Software and hardware heavyweights plan raft of products, services at the show SEVERAL OF THE industry’s biggest companies will push Linux technologies closer to the data center by announcing a raft of enterprise-class products and Web-based services at this week’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York. Evidence of the steadily growing influence Linux is having on corporate IT shops is the presence top-ranking keynoters from IBM, Computer Associates, and Hewlett Packard. HP’s Carly Fiorina keynote speech Wednesday figures to kick off the show’s war of words on whose strategies best serve corporate users. And users are eager for guidance. ”We are coming up on a critical time here on making some fundamental decisions on which Linux road to travel,” said Josh Mitchell, CTO with a Virginia-based ISP. “It would be nice to hear more from the larger companies on how they are going to work with existing infrastructure products and who they will partner with in the Linux community to do it.” One of the verbal battles shaping up is between IBM and Sun Microsystems on using Linux-based operating systems, applications and tools on mainframes, as opposed to using it on distributed systems. At the conference, IBM will back up its mainframe point of view by taking the wraps off its first Linux-only zSeries mainframe, code-named Raptor. The system will not bundle one of IBM’s proprietary operating systems, although the version of Linux it will run will sport virtualization technology borrowed from IBM’s VM operating system. The system will be aimed much lower in the market than IBM’s other zSeries machines in hopes of ripping market share from Sun, Compaq and HP. Company officials claim the new system will reduce costs in several areas including having to hire more expensive administrators with mainframe expertise. Shahin Khan, the vice president and chief competitive officer for computing systems at Sun, criticized Big Blue’s efforts to advance Linux on the mainframe. “Linux on the mainframe makes little sense, it’s not free and the applications aren’t there yet. We think it’s just another way of using the Linux community for extending the life of the mainframe,” said Khan. Sun officials at the conference plan to back up their point of view by highlighting the options for the open source operating system on distributed platforms like Sun’s. ”Users also find that mainframes do not give you the same performance per buck as the hardware Linux is actually intended for. And it doesn’t solve any of the portability problems because almost none of the Linux apps run on S/390s (mainframes), unless they are recompiled,” said Simon Phipps, Sun’s Chief Technology Evangelist. Sun’s centerpiece announcement at the show is a version of its iPlanet Application Server for Linux, which the company intends to ship in this year’s second quarter. Company officials see this as the last piece to be put in place to complete a seamless development environment. Meanwhile, HP will introduce its ”carrier-grade” Linux servers, an expanding Linux consulting service, pay-per-use utility pricing for Linux products, and a Linux developer’s kit for HP’s Opencall software, according to Mike Balma, HP’s Linux business strategist. The HP carrier-grade servers are an off-shoot of HP’s recently announced Compact PCI/NEBs-based server blades, and are targeted at telecommunication providers looking to save time and money when dealing with large scale server deployments. HP sees Linux as ideal for telcos because the OS can be deployed on inexpensive, non-proprietary hardware, a point HP will use to hopefully lure customers away from Sun and its proprietary UltraSparc processor platform. “Clearly, Sun has a market presence in the carrier-grade space, and Sun clearly doesn’t have a Linux strategy, so we know there will be Sun customers migrating over to HP,” said Balma. HP’s new Global Deployment Services and Outsourcing program for Linux is similar to HP’s other operating system service programs, and will assist customers in understanding how best Linux fits into a network environment. A pay-per-use program for Linux products from HP will also be part of the new Linux program, according to HP. HP will now also embrace Linux with its Opencall management software, said Balma. Leading a torrent of announcements from Linux operating systems distributors, market leader Red Hat will debut several new offerings for its Red Hat Network that will allow corporate users to securely manage Linux deployments over the Web. The Red Hat Network Workgroup service is design to let administrators conserve IT resources by managing up to thousands of open source systems through a single Web interface. Ximian, meanwhile, will announce a change in the licensing of its Mono Project, an open-source project to deliver a Linux/Unix version of Microsoft’s .Net development framework. The company plans to release the project’s class libraries under the X11 license and not the GNU General Public license. Company officials believe the change makes sharing source code less restrictive thereby expanding the potential number of contributors. The company will also announce it has completed work on a self-hosting compiler that is compatible with Microsoft’s C# compiler, which will make finishing the Mono Project significantly easier. ”With a C# compiler we can develop the rest of Mono without using Microsoft’s .Net Framework. We think this is a significant breakthrough,” said Miguel de Icaza, Ximian’s CTO and co-founder. For its part, Computer Associates will roll out 23 products across all four of its six major brands. They include enterprise management updates to its UniCenter line, storage management enhancements to its BrightStor lineup, security management solutions for eTrust, and a number of application life cycle management products under its AllFusion line. On the tools side, Borland on Tuesday will spell out its C++ for Linux strategy, according to Alison Dean, a senior director of product marketing at Borland, in Scotts Valley, Calif. Also pushing Borland’s open source strategy, the company will demonstrate its Kylix open source application development platform, Dean said. Sun’s Linux server appliance arm Cobalt will be on hand at the tradeshow to introduce the latest version of Cobalt’s Qube server, a Internet or Intranet server for small businesses or large departmental work groups. Upgrades to Cobalt’s Qube include added security features for distributed LAN (local area network) environments, enhanced management features for improved data backup and network printing capabilities, as well as a sub-$1,000 price tag, according to Peder Ulander, a senior director at Cobalt. Compaq will be at Linux World making several announcements. At the show, Compaq officials will introduce several enterprise-class email solutions for Intel-based servers running Linux. The new offering will be the result of a teaming on Compaq and Sendmail, according to Compaq representatives. Compaq will also demonstrate its new ProLiant BL e-Class server blades, which launched the same week as the trade show. Platform Computing will use the trade show as a backdrop to launch its Clusterware Linux cluster management software, according to company representatives. Clusterware offers advanced workload, resource, and performance management for distributed Linux environments. Software Development