Among the major server vendors, IBM is emerging with a clear story of end-to-end support for Linux that can't help but give the operating system a boost in the eyes of corporate information technology managers.
IBM is expected to announce it will support Linux on its Intel-based Netfinity line of servers, offering certification to distributors that Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE and TurboLinux run on its servers. In addition it will offer 90 days of free service and support for customers installing Linux on Netfinity hardware through its Personal Systems Group.
IBM (www.ibm.com) has already announced it was offering contract support for Linux through its Global Services Unit. It will finish moving its DB2 relational database system to Linux at the end of July and will make the Lotus Notes Domino Web server available under Linux by year's end. With software and services in place, the last piece of IBM's Linux strategy was hardware support.
"IBM is doing more than the other major vendors. It's shown a lot of nimbleness at picking up on hot new technologies," said John Ousterhout, chief executive officer of Scriptics, the company behind the open source code Tcl scripting language.
The only hardware vendor that has moved to back the open source code operating system similar to IBM has been SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics Inc.), which is a sponsor of the Samba project for file exchange between Linux and Windows NT, and contributor of its Irix' sophisticated journaling file system.
But IBM's recent efforts still dwarf those moves. And the company is far from done.
John Prial, director of Linux marketing at IBM, said the company plans to move a broad suite of middleware software and specialized capabilities to the Linux platform. For example, both IBM's message-oriented middleware, MQ Series, for connecting one application with another, and its ViaVoice software for issuing voice commands to a computer or giving it voice word processing dictation will be moved to Linux by the end of the year.
IBM also is believed to be bringing its clustering expertise to bear on Linux in a lab project set up last May with TurboLinux.
In addition, IBM is addressing advanced storage for Linux by creating a driver for its Netfinity 5500 RAID array or redundant array of inexpensive disks, which it will donate to Linux' open source code pool, said Tom Figgatt, e-business executive for the Netfinity unit.
