Linuxcon: IBM Admits zOS is Still Better than Linux (for some things) [VIDEO]

SEATTLE – Among the biggest pieces of news to emerge at the Linuxcon conference here this week is IBM’s announcement of a pair of Linux only mainframes known as LinuxONE.

With the LinuxONE, IBM said that it is focusing Linux, but that doesn’t mean IBM is leaving its legacy behind either. In a press briefing, Ross Mauri, General Manager for z Systems, emphasized that while Linux is the focus, the zOS proprietary mainframe operating system isn’t going anywhere either.

“I think when it comes to the absolute gold standard today for transaction processing and you look at companies around the world that are doing hundreds of millions of fully secured transactions every day – I’m not sure if Linux is up to that, yet,” Mauri said.

Mauri added that in his view, there is still a place for zOS in certain workloads, though it’s clear that Linux is the area where future growth will come from.

“There are a lot of lines of code written, probably more than a trillion, that runs on mainframes around the world and I don’t know if everyone is going to just go and throw that out,” Mauri said. “So there is a place there for a long time for zOS.”

Watch the full video interview with Ross Mauri below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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