A collection of enthusiasts simply wanted to see if it could be done. Boas Betzler, leader of the mainframe Linux project at Big Blue, used a famous mountaineering line to describe the impetus at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here. But now, the formerly unofficial project has grown to be more than just a curiosity. The reason to use Linux on a mainframe is to make processes ordinarily on outside servers run faster and be more secure, Wladawsky-Berger said. This is not something I envisioned back when I started.
Mainframes are powerful servers that predate most computing systems available today.
Unlike most of today's computers, mainframes use a powerful separate system to handle communications between the software and the storage disks, enabling very high-speed transactions such as recording a sale in a database. While many predicted the demise of the mainframe because of the expense of buying and maintaining them, their reliability and transactional speed has made them popular for some types of Web sites such as online trading companies that can't afford not to stay up and running. IBM believes Linux is a key part of the software needed to run corporate Internet sites. Sun Microsystems, however, isn't such a big fan and instead is pouring its energy into improving its Solaris operating system. Chief operating officer Ed Zander disparaged IBM's approach two weeks ago during a conference call.