It's Check-Out Time For All Proprietary Unix - LinuxWorld Expo - Industry Trend or Event

Computer Technology Review, March, 2000 by Dave Trowbridge

Linus is laughing all the way to the bank.

Linus Torvalds is, of course, the poster boy of the open-source movement, but Jimmy Durante could serve, as well. While I was wandering through LinuxWorld Expo at Javits Center last month, his famous phrase came repeatedly to mind: "Everybody's getting' inta the act!" And no wonder. The tidal wave of creativity unleashed by open-source software is creating profit opportunities at every level and in every channel of the computing industry. When a solution is based on a free operating system and largely commodity hardware, the sale is a pure value-add proposition: any proprietary lock-in can come only from the knowledge and expertise of the VAR, systems integrator, or ISV. The result is frenzied competition among vendors to supply integrators with the platforms--software and hardware--upon which to build their solutions.

So, it was no surprise to see the likes of IBM, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett Packard, Sun, and other major players banging the Linux drum in New York. What follows is a brief overview of some of the news and offerings at the show, in no particular order, illustrating the myriad of opportunities that await VARs and other integrators who hop on board the open-source bandwagon.

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls

It tolls for proprietary Unix, which is being chased steadily up the ladder into the rarified areas of enterprise computing, which demand 24x7 reliability, fault-tolerance, and other capabilities where Linux and BSD are still weak. Given the performance and stability of Open-Source Unix (OSU) on commodity Intel hardware, there's little or no justification for proprietary Unix at the low end of the computing market. All of the proprietary Unix vendors have seen the handwriting on the wall and were touting their open-source strategies at the show.

IBM has taken a leadership role in this effort, while simultaneously hedging their bets with Project Monterey, a joint effort with SCO and Intel to develop an enterprise-strength Unix standard for the IA-64 processor. The company has already made all of the components of its E-business offering available on Linux, including the DB2 database, the WebSphere application server (based on the Apache web server engine, Lotus Domino, MQSeries messaging, Tivoli system management tools, and several development tools). IBM's NetFinity servers are already certified for the Caldera, Red Hat, SuSE, and TurboLinux distributions and the company has announced its intention to make all of its platforms, including the S/390 mainframe, "Linux friendly."

At the show, IBM and Caldera Systems announced a free developer's kit aimed at application development for small business, along with no-charge support for registered developers and marketing incentives for ISVs. (This is very much in line with Caldera's emphasis on business-oriented Linux--their retail distribution is admittedly more a form of advertising than anything else.) Along with DB2, WebSphere, and Domino, the kit includes the IBM Developer Kit for Linux, Java Technology Edition, and IBM VisualAge for Java for Linux. The kit is supported on both Caldera OpenLinux and Red Hat Linux and will be expanded to include other distributions.

Silicon Graphics, which has seen its Unix market share steadily erode, made a big Linux splash at the show. Ironically, since the company has virtually no presence in low-end Unix anymore, it is, perhaps, better situated to exploit the OSU phenomenon than any other proprietary Unix vendor, not having to worry about cannibalizing its own products. The company rolled out a new Linux server platform, the SGI 1200, an Internet server based on that platform, the SGI Advanced Clustering Environment, and global Linux services, along with a host of supporting programs. SGI also announced the availability of IBM's DB2 database on the SGI 1200 and 1400 Linux-based servers.

The SGI 1200 is a 2U form factor rack mount server that comes preinstalled with Red Hat Linux 6.1 and SGI-specific enhancements (open-source). It features one or two Intel Pentium III processors, up to 2GB SDRAM memory and up to four Ultra2 SCSI disks. Designed specifically for ISPs, Application Service Providers (ASPs), and co-location facilities, the SGI Internet Server is based on the SGI 1200 and includes Internet-specific management, monitoring, and security tools with integrated basic services for Web serving and messaging. The SGI Advanced Cluster Environ-ment (ACE) is touted as an economical solution for compute-intensive environments; the company points to existing implementations such as the 132-processor SGI 1400L cluster at the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Hewlett-Packard also supports Linux and offers it on its NetServer line of Intel-based servers. At the show, the company announced the upcoming availability of its OpenMail 6.0 messaging and collaboration solution on Linux (now in beta); a 50-user version will be available via free download. OpenMail is unique as the only Unix-based messaging server that supports the rich functionality of Microsoft Outlook, including full wide-area calendar/schedule access. Hewlett-Packard also announced expanded support for Linux, regardless of the distribution, showed hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on Linux workstations, and detailed its plans to release to open source its large model-rendering toolkit.