Linux keeps its eyes on the enterprise

At the annual gathering this week at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in Boston, top-tier vendors from the Linux Nation will roll out a raft of enterprise-class products and services.  A few will lay out road maps for how they plan to kick their open source strategies up even higher into the enterprise.

Chief among them will be Hewlett-Packard, expected to show off a technically aggressive line of new Linux-based servers and workstations. The offerings will include its first Opteron-based workstation along with a new program called Big Tux that will see the company add support for Red Hat and Novell Linux variants to 64-processor Integrity SuperDome servers.

“The technology we will be showing through Big Tux, which refers to the Big Penguin, is a way to provide 64-way scalability using a standard Linux kernel. What we will be highlighting through this technology is that Linux and open source in general needs to cross the threshold over to a true enterprise class environment,” said Martin Fink, HP’s vice president in charge of the company’s Linux strategy.

The new Operteron-based workstations, called the xw9300 series, will come bundled either with Microsoft’s Windows XP or with a desktop version of Linux. Company officials are expected to focus hard on the advantages of the desktop systems’ 64-bit hardware and software.

“We will certainly be driving home the advantages of the 64-bit architecture. We will bundle Red Hat’s Enterprise Release 3, the 64-bit version only, and plan to support the 64-bit version of Windows XP when that gets delivered this spring,” said Jeff Wood, Director of Product Marketing for HP’s Workstation Global Business Unit.

The company will also announce it is enhancing its OpenView server management software to monitor and manage a number of different open source applications, including the MySQL data base, JBoss and Tomcat Java-based software.

Red Hat and Novell will intensify their ongoing battle in the Linux operating system wars when they each show off significant upgrades to their respective server-based products. Novell will formally release its Open Enterprise Server, a product the company hopes will be instrumental in helping move its NetWare users over to Linux.

The server combines versions of both NetWare and Novell’s Enterprise Linux Server 9, along with a number of services including file, print, management, and collaboration that can be delivered across the environments. Novell will announce the product’s pricing and availability at the show, according to company officials.

Red Hat will counterpunch by showing off its long-awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, the first version by Red Hat to contain the 2.6 version of Linux kernel. Company officials, however, have declined to say whether the product would be ready for release at next week’s show.

IBM will attempt to move its Linux-based server clustering strategy forward, taking the wraps off several building blocks for its eServer Cluster 1350 portfolio, including improved high-performance switches with support for Ethernet and InfiniBand, interconnects and storage options. IBM will also announce it will bundle a pretested version of Red Hat’s Linux distribution in with its clustering offerings.

“Preloading Red Hat’s Linux with this is a big step in terms of being able to offer a more complete clustered solution. We are doing so because as we move out of the academic and government markets that have technical resources to better deal with things like this, and into the commercial markets where they don’t have the time or money to make it all work,” said Bob Lenard, IBM’s Brand Manager for IBM’s Linux Cluster business.

Cray will show off for the first time a technical demonstration of its XD-1 supercomputer fueled by a dual-core Opteron chip from AMD. The company last fall introduced its first single processor based XD-1 system based on the Opteron chip.

“I think this will show we can provide a smooth evolution from single- to dual-core technology. Corporate users through this chip can not only double the density of the chip but get close to two times the price performance,” said Adam Lorant, Cray’s vice president of marketing.

Some analysts see the trend of this year’s show following the Olympian ideal of making Linux higher, stronger, and faster.

“What a lot of the announcements appear to be building on is the (Linux) foundation that’s already been laid within the enterprise. They are extending the tentacles of Linux into areas like clustering, and high performance, high availability types of systems,” said Stephen O’Grady, senior analyst at Redmonk.

One of the more interesting technologies from a startup to debut at the show will show off a virtual computing environment called Virtual Iron VFe that allows datacenter administrators to dynamically partition processing power across multiple servers on the fly.

“This environment allows you to treat all servers in the datacenter as a collection of building blocks, instead of as independently managed systems where users typically overbuy capacity to handle peak loads. This allows users to put together adaptable virtual servers and those virtual servers can be anything from a fraction of a server to large multiprocessors up on the grid,” said Scott Davis, founder and CTO of Virtual Iron Software.

Version 1.0 of the product, scheduled to be delivered in late May, will initially support both Red Hat and Novell-Suse’s versions of Linux.

Scyld Software, a subsidiary of Penguin Computing, will unwrap an updated version of its cluster management software that features new monitoring capabilities based on the Ganglia standard as well as enhanced support for SATA blades servers, including those from Penguin Computing.

Scalix is expected to debut an improved version of its flagship e-mail and calendaring program that features a browser-based console for administrators with features for managing server processes, messaging queues, and default settings.

In Scalix Version 9.2, the company has also improved the product’s calendaring capabilities of its Web Access e-mail client by including a real time free/busy calendar lookup and interactive graphical interface.

It has also added an installation wizard to better ensure proper installations that helps guide administrators through a range of different diagnostic and installation steps to ensure that the correct versions of required system components are installed.