John <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> said:
>On the old ibm mainframes? That would be interesting... I always 
>wondered how linux would run on one of those things. What do they do,
>run linux as a guest OS under VM? 
>
I think the folk at IBM disagree with 'old', and they're right of course:
J2EE, Web applications is nothing new for people who have played with
stuff like CICS, LU6.2, 3270 screens, etcetera. So mainframes are
excellent workhorses for these kinds of apps. And it seems they're on
a revival tour, because with Linux running on it it becomes extremely
attractive for companies to consolidate data into DB2 on the mainframe and
provide all the, err, 'modern' services with Linux, Apache, etcetera. All
on the same high-availability box. Before 9/11, we almost bought one
ourselves ;-)

Linux has been ported to 'bare metal', but the usual deployment is on top
of VM. IBM has started to rent out Linux boxes on mainframes as part of
their 'on-demand' initiative, and we think that it'd be nice to stash our
stuff there and never ever have to worry again about CPU/Memory upgrades,
crashed harddisks, broken powersupplies, backups, and whatnot.

SuSE Linux for zSeries is quite complete, save a couple of apps we could
simply copy everything over to it; the biggest issue is our Smalltalk
application server environment, which currently runs on VisualWorks, but
is going to be moved over to Squeak next year. 


-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.tric.nl     <cg at tric.nl>
tric, the new way           helpdesk/ticketing software, VoIP/CTI, 
                            web applications, custom development