In Canada, in the province of Saskatchewan, it is said that the land is so flat that you can watch your dog run away for three days.
That's nothing compared to Linux on the mainframe, which we've been watching run towards us for over nine years! (According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_zseries, IBM first formally announced Linux on zSeries in 2000.) Man, can that penguin waddle slowly!
Of course, one of the reasons it's been so slow is because mainframers are a very careful bunch. We generally like to wait for someone else to be leading edge, and then once all the bumps in the road have been smoothed out, we'll proceed.
A related reason is that there have only been a few announcements of big mainframe Linux success stories that map generally to the business needs of other mainframe organizations so far.
But that appears to be changing now. And it looks like the economy may just have provided the tipping point. After all, let's face it: the mainframe is a low-footprint, low-energy, green machine, so there are cost savings there. Then there's the small number of people needed to manage a mainframe, partly due to its centralization, partly due to standardization, which allows for numerous virtualized clones to run with far fewer support staff than "distributed" configurations would require.
Or maybe it was always inevitable and inexorable, but just slow. Whatever the reason, I saw the strongest evidence yet that mainframe Linux is arriving at SHARE last week.
You see, at SHARE, one of my favorite sessions, which I try to attend if at all possible, is Cheryl Watson's "Hot Flashes". In it, she gives updates on interesting things she's found out recently, many of them at the current SHARE, and also polls the substantial audience that turns out to see her.
Well, one of the poll questions she asked was, "Who's running Linux on their mainframes?" And guess what: 1/3 of the people in the audience raised their hands! That is substantially the largest portion I've seen yet!
So, yesterday, when I was presenting at a CA Mainframe Day in Philadelphia (including a presentation on CA's mainframe Linux strategy), I asked the same question of my audience... and got the same result!
It looks like it's just about time to take the lid off this thing...