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CA Technologies today announced it has joined the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project to advance the adoption of Linux on the mainframe.
CA officials said the company is a founding Platinum member of the project, which is designed to create a collaborative environment among top industry leaders and academic institutions to drive both improvements and enterprise innovation on the mainframe. The project will initially focus on reinforcing four key areas: scalability, availability, performance and security.
The Linux Foundation announced the Open Mainframe Project at LinuxCon in Seattle today.
“As the application economy brings increased workload demands to organizations, advancements are needed to promote innovation on Linux systems,” said David Hodgson, general manager of mainframe solutions at CA, in a statement. “CA Technologies is proud to partner with the Linux Foundation and other founding companies to help progress innovation on the mainframe. As a leader in management tools for Linux platforms both on, and off, the mainframe, we are committed to investing in mainframe innovations that are secure, reliable and cost-effective.”
Linux has been on the mainframe for 15 years and has become a key operating environment because of its flexibility, openness and ability to handle complex and large workloads. The growth of Linux on the mainframe, coupled with its potential, validates the need that all companies should be educated on this option so they can make the right choices for workload placement in the application economy, CA said.
“Linux is the fastest growing operating system in the industry with significant drivers expanding it into mission critical applications,” said Rob Enderle, founder of the Enderle Group. “The causes for this trend are speed, agility, a unified development environment, and cost. Plus, the quality of Linux has advanced over the years significantly. Mobile is also driving an increased focus on this platform which is closely tied to the mobile revolution.”
Enderle said the Open Mainframe Project is a key element of this effort and it is being driven by the Linux Foundation to drive capabilities and growth. IBM is committing to driving this through substantial funding and company resources, including IBM Linux Technology Centers, Open Source Community Contributions, academic initiatives and training programs, and open access to mainframe community clouds.
Founding members of the Open Mainframe Project include ADP, BMC, CA, Compuware, IBM, L3C, Marist College, RSM Partners, SUSE, The Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at University of Washington, University of Bedfordshire and Vicom Infinity.
According to The Linux Foundation, 97 percent of hiring managers said they will bring on Linux talent relative to other skills areas in the next six months. The Open Mainframe Project’s academic partnerships with universities, such as Marist College, will benefit future mainframe developers, helping them build Linux-based solutions on the mainframe to manage the future of mobile processing, cloud computing and virtualization.
“We are extending our existing relationship with CA Technologies as they understand Linux will deliver the speed and efficiency needed to operate in this dynamic mobile and cloud computing landscape,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, in a statement. “CA understands the potential that Linux has on the mainframe and other platforms. CA’s expertise and history of innovation makes them an ideal contributor to help us advance the most complex enterprise operations through The Open Mainframe Project.”
The Open Mainframe Project will focus on finding ways to use new software and tools in the Linux environment that take advantage of the mainframe’s speed, security, scalability and availability. The project will seek to broaden the set of Linux tools and resources and drive development and collaboration of mainframe Linux. It also will aim to coordinate mainframe improvements to upstream projects to increase the quality of these code submissions and ease upstream collaboration, Zemlin said.
As part of the launch of the Open Mainframe Project, IBM announced it is contributing a significant amount of mainframe code to the community.
“IBM is renewing its dedication to the Linux community with the new Open Mainframe Project, a collaboration with the Linux Foundation that involves IBM contributing its largest ever amount of mainframe code to the open community,” said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. “As a result, the Open Mainframe Project bears some resemblance to IBM’s autonomic computing initiative—originally called eLiza—which was designed to incorporate key self-managing and self-healing mainframe features across the company’s other server platforms.”