Red Hat Gets SAP Mainframe Cert, Hires New Exec in Japan

Published: February 12, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced last week that application giant SAP has certified its Business Suite applications and NetWeaver middleware running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux atop IBM's mainframe platform.

The certification of SAP's Business Suite and NetWeaver were done under the auspices of a Linux-on-mainframe effort that IBM and Red Hat launched last May. Linux-based mainframe engines account for roughly a quarter of Big Blue's shipments of mainframe computing capacity these days, as measured in aggregate MIPS, and efforts to use Linux to consolidate Windows and Unix workloads running on X86 and RISC machinery have been fruitful. But supporting the Business Suite applications and NetWeaver middleware on Linux engines on mainframes means that IBM will lose some z/OS software license sales, since the monthly fees for the z/OS software stack can be an order of magnitude larger than the annual fee for mainframe Linux support spread across 12 months. IBM is probably not too thrilled with this, but customers running the SAP application on the mainframe are still buying mainframe iron and will still probably put a z/OS and DB2 partition on the box to support the Business Suite applications across virtual Ethernet links inside the mainframe.

"The mainframe is experiencing a renaissance," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of the Enterprise Linux Business at Red Hat in a statement accompanying the certification announcement. "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."

As the two companies announced last year, Red Hat and IBM are working together to get Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running on the mainframe certified at the U.S. government's Common Criteria EAL 4+ security rating. This security certification will put the mainframe running RHEL 5 at the same security level that z/OS and z/VM have already attained. The higher EAL 5 certification requires and audit by the U.S. National Security Agency, and very few products have attained this certification to date.

In a separate announcement, Red Hat has announced that Yuji Hirokawa has been named as president of Red Hat KK, succeeding Yuji Fujita, who is being bumped up to chairman of the company's Japanese operations while at the same taking over as director of Red Hat's Asia/Pacific region.

Hirokawa has been in the IT industry for the past three decades, and comes to Red Hat from the Japanese operations of middleware maker--and soon to be Oracle division--BEA Systems. Prior to that job, he spent 22 years at Hitachi and a few years at the Japanese operations of server maker Sun Microsystems. Hirokawa will be responsible for the operations of the Japanese unit of Red Hat, including marketing, sales, business development, and other aspects of operations. He will report to Gery Messer, who was named president of Red Hat Asia Pacific a year ago. As chairman of the Japanese unit and a director of Red Hat Asia Pacific, Fujita will focus on forging new partnerships with Japanese OEM partners and strengthening existing ones.

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