IBM may be a big, lumbering multi-billion-dollar corporation that is slow to turn, but boy, when IBMers get imaginative, they get imaginative.

Steve Craggs of Lustratus Research recently marveled on what has become a fast-growing phenomenon: deployments of the open source Linux operating systems on mainframes. “Five or ten years ago, this sort of question would have been unthinkable, but now mainframe users are increasingly facing a choice between whether to use Linux on System z or z/OS to host new mainframe workloads.”

New Linux workloads may be the result of consolidation or initiatives such as SOA, he says.

However, IT managers and specialists appear to be divided as to how effective it is to run Linux on mainframes, versus commodity servers — and vise-versa, whether its better to stick to z/OS, the native mainframe OS. “On the one hand, long-time mainframe guys will say that z/OS has grown up with the mainframe and therefore must be the best choice. But IBM has done a lot to its version of Linux for the mainframe, and Linux bigots will be quick to point out that the license costs will be cheaper and there are strong advantages in standardizing on a portable and flexible operating system enterprise-wide.”

Linux offers flexibility, helps to drive license costs down and leverages widely available skills. The multi-system capabilities of z/OS combined with its close linkage to the System z platform offer the greatest exploitation of System z facilities. “But as always the devil is in the details,” says Craggs. “Worst of all, given the polarized nature of IT in general, the decision makers find it hard to get unbiased advice on such a divisive question.”

Facebook recently announced some milestones, which suggests they are maintaining one heck of a server and storage farm. They announced that their users have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. Since they actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, so that’s over 40 billion files.

Facebook also pointed out that 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day, and the companies have just over one petabyte of photo storage. They also noted that they serve over 15 billion photo images per day, and photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second.

No doubt their data center folks are a very busy bunch.

An IT consulting firm went around the floor of the recent InterOp show in New York, asking 100 IT professionals to rank their most urgent priorities. The resulting survey showed that they are mlost focused on supporting new technologies and innovations, followed by cost containment. Cost containment, by the way, rose from 11 percent considering this a priority a year ago to 21 percent this year.

Still popular, but not quite as popular as a year ago, is virtualization. There was almost no concern about two big items seen in the trade press and analyst reports — cloud computing and ITIL.

We do a lot of this type of work here at Unisphere Research, constantly polling members of users groups on what’s top of mind.  Interestingly, different groups yield different assortments of priorities.

Our most recent trend snapshot was among members of the International DB2 Users Group, which tend to represent large IBM shops. Among these professionals and managers, the top priority for the coming year, far and away, is managing explosive data growth, cited by 40 percent.  Meeting compliance initiatives come in second with 27 percent, followed by managing business intelligence initiatives at 21 percent.

What emerges from these surveys is a picture of IT and data managers needing to deliver more and more to their organizations on limited budgets. The push is on to get smarter and more innovative with solutions that can do far more with a lot less.