ARE PHILIPPINE e-businesses ready for a Big Blue penguin?

Nope, we don't mean Batman's fowl foe played in the movies by Danny de Vito, though IBM Philippines did hold the launch in Gotham in Malate. Nor are we talking about a waddling womanizer who loves Blue Label.

Instead, IBM has made available in the Philippines the Linux solutions platform for its established S/390 transaction server. This is part of Big Blue's efforts toward making Linux a true-blue enterprise computing platform and its continuing attempt to be as cool as Larry Ewing's original penguin mascot for Linux.

The thing about IBM's S/390 port to Linux is that it can actually provide native support-Linux on "bare metal." This is one option, or you could run several Linux applications over LPARs or logical partitions or over VM/ESA, one of the three operating systems S/390, including, of course, OS/390.

With three options for running Linux, what's the best choice for businesses?

"I foresee that most companies would be running on partitions or the VM. If you run it as a single image natively, you can't mix diverse applications," said Virgil Pedro, manager for Enterprise Server Systems and Printers at IBM Philippines.

He said that the S/390 could have up to 15 LPARs, giving the advantage of support for multiple applications on a single server.

"Even in Unix, you don't usually run multiple applications. That's why we see the proliferation of severs in Unix and NT environments because each application requires a server. The strength of the S/390 is that it can run a multiple workload environment. Architecturally, in an NT environment it's very difficult to mix," he said, claiming that you can only push system utilization in NT by up to 60 percent before degradation sets in.

Since embracing Linux, IBM has been whistling a different tune, and the same company that once designed the operating systems of its mainframe, minicomputer and desktop machines to be proprietary and incompatible with each other now seems to be a true-blue open source advocate. Yet what about the temptation to tweak Linux to its own advantage and optimize it for its systems? Sure, the GNU General Public License was designed to prevent this, but hey, remember Java? Sure, it wasn't developed under a GPL or as open source software, but wasn't it supposed to remain open?

"In terms of hardware, it's easy to answer that concern. From a hardware point of view, having an OS optimized for that environment is not that important because hardware is now much faster. Optimization is on the software level. Linux itself offers an open standard. We want to offer different alternatives. We would rather have AS/400, S/390, and RS/6000 running on Linux because Linux is what customers want and they would still be buying our machines," he said.

He, however, claimed that IBM's existing OSes like OS/390 are still important not because they are proprietary to IBM, but because they are suited to different customer requirements. He claimed that this is not out of loyalty to its own OS, but because of technical advantages in certain business environments. For example, he admitted that OS/390 is not for every user since a customer might be looking for a Toyota instead of a Rolls Royce-level of enterprise computing performance and high availability.

"Actually, in an ideal world every OS should converge, but that's not going to happen because different vendors have different interests. We don't need to have one OS for all systems. We just need them to interoperate. Market needs are diverse and not a single OS would fit all requirements," Pedro said.

In the end, he admitted that the large S/390 installed base would be the biggest value proposition from IBM. Since many companies already have their databases and other applications on S/390, Pedro said that it makes sense for customers who want to go Linux and become e-businesses to leverage on their existing systems.

"Open source philosophy is really different," Pedro said, admitting that IBM has changed a lot because of this revolutionary development. He noted that Big Blue must heed the voice of the strong open source community.