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HP Embraces Linux for its Toughest Servers
Colmao writes "Investor's Business Daily wrote up an article interviewing Martin Fink, the head of HP's NonStop Unit. From the article'In a move that suggests Linux is finally ready for prime time, Hewlett-Packard is giving the free software a bigger role on some of its toughest servers.' NonStop servers are HP's most costly machines. They are designed to be always on, mission critical appliances. They are used to run some of the world's stock markets. Linux is making big moves in the datacenter and getting some much needed exposure."
>in a move that suggests Linux is finally ready for prime time
Again? I think the last time was when it was let known that linux run several important systems in stock and other vital exchanges.
Eh?
HPs Desktop business is dealing commodity hardware for 'mom and pop' kinda people who need to check their e-mail, browse the web and share videos with family etc.
I can totally see why Linux is unsupported on their desktop systems, it's a pure business decision due to the relatively tiny number of Linux users buying their systems.
On the other hand their server business is the exact opposite due to the increasing market share Linux is getting in the data centre. Linux has already proved it's self on their entry and mid-range servers for a number of years now and their finally giving it the break into mission-critical data centres that it deserves.
Looking at the parents comment they have never dealt with HP servers running Linux, or indeed HP servers running anything. The platform support package (PSP) is great, it includes industrial strength drivers for their RAID cards, power management interfaces and even utilities to toggle the maintainance LED.
All in all HP could be called double faced, but the amount of development work required to make/certify drivers for all the desktop hardware they make just isn't worth it just to persuade the few Linux users that haven't heard the HP Desktop horror stories to buy their systems.
Considering
- Linux is the leading OS in the Top-500 supercomputers, and
- Linux runs large clusters such as Google, and
- Linux runs
a bunch of stuff for Schwab, ETrade, etc -
- and this other computer company that's a bit bigger than HP called IBM already noticed Linux
I think this article is badly misnamed.The article should have been titled
"Linux Propelling HP into Truly 'Big' Time".
I own a hp laptop and i cant get some of it's features to work under Linux. ...
They put on their most expensive hardware an OS that they don't support.
What to make of this?
HP is a massive company with ~150,000 workers (minus those cuts that are about to happen). The team that does the very high end systems discussed in this article have very little to do with the team that designed your laptop, other than getting a paycheck from the same company. They have far different interests and customer needs than the laptop people do. Linux has very limited penetration and market share on laptops but a large and increasing share of the server market.
Don't worry about IBM. Having core developers in-house
boosts their services part. If HP cuts their devs
and goes with Linux without R&D part in place then
their efforts to develop their service business
(something they dearly want) will hit the wall sooner
rather than later.
Further, IBM has spent enormous sums of money to ensure that Linux is reliable.
They haven't even spent a fraction of the amount of money that they would have in developing their own operating system from scratch.
IBM will soon discover that this aspect of Linux is the Achille's heel of open source.
I'm sure they were already aware that contributing to a GPL project means other people can use your code.
By using Linux, HP essentially gets a free ride from IBM and need not spend the money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM has already done the work.
I doubt IBM spent any time worrying about how to support the sort of redundancy that goes into the NonStop servers. HP would have had to contribute a lot of that themselves, and guess what? IBM gets access to all that code.
:wq