17.3 Summary

There is a wealth of applications and middleware available for Linux on the mainframe, both from Open Source and software vendors. Sometimes a new application is available for Linux on the mainframe before it becomes available for the traditional mainframe operating systems.

Linux can improve your time-to-market for new projects. Application servers running on the mainframe inherit the RAS characteristics of the mainframe hardware and can take advantage of the mainframe's virtualization technology.

In the next chapter, we look at how you can bring existing applications to Linux on the mainframe. In the chapter that follows, we discuss the additional benefits you can get if application servers perform functions that are tightly related to other servers in a consolidated environment.