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.