Novell plans an October launch for its Suse Linux Enterprise Real-Time product, an operating system geared for Wall Street traders and others who watch every microsecond of the clock.

Real-time operating systems can respond to external events within a guaranteed time frame, a feature that mainstream business computing doesn't generally require but that's necessary for some areas, such as aircraft radar. But in a move that indicates the flexibility of Linux, Novell plans to begin selling the real-time variant of the open-source operating system next month.

Novell planned to announce the product at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo on Oct. 9, said Justin Steinman, Novell's director of marketing for Linux and open-platform solutions. Novell would share the stage with Concurrent Computer, which did much of the engineering work behind the real-time version that Novell would market, he added.

Novell and Concurrent announced their first joint customer, Siemens Medical Solutions, which will use SLERT to power Magnetom magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning products.

Wall Street also was interested, for example, in recalculating investment portfolio risk and placing trades based in response to new information, Steinman said. One unnamed investment bank told Novell that for each thousandth of a second that its trading software can act faster than competitors' software, the company would see $100 million a year in new revenue.

But while Linux is adaptable, it can't do everything. Indeed, in some more demanding parts of the real-time market, its limitations become apparent--for example those that must be able to take actions every 10 millionths of a second--with each tick of a high-precision clock.

"If there are applications that need to have 10 microseconds every single time, that's what I call hard real-time. Linux isn't going to do that," said Glenn Seiler, senior manger of Linux platforms for Californian-based Wind River Systems.

Real-time operating systems are one component of the vast and diverse embedded computing market, which includes everything from cash registers and mobile phones to automotive telematics and wind turbine power plants.

One of the family
SLERT will be one of several members of the Suse Linux Enterprise product family, which already includes a server and desktop version of Linux introduced in July. The company is betting that an aggressive Linux strategy will help the company improve its overall financial performance and compete better with the top Linux seller, Red Hat.

SLERT is a joint effort. Novell, which has better name recognition and a larger sales force, will work on marketing SLERT, Steinman said. Concurrent has years of embedded operating system experience and helped with extensions to Linux that provide the real-time support. The two companies would share revenue, Steinman said.

While some real-time operating systems are found in small computing devices, SLERT is geared for larger systems such as multiprocessor servers. On one test on that type of system running the Ingres database over 28.8 million transactions, SLERT responded as fast as 11 millionths of a second and no slower than 27 millionths of a second, Novell said.

Novell's real-time Linux leader is Moiz Kohari, founder of the now-extinct Mission Critical Linux. (The company had some influential employees: Red Hat's chief technology officer, Brian Stevens, also had been Mission Critical Linux's CTO.)

The product won't be purchased the same way as Novell's other Linux versions, however. "Setting it up does require a consulting engagement" from Novell, which installs and tunes the software, Steinman said. "It isn't something you can take off the shelf and get up and running."