IBM Rents Linux Partitions Under Utility Sales Model

by Alex Woodie

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. IBM has announced Linux Virtual Services, a new program in which companies purchase space on an IBM-hosted zSeries mainframe 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. This "eUtility" offering could eventually be offered on iSeries and xSeries machines.

The new Linux offering is part of IBM's plan to encourage users to outsource their processing and let IBM Global Services manage the servers, a la the application service provider model. 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 and will be easily accessed and fully interoperable with one another, based on a new collection of standards, or so we're told. 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 and looking to make the most of its industry-leading virtualization technology, which allows a single mainframe--or iSeries or xSeries servers, for that matter--to be split up into numerous "virtual servers" that are housed in separate partitions on the host server.

For companies that have begun using Linux for things such as Web, e-mail, print, or file serving, Linux Virtual Services is a step upward, in terms of 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 a bargain-basement 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 is to charge its customers not on their applications' peak demand but 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 in 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 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 it's on the same mainframe, and that the virtual servers are as secure as any stand-alone machine.

IBM started dabbling in hosted Linux servers on mainframes for developers last year, and it eventually put out a similar offering to let companies that wanted to play around with Linux on iSeries do so with developer partitions. If IBM is offering Linux partitions on mainframes, odds are the people in the MidMarket Server Division, within Server Group, are also trying to figure out how to offer an eUtility program on the iSeries, for those customers who are more comfortable with iSeries machines, for whatever reason. The economics of Intel-based servers and the availability of partitioning software from VMware (IBM's partitioning partner on the xSeries), on Big Blue's Intel-based servers, also suggests that IBM will launch eUtility hosting on xSeries machines as well. IBM will probably charge a premium on zSeries and iSeries machines because of their inherently higher availability and dynamic partitioning capabilities, and will probably offer low-cost Linux images on the Intel-based machines for companies that cannot budget the $300 a month that IBM is charging for base zSeries Linux images.

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