Linux has become the darling of the technology community as the open-source operating system with the ability to run on almost any type of processor. Until now, most of the focus has been on stripping down the OS to run handheld devices and small electronic appliances. Now, however, New York's Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH) is among the leading financial investment firms that have taken the open-source OS to its mainframe environment.
Rewind to the middle of 2002 when IBM first approached BBH to discuss running SuSE's flavor of Linux on the firm's z-Series mainframe. "When IBM came in to talk to us about this, we were slightly skeptical," says Rick Berk, CIO for the investment firm. "At that point it hadn't been proven."
For BBH, the mainframe has been the central component of its computing infrastructure for the past 25 years and it currently runs between 75 to 80 percent of its applications on the system, which represents hundreds of thousands of daily transactions and up to 4 million operating transactions per week.
Deploying SuSE Linux on the mainframe using IBM's Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFL) capabilities provided a blend of mainframe stability and the popularity of open source, says Berk, who sees the smaller computing platforms wanting in terms of management capabilities. "The management for the smaller systems is still not quite therethey still have a tendency to spike. There are times where they will be running at 100 percent for a while and then go back down to 20 percent utilization."
"Linux is growing in popularity as firms add infrastructure," says Colette Martin, director of marketing and strategy for the z9 Series for IBM. She says that 20 percent of shipping mainframes support the open-source OS. "Firms are using z/OS for their back-end processing and Linux for their application processing workload."
Berk is firm that none of BBH's existing "bread-and-butter" applications running on the mainframe, such as transaction processing, securities control, cash management, and other large transaction-based applications, are being migrated to the new OS. "At this point, they are running absolutely fine and we have no plans to move them from their current environment," Berk says.
Instead, BBH plans to use the SuSE platform to support newly developed applications moving forward, which would have been developed in the Linux-on-Intel or Sun Microsystems Solaris environments.
Rolling out the Linux environment went smoothly as IBM staff demonstrated to BBH's dedicated mainframe support staff how to add and delete virtual Linux servers as well as configure the systems' memory to support the IFLs. On the development side, "a majority of our Unix programmers were able to pick it up relatively quickly," says Berk, pointing to newly developed Linux-based corporate actions as well as some portfolio accounting applications as early deliverables on the new platform.
One issue Berk has with open source is the dearth of support from third-party vendors. "I'm not seeing a rush to it," says Berk, commenting on the dearth of third-party applications that support the Linux environment. "We are certainly sharing our desire to get applications that support Linux."
What has the return on investment (ROI) been for BBH? Berk hasn't sat down and crunched the numbers yet, but he says, "It's a considerable amount due to what I have seen."
The immediate benefit Berk has seen in deploying the environment has been the vast reduction in time and effort to provision new servers, which went from days to minutes. "All that stuff goes away," he says, explaining why the bank decided this year to begin using the new platform for test servers. "That's were you get most of your requests for additional servers."
Although BBH's mainframe has six of its 11 processors running SuSE Linux, and the rest running z/OS, Berk's team has not decommissioned a single Sun Solaris server in favor of the new platform. That said, the growth in BBH's Sun environment "is going to be much slower than a couple of years ago," he says. "Once we feel that the Sun Solaris price point comes more in line with the Linux/Intel price points, we're going to go with Linux. Not only do we see the performance being the equivalent or better, we also get all of the ancillary mainframe services."
Sun officials did not return phone calls for comment.