LinuxWorld Next Week: Linux Heats Up

With LinuxWorld opening in San Francisco next week, there has been a crescendo of Linux activities and announcements, while I mourn the fact that my creative scheduling locked me into a week of east coast appointments.  But kindly vendors are, of course, busily briefing us so we can share some of the fun now and more next week, even without being there.

The real point of this article is to say that Linux is becoming more important as a mainstream platform over time.  Customers are considering it as a serious alternative and sometimes implementing on it.  ISVs are often porting to it.  The paraphernalia of Open Source – the development method, the licensing, and the support – is starting to change how we look at software more generally. 

Linux At Microsoft 

So it was with some surprise we discovered that there is a very smart guy at Microsoft, Peter Houston, who has the job of keeping track of the server industry.  Since this includes Linux, he keeps track of Linux on the both server and desktop, viewing Linux as a competitor.

Microsoft views the current use of Linux as a commodity operating system for commodity servers:  web servers, basic network infrastructure, some edge-of-network Email and routing.  These are places where it would be difficult for a vendor – hardware or software – to provide much differentiation, and decisions are based more on price than features.

We keep thinking that Microsoft must have some skunkworks projects to test their software on Linux “just in case” they need it.  After all, Microsoft is famous for making adjustments to marketplace conditions, as they did to the Internet.  They seem to just not think that’s necessary are even, I think, likely.  We can’t resist remarking that now that they run the Office Suite on Macintosh’s OS X operating system, a robust Linux variant, they’re only a fast port away from Linux, should they want to be.

We note that Microsoft has toned down its anti-Linux comments a bit and is more into treating it as just another element in a very heterogeneous market.

Linuxcare Offers Another Tool For VM Linux Users

We had really stopped paying attention to LinuxCare after its IPO got tabled and most of its staff disappeared.  We thought it was just another victim of the post-Internet Market Bubble.  But we were wrong.

LinuxCare, which has focused on providing support to big OEM Linux customers (IBM, HP) since 1998 has reconfigured itself to now offer enterprise software, targeted to the 17,000 users of IBM mainframes. 

Their new Levanta offering provides tools to support provisioning, configuration, and updating for VM systems running Linux.  Its major advantage is that it will allow a system administrator to manage two to three times as many Linux instances.  Exactly how many Linux instances Levanta on an IBM Z-class machine could support depends, of course, on just what the applications might be, but LinuxCare feels confident that they are talking about hundreds of instances of Linux, perhaps as many as 500, depending on the particular application mix.

It’s important to note what’s being offered here:  Levanta is not a Systems Management product – they cooperate with IBM’s Tivoli or other mainframe SMS products for such function.  Levanta is designed to permit day to day operation to be performed by administrative or Linux users, rather than IT staff with VM skills, via interfaces which will be familiar to each type of user, but someone with VM skills is still required to do the initial system set-up and tuning.

This is a mainframe product with, of course, mainframe-style pricing in the $150,000 plus 20% per year maintenance pricing range.  The product has been installed at Verizon and is being used at an IBM data center in Poughkeepsie (although it is not the basis of IBM’s own hosted Linux on VM offering).  It will shortly be announced on a major Financial Services customer as well.

We expect to offer more Linux news (some of it still embargoed) next week.

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