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IBM Invests $50M in Novell, May Ship SUSE Linux
dave writes "Novell announced that it has finalized a $50 million investment from IBM, and that IBM can now begin shipping SUSE Linux on all IBM server platforms. Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,' and one has to wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come."
HP and Novell are putting SUSE on it's desktops and laptops.
> Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,'
This would explain why we have been running SuSE on our mainframes for the last two years then.
IBM has had marketing agreements with Red Hat, SuSE and and TurboLinux for quite some time. It may favour Red Hat in the States, but it seems quite agnostic about which distribution to recommend to customers.
You must have been out of the IT world for quite a while. IBM sells:
- intel servers (running linux or windows)
- AMD opteron servers (SUSE has an AMD64 port)
- power processor boxes (running AIX and linux)
A press release from 2000: SuSE delivers Enterprise Linux for IBM RS/6000
They are THE major player in the very large server market, however they are still a formitable competitor in the medium-sized to Pentium-class server market.
And for good reason. IBM packages their servers with a LOT of goodies. IBM Director (formerly known as Tivoli) comes free with every server. And now we're getting SuSE.
IBM has been far from a "Red Hat shop" in the past. SuSE has had -- until the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 -- better mainframe support, and SuSE's Enterprise distros for the Power architecture (pSeries & iSeries) has also been better.
/. anyway; why clutter a good post up with verifiable facts). IBM has also had a relationship with Red Hat (Hardware Management Consoles for the partitionable pSeries boxes use a customized RH distro), so it's not like they've been *only* SuSE.
You've been able to get SuSE Enterprise for Power with your pSeries box for a while now (sorry, no time to look up specifics, and this is
Remember, at one time, in the not-to-distant past, IBM was a "partner" with 4 different Linux distributors: Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and (gasp) Caldera. So, you might as well say IBM's been a "SCO shop" for a while, too.....
Out of the IT World? More like off of the planet!
IBM is the #3 server vendor in the world behind HP and Dell. They have about 15% market share. IBM has been investing billions into Linux and the types of servers that would support it best (notably blade servers -- perfect for grids).
In December 2000 IBM committed to invest $1Billion in Linux software, hardware, services, the open source community and partnerships during 2001. That's only 2001! If anything, they have only increase their rate of investment.
Add to all of this their strong commitment to WebSphere and Java, and you have a company that has more than embraced Linux. When IBM invested 2.5 Billion in a new semiconductor manufacturing facility,they automated the facility using Linux.
Come back to our world where Big Blue is bigger & bluer than ever!
Harbinger of things to come is the latest phrase from the department of redundancy department.
A harbinger describes things to come, so this phrase is equal to "A fortelling of things to come of things to come". Not only that, but Merriam-Webster (my online dictionary of choice, since dictionary.com implemented annoying popups and banners that give people siezures) lists 2b (n. one that foreshadows what is to come) as a precursor to the modern definition (one that pioneers or initiates a major change). Not that "an initiator of major change to come" makes much more sense, as "initiator of major change" already implies something is to come.
~Will
sig?
Reliability. They are also faster than x86, especially in read/write to the HDD. Stripped arrays are fast.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
NOVELL has decided to go with KDE as desktop rather than GNOME.
Read more here. This is a direct quote from Novells Chris Stone.
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