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IBM to Offer Linux Software
ChrisKo writes: "Article on how IBM is going to start offering software for Linux" Specifically DB2 and WebSphere. Talks about other Linux related stuff too, and says that Linux is the #2 OS. Not sure who's #1.
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The Reuters author appears to have got it slightly wrong. IBM have been shipping DB2 and several other applications for Linux for some time now. The real news is that IBM are now shipping and supporting it not only on Intel-based clusters, but also on multiple VM instances of Linux on big iron. Enterprise Linux Today explains it better here.
This is a follow-on from IBM's recent announcement of a significant win at Telia, the Swedish telecomms conpany. Telia tossed out a room full of Solaris servers (the exact number seems to vary between articles), and replaced it with one big fault-tolerant hunk of IBM, running multiple Linux VMs.
The term "VM" normally makes one think of Java, but IBM has been doing VMs for a long time. Their mainframe HW lets you runs multiple simultaneous instances of OS, each called a Virtual Machine. You can take down and restart VMs without affecting its neighbor VMs: very handy for 24x7 ops. Each VM gets a dedicated slice of storage and memory, but can share HW infrastructure like I/O.
Until now, you had to use IBM OSes to do this, e.g. VM/VMS, aka OS/390. Now you can do it on Linux. If I were an ISP/ASP, I would find this very interesting. Bravo Alan Cox for making this happen.