will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

[Jim Herrmann]

Spoken like a *nix hacker.  ;-)  No, Sprint is still, and will be for a very long
time, a mainframe shop.  They have plenty of *nix, as well, but the corporate
data lives in a DB2 for OS/390 data base.  Sprint PCS is a big AIX user.  They
have a DB2/AIX/SP box(es) that has one table that is over 6 Terabytes living
across 64 nodes (or something like that), but the long distance company runs on
mainframe DB2.  But even at that, they also have some mainframe DB2.  They are
one of the largest participants in the Heart of America DB2 User Group (of which
I am an officer), which has traditionally been a mostly mainframe group, but is
now expanding to include "baby" DB2, which is not really a baby anymore, see
reference to the Sprint PCS table above.

It was not an exageration when I said that 70% of the worlds data resides on IBM
mainframes.   Not necessarily in all in DB2, but also including IMS and VSAM.
IMS fast path is still the very fastest data base in the world, and is used by
companies that need extremely high transaction volume.  Were talking tens of
thousands of transactions per second.  Mainframes are used by companies that need
high availability also.  Unix variants are pretty reliable, but not compared to
the mainframe.  OS/390 has something like an average 99.9999% uptime.  Also,
multi terabyte DASD farms are quite commonplace in even small shops.  It's
unbeaten for availability, security, reliability, recoverability, and
scalability.  All things that are very important to large IT shops.  The
mainframe is NOT dead.  It's merely been reinvented as a REALLY big server.  :-)

I really didn't want to get into a whole mainframe vs. unix discussion.  We're on
the same side.  :-)  Like Jeff said earlier, there's a place for each.  I'm here
to talk about Linux, and Linux on the mainframe is, without a doubt, going to be
a very significant contributor to acceptance of Linux into Corporate America.  I
want to get ahead of this trend, so I am pursuing Linux on my own time at home,
and I love it.  It's a great OS, and there seems to be a really great community
that has evolved around the whole open source concept.  That's what this is all
about.

Sorry for my rants.  I'll be quiet now.

Peace,
Jim

Mike Coleman wrote:

> Jim Herrmann <b3d at kc.rr.com> writes:
> > Anil seemed to be writing from somewhere deep in the bowels of Sprint,
> > certainly a large mainframe shop.
>
> I wonder if they still are.  I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if they had a
> few, but I bet most of the occupants of the glass rooms are Unix boxes of
> various flavors (and probably lots of Windows servers as well).