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HP Announces Linux High-End Workstations
montezuma writes "HP announced their high-end Visualize
workstations running Red Hat. " That XL550 looks
pretty spiffy. But its nice seeing that they're doin' it.
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They are using a Permedia2 based card which is a
nice OpenGL-card for non-games software,
atleast in NT. I hope that 3dlabs get there act
together and will start making sure their hardware
will be hardware-accelerated in XFree86.
Wouldn't mind getting a Oxygen-card
for use with Maya ( I just hope AW will port it someday).
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Posted by Buffy the Overflow Slayer:
I get the impression that HP, like SGI, is using Linux as their IA-32 Unix. I also noticed that their Linux boxes graphics have hardware 3-D support for OpenGL. It sounds interesting.
-buffy
About companies reading slashdot its user's web pages to become more informed: I get more visits from tide*.microsoft.com and its robots on my personal homepage than any other entity. Is there someone at Microsoft that likes me?
Makes me remember that song by Rockwell: Somebody's watching me.
After speaking with my HP sales rep, and this is VERY UN-OFFICIAL. They are planning to release Linux on the C and J class macinhes. They are working on certifying the OS to work with their stuff. It might be as early as Q1 next year, they are very excited about this, the reason I was talking ot him is he just sent a quote to me for a few machines and wanted tolet me know what difference there would be in the qoute if I went with Linux. I cannot go with Linux just yet as our apps are certified internally and Linux is pretty low on the certification priority list, but I hope next year we'll get around to making it a corporate standard. Before everyone flames me, I do not certify anything, I just submit my humble requests and hope, we already run everything that is mission critical on Sun or HP, using Solaris or HP-UX, which both work fine.
I am very happy to see HP doing this, it will show the large companies like the one I work for that Linux is a viable OS and not a joke. The high end offering we are no seeing is the step the manufactures have needed to take. This will snowball and we will see it happening. To quote Tony James " The Evolution Will Be Televised".
Oh and one more thing, this is a "Good Thing" lets not turn this whole topic into RH bashing. GET OVER IT. I don't use RH (although I might now) but hey all around this is getting Linux good attention, if you go to HP's site you don't see "Red Hat Linux Systems", you see "Linux Systems". They don't even say it's RH until you read the specs. RH!=Linux but Red Hat Linux=Linux, Debian!=Linux but Debian Linux=Linux. It doesn't matter what flavor they install, at least they are installing it.
I used to work for HP in both their 'Computer Products' org that makes PC's, etc & 'Professional Services' org that does tech consulting. That's why I still troll thru their web pages occasionally.
It appears that HP now considers Linux a 'supported operating system' which means that all
the seperate divisions will do what they think
is right for the Linux marketplace. This means
stuff like bundling Linux on x86's, providing end-user phone support, ensuring device drivers
are available, providing consulting services (there'll be a special group of consultants formed to do this) and generally incorporating Linux into what they do for other operating systems.
The day it becomes 'strategic' tho is probably
still a ways off for them. That will happen when
the PA-RISC system folks announce support for it - remember that unlike x86s, PA-RISC has only ever has HP-UX running on it.
Interestingly, SGI with Belluzzo, an ex-HP'er, seems to have picked up Linux much more quickly
and are doing more innovative things like XFS source, etc.
It may be the coop advertising. From what I hear, if you mention NT used in your products, 50% of your advertising being paid by Microsoft can make or break your advantage over competitors. So HP has some NT and Intel featured in their ads and may be getting most generous help. Granted, those advertisements seem like oxymorons to me: "the unstoppable Windows NT!" I have always viewed HP products as bulletproof lab equipment and calculators that retain full value over the decades. You just may have to do a Linux conversion with their computers so they may be useful after the first year.