Chciago's Northern Trust is piloting Levanta by Linuxcare as it looks to reduce the costs of managing Linux on its IBM eServer zSeries mainframe.
Introduced by Linuxcare last week, Levanta has been developed to simplify administration of virtual Linux servers on the mainframe.
Brian Diddens, vice president, mainframe services, Northern Trust, comments: "After a review of Levanta by Linuxcare, we were impressed with its ability to bridge the technology differences between the mainframe and distributed system support environment, allowing our traditional mainframe system programmers to now maintain and administer Linux."
He says Levanta will allow Northern Trust to increase Linux usage without needing additional administrative staff.
In a separate move, IBM today unveiled a programme to help customers move from the Sun Solaris platform to the Linux operating system on IBM eServer machines. The three-pronged programme includes the deployment of a dedicated Sun transition team; an upgrade of IBM's most popular Intel-based server for Linux applications; and the development of a new generation Linux cluster system aimed at boosting price/performance.