LINUX ON THE
FINNISH LINE

In Finland and regional areas, Sonera Entrum's goal is to lead in telecom service. Currently, Sonera Entrum is in charge of fixed network joint ventures in the Baltic States, provides services to over 500,000 consumers in Eastern and Northern Finland, and, increasingly is providing services to corporate customers in the region. Last year, corporate subscribers numbered 70,000.

IBM's Linux equation is to help them get to all the places they're going reliably, and at a manageable cost. The solution has turned out to be one IBM eServer zSeries—IBM's mainframe line formerly known as the S/390—running Linux together with an IBM Enterprise Storage Server ("Shark"). This mainframe will be partitioned into 500 virtual servers each running its own copy of Linux. An IBM enterprise scale server can host up to 30.000 virtual Linux servers at the same time using IBM's Virtual Machine (VM) operating system, which allows the creation of partitions. Partitioning a mainframe into several independent computers is considered highly useful for consolidating work into a system that can be easily managed.

The deal is not the first for IBM in the telecom sector. Before Sonera Entrum, there was Sweden's telecom giant, Telia, that declared it was ready to go with virtual server approach. In December 2000, IBM and Telia announced that Telia would create1,500 virtual Linux machines on an IBM mainframe with Shark storage to run Internet and IP-VPN service operations across Scandinavia. Story has it that Telia was briefed by IBM at a Linux integration center and made the decision in a matter of days after the visit.

The Sonera/Telia deal numbers are very similar. Telia replaced 70 web-hosting Unix servers with 1,500 virtual Linux servers. Both are consolidating using a single IBM S/390/G6 (zSeries) server in conjunction with a Shark storage unit. What’s more, the motivation for both telecoms to consolidate was not to achieve cost savings alone, but high availability and reliability assurance for customers.

Both Sonera Entrum and Telia are two telecom leaders realizing the benefits of this computing approach to their business needs as telecom players. The way industry watchers see it, the telecom industry’s explosive growth across many sectors in 2000 was unsustainable. Nonetheless, that does not overshadow the fact that telecom players must anticipate the right technological practices to ensure their services respond to ready opportunities for market growth. Last year’s downturns in the telecom industry should be balanced by the fact that the telecom industry this year could see more boom than bust.

Gartner researchers see likely gains as the global telecom market continues to grow. The services part of the market looks especially resilient. The telecom services market grew in all regions last year and will continue to do so through 2005. Within telecom services, demand remains for basic voice capacity in developing markets and for higher bandwidth in all markets. Says Dean Eyers in his Gartner study, Telecom Markets and the Recession: An Imperfect Storm: "It is much easier for a company to delay a capital expense decision than to reduce reliance on a service that has become part of its business process. Also, the bandwidth and connectivity implications of Web-based services and applications will drive growth significantly during the forecast period, even if this growth is slower than some of the dot-coms would have had us believe."

To be sure, Sonera Entrum is one of the service players on an ambitious track of Net telephony, data security, network services, and more under wraps. Last October, an agreement with Ericsson announced the delivery of Digital Residential Gateways (DRG) to add voice services to Entrum’s Internet access services. With the Ericsson DRG, Sonera's customers can use standard analog telephones to make two simultaneous IP-telephony calls while using the Internet, on one broadband connection over the Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) network.

Speed to market is important in telecom services. Faced with the pace of keeping up with demand and the need to leverage technology changes, Sonera Entrum can't sit back. In a company report issued last year, Sonera said "The failure to develop and implement new technologies and services on a timely basis could cause us to lose customers." Small wonder, then that Sonera Entrum made its move and announced in October a big sweep of its computer operations, replacing 60 different servers from different vendors with a single computer having 500 virtual servers running Linux. The vendors who gained from this decision: IBM impressed Sonera Entrum, with the promise of rock-solid and high performing hardware, along with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and other Open Source solutions.

Why make such a move? The bottom line is customers. "We're looking for new business," says a Sonera Entrum technical officer. What he implies is that running virtual servers permits a player like Entrum to be as scalable and flexible as needed, without accompanying expense and headaches in running server farms. Those costs and headaches are namely in manageability, space requirements, and energy requirements. The virtual servers, being all part of one computer, share computing capacity and eat up less energy. They need an estimated 75% less office space.

