The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Belastingdienst) is looking for a supplier of the Linux operating system for its IBM System z mainframes.

The public tender comprises provision of the operating system for four IFL processors for a period of one year, and maintenance of and support for the platform for eight years. The latter term can twice be extended by a further year.

The contract will be awarded to the supplier offering the lowest price. Bids must be received by 24 October, and the contract will start on 1 December.

Linux on z Systems

The mainframe environment of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration is used to run almost all bulk transaction processing in the organisation. The agency wants to re-implement programs written in the Cobol and Java programming languages in IBM's version of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). BPEL is a domain-specific language used to specify business processes and web services.

The agency currently has two mainframes, each featuring two IFL processors. They will run either Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). The platform will use the z/VM operating system as a hypervisor to run the Linux images from a central RPM repository, and IBM Wave to manage the virtual machines.

With this migration to 'Linux on z Systems' the agency aims to renew its operating environment. Other applications that may be migrated to the new platform include products from IBM's Tivoli Suite. Starting with four IFL processors now, the agency expects to have 50 processors deployed by 2023.