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By Joey Gardiner, 15 October 2001 11:30

NEWS Finnish telco Sonera has gone open source and replaced more than 50 servers with a single IBM mainframe running hundreds of virtual Linux servers. The telco said it made the decision because it needed an infrastructure that could easily expand to support new services without eating up more and more power and space. Pasi Sutinen, technical director for Sonera Entrum, the fixed line business of the telco, said: "We wanted to roll-out our Linux applications to mass production scale. If we'd have stuck with our existing policy it would've just meant countless more Intel servers, all sucking up more and more power and taking up more space." Sonera will use a zSeries server - the new name for the old S390 - running Linux to look after its data networking. It will also be used as the backbone for new IP services for Sonera's ADSL customers. It will replace around 50 Compaq and HP Intel servers running both NT and Linux, as well as a number of Unix servers running SCO Unix. IN the short term, the telco will run 396 virtual Linux servers on the one mainframe, but plans to take that figure up to 500. The company has also bought an enterprise storage server and support from IBM Global Services. Sonera refused to say how much the deal was worth, but a spokesman said it was more concerned with good technology than saving money. The contract win represents another big success for IBM since it decided to re-launch its mainframe computers and configure them to run Linux. At the end of last year, it persuaded Swedish telco Telia to get rid of the 70 Sun servers it used in its data centre, in favour of one mainframe. Ari Voutilainen, corporate communications manager at IBM Finland, said the deal was another vote of confidence in Big Blue. He said: "For a company to put 60 servers on to one shows how reliable our mainframes are. If this server goes down, its Sonera's business, but they're happy to do this." Martha Bennett, VP at analyst house Giga Information Group, said the decision highlighted a wider trend toward Linux. "There is a bit of a herd mentality to an extent. IT directors want to see new technology proved elsewhere before doing it themselves, but this beginning to happen," she said.