Business customers beyond telecoms are turning to server consolidation. "By means of the consolidation of large server farms, customers enjoy a lower level of administration expenses due to uniform server structures," explains Dirk Ott, Head of IBM Linux Marketing, EMEA Central Region. "This not only reduces system administration costs during the integration of new Linux servers, it also hosts a great savings potential for locality and energy costs."

This is a trend that places its eServer zSeries line to strong advantage. The latest release of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 for S/390 is based on kernel 2.4. This version supports HiperSockets, a high-performance feature that implements data transfers between virtual servers over the z900 memory bus in the mainframe. SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 for S/390 also supports the journaling file system ReiserFS and the network and disk device configuration can be modified dynamically without a reboot. The Logical Volume Manager allows the runtime-integration of dynamically attached storage devices into existing virtual volumes of almost arbitrary size, delivering practically unlimited disk space without downtime.

Sonera Entrum production systems run SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390 on the zSeries mainframe. Another SuSE customer for its S/390 product is rail freight company Transtar, which is developing a real-time tracking system  to deliver online freight information to Transtar's employees and customers. Jens Sandmann, enterprise sales manager at SuSE, makes much about leveraging SuSE experience gained in working with past customers to better appreciate the business needs of new enterprise customers in making virtual server farms part of their computing infrastructure. "We are currently working with Sonera on support and assisting Sonera’s team through our service consultants."

Sandmann says that many business customers are using mainframes in the form of OS/390 and zOS for their applications and databases for ERP, materials requirements planning (MRP), and stock management. As space in data centers comes at a premium, the space savings to be obtained by using mainframes to replace potentially hundreds of discrete rack-mounted servers are becoming more important. "In these instances, bringing the middleware applications, which process the data held on the mainframe database, back onto the mainframe achieves faster and more reliable communication with maximum bandwidth and near-zero latency between them, the second, and third tiers (application servers and back end database)."

Still, Sandmann has to sell SuSE technology, not win any server farm campaigns, and he sees the advantages in using SuSE Linux for the two different approaches. "SuSE Linux Enterprise Server runs on the commodity hardware of server farms and the high-end mainframe hardware used for virtual server farms."

Nonetheless, an energy-trouble spot of the Internet economy has been the steady growth in server farms, which house the computers necessary to power web sites and e-business. Cynics who think datacenter opponents exaggerate the negative effects of these centers boil the argument down: The "server consolidation" strategy is a popular sales technique for all high-priced server sellers only too happy to be able to respond to corporate frustration at managing dozens and up to thousands of servers. The argument remains, however, that some corporate IT planners in operations requiring 24x7 availability may actually be better off in turning away from server farms, or data centers, to instead adopt a computing approach of using one mainframe running multiple Linux servers.

This is nothing new to analysts and IBM. Even back in May 2000, Aberdeen Group’s Bill Claybrook, in his white paper, “Linux for S/390: A perspective for IT Executives,” was pointing to a ready market of first-generation web architectures using large farms of small servers to host web sites for businesses with Linux as their dominant operating system. “Those providers now have the option of consolidating a massive amount of servers on to a Linux-for S390 platform. Providers gain all of the administrative advantages flexibility, security, and reliability associated with the S/390.”

Today, the advantages of consolidation-on-mainframes running virtual Linux are on greener lines, in the arena of energy waste versus energy conservation. Technology analysts at Hurwitz Group and Matterhorn Group have come out with reports recommending a mainframe running Linux as an efficient energy alternative to server farms.

With the recent power shortages in California, popular opinion, activist groups, and even some analysts have all grown especially unkind to energy guzzlers. Any environmental enthusiast who was part of a particularly dark summer in California would find it hard to approve of the idea of buildings crammed with computer servers with their lights on morning, noon, and night. After all, say activists, while other residents and businesses are struggling with blackouts, are these data centers doing more harm than good?

“Witch hunt,” is what one San Francisco data center builder calls it. Servers, after all, don’t always run at full capacity. They are frequently bone idle. Even though a server farm might have a large kilowatt capacity, they might end up using only a small portion of their capacity. Actually, the Natural Resources Defense Council, listed as a nonprofit environmental group, believes claims about the insatiable appetites of electricity-intensive server farms are overblown. In a report in August 2001,”Energy Efficiency Leadership in a Crisis” which they co-presented with The Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group (founded by David Packard of Hewlett-Packard,) the report said, “ Even in the San Francisco Bay area counties, which house fully 10% of the nation’s server farm capacity, such applications account for only about 1.2% of regional electricity consumption.”