| Red Hat announces SAP-certified mainframe apps |
Feb. 05, 2008
People have been predicting the death of the mainframe for more years than the mainframe has been around.
Thanks to Linux, though, the mainframe is as strong as ever, and now Red Hat has announced that SAP has certified its SAP Business Suite family of business applications and the SAP NetWeaver platform on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) running on IBM System z mainframes.
SAP's certification on RHEL came about, Red Hat claims, as part of its IBM Linux on Mainframe partnership. This program was a marketing effort, started in May 2007, to encourage companies to evaluate and deploy RHEL on System z. In particular, it was meant to emphasize to enterprise customers just how secure, scalable and inexpensive the combination of Linux and mainframe was compared to other server solutions.
In the press release announcing that SAP was coming on board with this program, Red Hat stated, "In combination with the mainframe's proven security thresholds, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides additional functions such as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and ExecShield. In addition to the Common Criteria certifications already available to customers of System z, IBM is sponsoring the EAL 4+ certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on System z. The existing certifications, which include LSPP on z/VM and z/OS, combined with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 certification, help provide a secure platform environment capable of meeting stringent public and private sector security policies."
"The mainframe is experiencing a renaissance," Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's vice president of Enterprise Linux Business, said in a statement. "Many of our customers are planning consolidation projects right now. Often the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on mainframes plays a central role in these projects. With this certification, Red Hat ensures that customers can confidently run their SAP applications in a consolidated infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframes."
Red Hat is hardly the only Linux vendor emphasizing the potential power and cost-savings of Linux on the mainframe. Novell just announced a new, easy way to install SUSE Linux on System z mainframes, SLES Starter System.
So long as major enterprise software vendors such as SAP continue to move applications to Linux on the mainframe, and the work of 3,900 x86 servers can be moved to 33 mainframes running Linux, big iron computing is in no danger of dying out anytime soon.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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