Solaris is Fujitsu's preferred UNIXTM solution, and Fujitsu is one of the largest technology service companies in Japan. I could go on, but the introduction of Solaris on System z would help many customers around the world lower their costs of computing (including power, cooling, and data center space), scale up in addition to scaling out, improve the quality of their service delivery, and take advantage of increased choice and flexibility offered with all the applications and middleware available for the other 5 operating systems via in-memory, secure, high performance connections.
Solaris on System z would become in fact the third UNIX or UNIX-like operating system for the mainframe. Linux is "UNIX-like" of course, and z/OS is UNIX. (z/OS contains z/OS UNIX System Services, a complete, certified implementation of UNIX.) [Update: One develops z/TPF applications nowadays using Linux (e.g. gcc), and z/TPF is acquiring lots of in-built software familiar to UNIX users, so arguably z/TPF is at least trending toward acquiring UNIX-like characteristics.]
Now that Solaris on System z looks like a not-too-distant capability, do you think you'll be trying it?
| by Timothy Sipples | August 16, 2007 in Future Permalink |
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Comments
What about one of the BSD (Free, Net, Open)? Heck, if it can be done with Linux...
How about the ultimate irony - eCS ported to System z...
Posted by: Ray Mullins | Aug 16, 2007 11:16:00 PM
Solaris does have substantial roots in BSD, actually.
Posted by: Timothy | Aug 17, 2007 12:31:28 AM
Yes, if it's a reality, we'll try it. What kind of engine do you need? An IFL? zAAP?
Posted by: | Aug 23, 2007 8:57:35 AM
it is gooooooooooooooooooood
Posted by: harshil | Feb 21, 2008 12:24:57 AM
If you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it’s not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community. Maybe it will be someday, as some Sun executives have claimed, but it’s definitely not a priority by Sun; if it was, it would have been done before now.
Posted by: 4gb usb drive | Dec 16, 2009 12:25:22 AM
Hi,
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Posted by: bharath | Nov 29, 2010 5:00:27 AM
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