Air NZ cuts costs with Linux

13.08.2002
By ADAM GIFFORD
The penguin may be flightless, but the Linux mascot has become the bird of choice at Air New Zealand, leaving Microsoft grounded.

As part of a deal with IBM that was renewed last week, Air New Zealand is replacing the 150 Compaq servers it uses for email and file and print serving with IBM Z800 mainframes running the Linux operating system Websphere Application Server, DB2 Database, and Tivoli software.

This means the airline can replace 4000 Microsoft Exchange email and file and print clients with Bynari, an open source email application.

Going on the latest Microsoft Software Assurance model, that could mean a saving of $600,000 a year in licence fees alone, although the price large customers pay Microsoft is usually a tightly guarded secret.

Air New Zealand spokesman Cameron Hill said the airline believed Linux "has come of age in its ability to be used by major IT users".

He said Linux was being used to reduce costs.

"We wouldn't do it otherwise."

Air New Zealand has refused to say how much the IBM deal is worth or discuss its term, but the typical way such arrangements now work is that the supplier steadily reduces costs and shares the savings with the customer.

Bob Morton, IBM's northern region manager, said as part of the contract "we will take Air New Zealand through a migration programme to put several applications on Linux on the mainframe".

He said this should reduce the total cost of the ownership. As IBM continued to own the hardware it deployed, this would benefit both parties.

It is using two mainframes, one for disaster recovery and system redundancy.

Morton said mainframe computing was starting to look more attractive for many large organisations as the cost of running them fell.

"The true cost of managing distributed environments is large, and most organisations are looking to rationalise and simplify their environment. For a lot, that means consolidating their servers and centralising."

He said Air New Zealand's acceptance of Linux should accelerate interest in the New Zealand market.

While IBM's original 1997 agreement with Air New Zealand covered mainframe maintenance, over the course of the deal it extended it to midrange servers and other web and Linux services.

In replacing the email servers IBM is moving in work done by Gen-i, which also has a contract with the airline.

Gen-i managing director Garth Biggs refused to comment on the implications of the move. "Air New Zealand is still a very valuable customer for us," Biggs said.

Roger DeSalis of the New Zealand Network Operators Group said the next NZNOG conference would include a technical session on Linux on the mainframe.

"The mainframe can be used for a significantly more effective web server because the mainframe has proper I/O [Input/Output], and the web world is all about I/O.

"With Air New Zealand moving as much of its activity as it can online, which it is signalling through things like its attempt to reduce its dependence on travel agents, it needs serious web capability," DeSalis said.

He said Linux did not run native on mainframes, but could run in partitions running on top of the MVS mainframe operating system.

"It is significantly cheaper than having lots of MVS licences."

DeSalis said other New Zealand companies were likely to follow Air New Zealand's lead and increase their use of Linux, particularly as technical people familiar with it were promoted to positions of authority.

"The maturity level and quality of the software is stunning. The latest Debian 3.0 distribution which came out a couple of weeks ago came on seven CDs and includes more than 3000 software packages, all stable and tested."

IBM is trumpeting the Air New Zealand move at this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

"It is significant that customers of every size and from every industry are turning to IBM, our business partners, and Linux for mission critical applications and total Linux solutions," said Steve Solazzo, IBM's general manager for Linux.

"The overwhelming trend toward Linux throughout the business world validates IBM's decision over two years ago to embrace Linux and is further evidence of Linux's compelling value proposition."

As well as Air New Zealand, it said, Deutsche Telekom's T-Com Internet division had consolidated Unix service applications previously running on 25 Sun servers on to an IBM eServer zSeries mainframe running Linux.

The applications included mail, intranet sites and mail back-up services for internal and external customers.

Another key customer was Australian Government social services delivery agency Centrelink, which had signed a four-year partnership agreement with IBM to provide mainframe capacity.

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"The mainframe can be used for a significantly more effective web server because the mainframe has proper I/O [Input/Output], and the web world is all about I/O.

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I've noticed the similarity between WWW servers and IBM mainframes. A WWW server handles requests much like IBM mainframes handle IBM 3270 terminals. Those "block mode" types of terminals were designed to allow users to fill out fields on the screen, then send the entire screen by hitting various keys that interact with the system. The rest of the time, the CPU is not getting interrupted. A WWW server is similar since it gets a form or request, then responds with a WWW page, like an IBM mainframe gets a filled-out screen and returns a screen to the terminal. IBMs were primarily batch processors, like WWW servers are. In contrast, a UNIX system has to handle the interrupt every time a user kits a key on a terminal.

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He said Linux did not run native on mainframes, but could run in partitions running on top of the MVS mainframe operating system.

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Now this is just frigging bizarre. IBM mainframes do not even use the ASCII character set, but use a standard based on punch cards (EBCDIC), which was the first character set I learned when I started programming, since I learned on an IBM mainframe. I wonder if they have an MVS application that can emulate a PC that Linux can run on?

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"It is significantly cheaper than having lots of MVS licences."

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OK. So the reason they're doing this is so they can have very few MVS installations that run Linux on top? MVS is an IBM product, or at least it was the last time I used it in 1992. I figured VM might be the operating system they would use to run Linux on since it supports virtual machines. I'd like to know more about how this "Linux on MVS" works.

I must say this is the most bizarre configuration I've read about.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

The hardware in question is in fact the Z-series, which is what IBM renamed the S/370, S/390 line.

These systems run Linux under VM, not MVS. IBM rewrote Linux to run directly on 370 hardware -- the system does not emulate a PC in any way. Most customers run Linux under VM, because VM makes it much easier to configure the hardware and manage the computer.

Yes, VM and MVS still use EBCDIC, and if you want to program to a 3270 terminal, or an IBM printer, you need to use that character set, because genuine mainframe hardware still uses the EBCDIC character set. However, these days, most communications I/O is done through TCP/IP, which is character-set agnostic, and the outside world uses ASCII, so I believe that the Linux kernel uses ASCII internally and only translates to EBCDIC when you use the device drivers for things like 3270 terminals.

The real advantage of Linux on 370 hardware is that the architecture is optimized for I/O efficiency, especially disk efficiency. A mainframe can easily have over 200 hard drives per system, and can use them efficiently. Because of issues such as paging, the more disks you get into motion, the faster the system runs. This contrasts sharply with PCs, where disk activity is usually the limiting factor.

PCs are optimized for fast graphics -- PCs are sold based on how many frames per second they can render Quake at. Graphics optimizations are useless for a file server or database system.

Plus, IBM hardware and software is extremely reliable. The mainframes we used were so redundant that you could have a CPU fail without causing a system crash. The system would reconfigure itself, send a message to IBM via modem, and keep running. This happened to us once, and the only reason that we know that anything had happened was that an IBM service rep called us to notify us that we had had a CPU failure! As far as the software, At one point, we had been running VM for nearly a year, with peaks of over 1,000 simultaneous timesharing users, without a single crash.

In short, they have done something remarkably sensible -- installed a fast, reliable mainframe system. By running Linux, they gain the ability to run a lot more software than if they were running VM or MVS natively.

This is not to be confused with a more typical deployment of Linux -- where you purchase a standard PC, erase Windows, and install Linux on the hard drive to get a cheap Unix server.