Linux on System z: Red Hat—Hang ‘em Higher
by David Boyes, Ph.D.
August 1, 2009
** Read this article online at http://www.mainframezone.com/operating-systems/linux-on-system-z-red-hathang-em-higher
With the fuss about Oracle and Sun mostly settling into a “wait and see” mode (albeit one that seems to be driving more interest in OpenSolaris for System z), I think it’s time to spend a little time on the System z Linux distributors to see what they’ve been up to lately. As the challenger to the historically dominant Novell SUSE on the System z platform, they often have an uphill battle to fight when discussing the mainframe and how it fits into their overall strategy. In recent months, new staff and new investments appear to be part of a larger effort to understand the large systems market and to fix the view that Red Hat has a less than serious commitment to the mainframe.
Red Hat had a slow start in the mainframe world, entering the market well over 10 months after SUSE with a commercial distribution. Red Hat had some early difficulties with field support, and with the ability to develop and maintain hardware that wasn’t Intel-based. On the positive side, investments both in training and funding from IBM and others appear to have helped Red Hat provide more internal education to address the position of the mainframe in large organizations and that Intel systems aren’t always the best answer. The release engineering process for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 had significantly fewer problems than previous releases, and Red Hat is making progress getting more applications day-zero certified on newer RHEL releases. Red Hat also has invested in program managers that appear to “get it” on mainframe topics, a refreshing change for a company that historically hasn’t understood the mindset.
The diversity of packages in RHEL 5 also is encouraging. We’re starting to see more focus on enterprise infrastructure tools such as modern versions of Nagios and more intelligent compile options for common packages such as OpenSSL to enable and exploit some of the custom hardware capabilities of the System z, such as the hardware cryptographic processors when present. I give Red Hat significantly higher marks for trying to position the mainframe in a larger strategy, one they’ve taken care in recent months to position as a cross-platform, cross-industry solution, especially for customers that have enterprise support contracts.
Of course, it can’t be all roses and beer. Field deployment is still weaker than Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)—if nothing else still due to fewer deployments making the expertise available less common—and one still gets puzzled noises from their support people when the System z platform is mentioned. I’d like to see more investment in training for their phone staff and professional services. There are still gaps in support for applications such as the OpenJDK Java implementation and JBoss on z. While this is understandable (they can’t do everything), it’s still confusing and tends to make me ask whether they’re really in this game for the long haul.
In any case, the RHEL 5 release bears a second look, as does the introduction of the Fedora “experimental” release for z. I’ve seen a couple of places where Fedora is an interesting option even given its desktop orientation.
Next issue, we’ll look at the latest from Novell: SLES 11. It has some neat, new goodies and a few questionable “features” and packaging options.
