Today's blog post comes courtesy of Salvatore Salamone, executive editor for Ziff Davis Enterprise.

Last week, IBM hosted several guests (myself included) at its Poughkeepsie, NY facility to help celebrate a significant anniversary.

The celebration marked the tenth anniversary of opening up the IBM System z mainframe to run Linux applications. This gives System z users great flexibility and a powerful platform to consolidate a variety of workloads.

Speaking at the event, Tom Rosamilia, general manager, System z Division, IBM Systems & Technology Group, noted the reasons why organizations are running their Linux apps on System z hardware.

The two main drivers are the ability to quickly provision servers and the ability to maintain a level of control over the applications while lowering risks. Additionally, moving Linux apps to a System z, “allows [organizations] to consolidate lots of servers, while inheriting the properties of running on z,” said Rosamilia.

A typical use of Linux on a System z is to run, for example, a transaction processing application on the zSeries/Operating System (z/OS) and Web services applications on Linux side-by-side on the same machine.

To date, there are over 3,000 Linux applications enabled for System z; about 550 of which were added last year. IBM claims that more than 70 percent of the top 100 mainframe customers worldwide run Linux.

Now, no one is suggesting a company buy a System z just to run Linux apps. But for organizations that do run their core business applications on a System z, the Linux support simply provides a way to make use of the platform’s resources and perhaps increase system utilization rates.