Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

LANSA last week announced its first Linux product, a component of its LANSA for the Web runtime software that runs in a Linux partition on the iSeries. The new software, which the Downers Grove, Illinois, company calls LANSA for the Web Edge Server, provides a lighter, stealthier version of the OS/400-based Web server, which the company characterized as overkill for Web serving, not to mention a security concern. Edge Server is the first of many Linux products LANSA is working on.

LANSA for the Web Edge Server is the first packaged Linux software offered by the company, the iSeries community's most successful vendor of fourth-generation-language (4GL) development environments. The company has allowed its 4GL users to compile programs to the Linux operating system, but when it comes to LANSA's new focus on developing shrink-wrapped business apps, LANSA for the Web Edge Server is breaking new ground.

Al Grega, LANSA's director of business development, says that when it comes to Web server workloads, it makes more sense to use Linux than OS/400. "You don't need all the functionality that OS/400 has," Grega said from the floor of the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco last week. "There's a lot of feature functionality you're putting on the edge [of the data center] that you don't really need. You don't need a database. With LANSA for the Web Edge Server, you're putting a stealthier layer of support on the edge."

Before Linux Edge Server, LANSA often recommended that customers install a second OS/400 server--such as the iSeries Model 270--to separate a company's OS/400-based data from its Web server and to sit in the demilitarized zone. With today's advanced logical partitioning capabilities, customers can get by with running multiple workloads in different partitions on the same box connected to the Internet, Grega says.

"Linux gives us a way of doing that without putting OS/400 in the DMZ," Grega says. "You definitely need a firewall. You don't want to put the onus of a firewall on the back-end OS/400 partition." With a selection of Linux-based firewalls, such as the open-source firewall available from netfilter, users can get all the IP, NAT, and proxy filtering they need, and run it on an iSeries, without directly involving OS/400.

Grega says the hope is LANSA's new Linux message, coupled with the new line of inexpensive iSeries servers like the Model 800 and 810, will spur sales. He backs up this message with the cost figures put forward in IDC's recent report, "Consolidating Multiple Workloads on the iSeries Platform," which showed significant advantages to running Linux and Windows workloads in an iSeries environment compared with Intel boxes.

While LANSA's primary focus remains OS/400, Windows and Linux are creeping into the picture. Grega says a poll conducted among customers at LANSA's recent user conference show that Linux and Windows are tied for second as the platform LANSA customers most want the company to write its products for. OS/400 remains the top pick.

LANSA is well positioned for this technological shift. As is the nature of most 4GLs, it's a relatively simple matter for LANSA to support additional operating systems, once its customers have written their applications to the LANSA spec. Apart from the ease of movement afforded by Java, most programming languages are tightly coupled to a specific operating platform, such as RPG is to OS/400. LANSA plans to use its special capability to support additional platforms with both its shrink-wrapped products, as well as its development tools.

By the end of the month, LANSA plans to offer support for LANSA Integrator, a product that lets business partners share transaction data, on Linux running on Intel. Later this fall, the company plans to offer Linux capabilities with its other development tools, LANSA for the Web and Visual LANSA.

LANSA is positioning itself for an expected upswing in business due to Linux. "Linux is a technology that's going through its test cycles right now," says Grega, who left his job as iSeries e-business manager at IBM to join LANSA last September. "All the early indications, in using LPAR and Linux, the reviews are tremendous. Overall, as an application tools vendor, LANSA is fully on board with Linux support."

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