Large enterprises continue to step up their investments in Linux on the mainframe in order to deliver more value to the business, while controlling IT costs, according to a recent global study of large enterprises commissioned by CA, an independent IT management software company. The study surveyed 100 IT executives and managers at companies with at least $2 billion in annual revenue, about their use of the Linux OS on IBM mainframes. Ninety-three per cent of the respondents projected that their use of IBM's IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux) speciality mainframe processor would increase or at least remain steady over the course of the next two years. Forty-two per cent projected that their use of the IFL would grow between 21 per cent and 4D per cent, and 10 per cent projected that it would grow more than 76 per cent.

The two main reasons cited for this increased Linux usage on the mainframe were the desire to take advantage of the computing capacity available on their mainframe's central processors and/or IFLs, and, their assessment that using Linux on the mainframe would be'more cost-effective than other platforms. Respondents also said they were using Linux on the mainframe to support 'green' computing initiatives and infrastructure consolidation strategies.

Survey respondents were also asked to rate specific aspects of Linux on the mainframe as challenges or advantages. Four aspects were rated as strongly advantageous: backup, restore and disaster recovery; the ability to scale to many virtual machines; security; and availability of applications. Of these, scalability received the strongest rating overall. CA provides a set of solutions to help manage and secure z/VM and Linux environments on IBM's System z platform.