After years of planning and researching, Salt River Project (SRP; Tempe, Arizona, U.S.) has migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframe servers.

In 2006, SRP began to accelerate its investigation of Linux solutions after upgrading its System z mainframe. Though SRP's Power division had been testing Linux in-house for approximately three years and had a desire to move to a Linux-based environment in the future, it didn't have any Linux solutions in production at the time.

"We were very interested in Linux on the mainframe for the enhanced utilization, flexibility, workload consolidation and management capabilities offered there," said Kevin Masaryk, senior Linux/Unix administrator at SRP. "Above all, it could help us mitigate the risk of server sprawl that was plaguing our traditional environment. In fact, whether on the mainframe or a distributed architecture, Linux would allow us to run more workloads per server than our previous environment."

After deciding to evaluate various Linux solutions for the mainframe, SRP selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which the SRP IT team had evaluated during its in-house Linux testing. SRP decided it would prefer to use one reliable Linux distribution in both its mainframe and distributed environments.

Today, SRP has nearly 50 Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers and the implementation is ongoing. The SRP team leveraged Red Hat Training offerings to expand internal knowledge of Red Hat's products and services in production environments, and uses Red Hat Network Satellite to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframe servers has provided SRP with a very stable and predictable solution that can be easily managed via Red Hat Network Satellite. It has enabled cost savings through the elimination of licensing costs and also has provided boosted performance for its servers.