In his keynote address at the Red Hat Summit 2009 in Chicago last week, "Linux Everywhere? Matching the Workload to the Computer," Bob Sutor, vice president of Open Source and Linux at IBM focused on the varied use of Linux on a wide range of devices, computers and mainframes, and the benefits of technologies including virtualization, cloud computing, horizontal clusters and grids, and centralized computing.
Organizations can effectively match the work they need to do on Linux to the appropriate software, processors and machines, said Sutor, who presented real-world examples of major organizations that have successfully deployed IBM and Red Hat technology for business advantage. He showcased how:
- Astellas Pharma, Inc., a worldwide pharmaceutical company in Japan, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), IBM BladeCenter, and IBM System x HS20 blades, reduced drug discovery simulation time from one year to one month, ensuring greater productivity for Astellas' research staff, and driving infrastructure savings.
- Salt River Project, a utility company in central Arizona with requirements to reduce server sprawl of distributed HP-UX systems, as well as increase utilization, flexibility and management, is using RHEL, IBM System z mainframe, and Red Hat Network Satellite technology to achieve a stable, predictable and easily managed solution while reducing costs.
- The Bank of New Zealand consolidated 200 Sun servers down to just 1 IBM System z10 mainframe running RHEL, reducing its carbon footprint and addressing data center cost and capacity concerns.
• Impire AG, a sports television company, which provides intelligent, real-time 3D graphics and statistics for professional sporting events to TV broadcast companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, is using RHEL, IBM BladeCenter, IBM Informix Dynamic Server, IBM DB2 AlphaBlox, IBM DB2, IBM DB2 Data Warehouse Edition and IBM WebSphere Portal Express to achieve benefits such as higher system availability and reliability, and faster and more in-depth analysis with data mining.
Linux runs on more processors than anything else, said Sutor, who emphasized that it is important to choose the right computer for the workload, not vice versa. For more on IBM and Linux, go here.
Centrify Suite Earns Certification from IBM and Red Hat
Centrify Corporation, a provider of Microsoft Active Directory-based, identity and access management and auditing solutions for non-Microsoft platforms, has announced the availability of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Centrify Suite 2008 for Linux on IBM System z.
With Centrify Suite, enterprises can leverage their existing Active Directory infrastructure and user accounts to secure the hundreds to thousands of Linux servers that a single mainframe can host. Centrify Suite has passed the IBM validation program, earning the IBM brand "Ready for Systems with Linux" for System z servers. The Centrify offering is also certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for System z.
"Linux on IBM System z servers provides one of the most cost-effective, powerful, resilient platforms for running massive Linux workloads," says Corey Williams, director of product management for Centrify. "Combined with Centrify Suite 2008, you can centrally control access and manage users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z and those on other Unix and Linux systems to provide a secure and compliant operating environment for the most critical business servers." For more information, go here.