Guild Companies

IBM is bringing together elements of two of its most promising research and development projects—Linux and grid computing—and delivering them through one of its most successful products, the mainframe. On July 1, IBM announced Linux Virtual Services, a new program where companies purchase space on an IBM-hosted zSeries to run their Linux applications. Big Blue provides all the necessary backup, network, and maintenance services, and bills the user in much the same way a utility company bills its customers.

The new Linux offering is part of IBM's eUtility program, in which IBM encourages users to outsource their processing and let IBM Global Services manage the servers. IBM tells us that, in the future, when "grid computing" has taken hold, computing resources will be delivered and charged for over the Internet in much the same way that access to modern-day utilities, such as the telephone network and electric grids, is managed and sold today. When that day comes, application services—or Web services, if you like—will be as available and reliable as the dial tone on your phone, or so we're told anyway. While the commercial "grid" network is still just a few years in the making, Linux Virtual Services shows us that IBM is pushing hard in this arena.

For companies that have begun using Linux for things such as Web, email, print, or file serving, Linux Virtual Services presents a step upwards, both in functionality and price. At $300 per month per Linux service unit (roughly equivalent to the processing power of a 300 MHz or 400 MHz Intel-based server), IBM appears to be steering its new Linux offering toward more demanding workloads, including application and database serving, and the implementation efforts those workloads entail. Indeed, IBM is touting its ability to run WebSphere, Apache, and DB2 applications through this program. But for simple Web serving, users will still get a better deal (if not more security or availability) going with bargain-basement-discount PC server and running their favorite Linux distribution and the Apache Web server on it.

One of the really smart things that IBM has done with its Virtual Linux Services pricing schedule is to charge its customers not on their application's peak demand, but to charge them based on their anticipated average demand. IBM will provide, free of charge, 10 percent of additional processing capacity per virtual server, to meet spikes in customer demand. Customers can also negotiate for additional capacity for scheduled workload peaks, such as those for batch processing. IBM is also charging customers only for the storage they use, and letting customers use as much storage as their Linux applications demand.

If Linux Virtual Services sounds like a familiar concept, it is. Last May, as part of Big Blue's highly publicized $1 billion research and development investment into Linux, IBM launched its Linux Community Development System, a project that is basically a mainframe attached to a few terabytes of disk that Linux programmers can log on to over the Internet to test new software and otherwise to familiarize themselves with the mainframe environment.

Hundreds of "virtual" Linux servers can be housed in a single mainframe, eliminating much of the complexity of establishing the server-to-server connections that would be necessary to run a Linux application across several independent machines. For companies that are concerned about the security of data housed in one of these virtual servers, IBM says that one virtual server cannot access the data housed in a separate virtual server, even if its on the same mainframe, and that the virtual servers are as secure as any standalone machines.