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IBM (Offically) Launches Linux Box Clustering
Neumsy writes " IBM has offically announced that it is releasing Linux-Based Server, Software Packages. Yahoo! News has the story . According to IBM, this will expand the use of Linux. It's a good overview article. Not too much in depth, but still nice to see Linux getting out there more and more."
A lot of people seem to confuse what the posters say (which is in quotes btw) and what the Slashdot crew says. Of course, either is just as likely to be spelled incorrectly :).
What's even more fun is that Linux has now received some serious television advertising. Up until now (at least in my area) the only "advertising" Linux has received has been the mention of Linux as a possible training route at the computer schools popping up all over the place, as well as being lumped in with all the "UNIX systems that will crash at Y2K because it's so old, but you don't have to worry because nobody uses UNIX any more." -- that was said on one of the news stations here. I sent an e-mail to the channel's producers explaining to them that the use UNIX every day to run their servers (they were running Solaris), produce their graphics (they were running IRIX), and so on. I never heard back from them.
Anyway, this advertising thing is something I've been wishing I could do for a long time. It's one of the few things still really holding Linux back. I've just never had enough money to put together a campaign, and that's the major shortcoming of Linux: lack of awareness due to lack of significant cash flow. This, together with the DoJ statement that Microsoft can no longer use boot loader restrictions to leverage its monopoly position, will lead to a truly competitive desktop OS market in the near future (I say desktop OS because Linux is already taking over the servers, as evidenced by this commercial).
A solution to the problem with music today
Isn't this article more about Tivoli on linux and less about clustering?
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Keep in mind it's IBM software on linux that IBM promotes more than linux (partly because AIX is so lame and was never that widely adopted)
I wouldn't say that Linux was a direct competitor against MS. Instead, I'd say it was an alternative.
Competitor implies that they're working towards a common goal, just using different methods.
What most people fail to understand about this type of cluster (high-performance, rather than high-availability) is that your apps don't *magically* become faster because you have N more nodes to run them on. Cluster applications require coding to an interface such as MPI or PVM to reap the benefits of the hardware. I don't know of any MPI-aware Quake or Apache servers though ;-)