z/Linux
or
Linux on the Mainframe
Eric K. Dickinson
Presenter
Agenda
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Biography
Disclaimer
The Mainframe Must Die!
zLinux
What Qualifies Me to Present?
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Been a nerd since 1979
Fixed computers and radars in the army
AT&T Computer Systems System 5v4 1986
Became Richard Stallman fan 1989
Became Patrick Volkerding fan in 1993
Installed first z/Linux 2007
Became Government production 2009
Presentation
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Not sponsored by the Government
Not connected with the Government
Not endorsed by the Government
This is purely presented as a hobbyist.
The Mainframe Must Die!
• Perceptions of the Mainframe
– Words Hurt
– Expensive
– Huge
– Dinosaur
• zSeries Servers
– Enterprise
– Scalable
– Velociraptor
zSeries Server Vocabulary
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LPAR
FICON and FCP
DASD
Cryptography Accelerator
z/VM
64bit Operation
IFL
Books
LPAR
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Hypervisor
Virtualized Systems
Physically Unconnected
Hipersockets
60 LPARS
Memory Isolation
Variable Workload
• Both
FICON and FCP
– 4-8G
– 1600 MBps
• Fiber Connectivity
– Multiple Concurrent
– Additional CRC
– Same Cables as FCP
• Fiber Channel Protocol
– Switched Fabric
– SCSI
DASD
• zLinux uses
– Direct Access Storage Device
• CKD Count Key Data
• FBA Fixed Block Architecture
– FCP
• SAN
• NAS
• SCSI
Cryptography Accelerator
• Off-loads Cryptography Processing
– 128 bit AES
– DES
– SHA
– Independent Random Number Generator
z/VM
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Hypervisor
Monitoring
Tunable
Isolated Memory
Hipersockets
64bit Operation
• 31 bits?
• 64 bits?
IFL
• Integrated Facility for Linux
• Tuned to Only Linux Processor Instructions
• 256 Theoretical guests.
Books
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Processors and Memory are in “Books”
Hot Swappable
Add Processors Hot
Add Memory Hot
z/Linux
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Is It Really Linux?
Distributions
Configurations
Strengths
Weaknesses
Well Suited For
Who uses it?
How Do I do it?
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Is It Really Linux
Not Emulated
Complete Native Operating System
Formally Released 2000
Linas Vepstas
Big-Foot, Think Blue
Open Source
Gartner Reports the Future of Government
and Big Business
• Makes IBM OSS friendly
Distributions
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Red Hat RHEL6
Novell SuSE SLES 11
Debian
Gentoo
Slackware
CentOS
Fedora
Etc
Configurations
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Just Like Real Linux
Multiple Network Interfaces
Logical Volume Management (Grow on the Fly!)
RPM, APT-GET, YUM, YAST and Source
LAMP
Oracle, DB2, MySQL
PHP, Perl, JBoss, Java, Ruby (This list goes on)
Strengths
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Costs (Most Important)
Enterprise Class
High Availability
Standard Development
High I/O
Industry Direction
Security
Support
Ubiquity
Weaknesses
• Processor Intensive
• Package Availability
• z/VM Knowledge
Well Suited
• LAMP Applications
– CMS (Content Management System)
• Wiki (Mediawiki, Twiki, Swiki…..)
• Blogs (WordPress…..)
• CMS (Drupal, Openpublic, Joomla, OpenPublish….)
• Databases
– MySQL, Oracle, DB2, Postgress ……
• Email
– Sendmail, Postfix….
• Security
– Scanning (Nessus, Satan, Sara…
– Firewall – IPTables
• So Many Others
Who Uses z/Linux?
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CMS Center for Medicade/Medicare Services
NIH National Institutes of Health
SSA Social Security Administration
State Farm
Many others
How Do I Do it?
There is plenty of help on the internet.
Detailed instructions may be found
• http://www.turbohercules.com/projects/zlinux/
• http://linuxvm.org/info/howtos/hercules.html
Support may be found at
• http://www.turbohercules.com/services/
• http://www.hercules-390.org/
Greening the Data Center
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No Additional Power
No Additional Cooling
No Additional Floor Space
Use Resources More Efficiently
•Questions?