[DC LoCo] Red Hat and SUSE join IBM in new Linux system, Canonical opts out | ZDNet

[Kevin Cole]

Source:
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/red-hat-and-suse-join-ibm-in-new-linux-system-canonical-opts-out/10832

Red Hat & SUSE's Linux will be on IBM s new POWER servers, but not Ubuntu.

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Home / News & Blogs / Linux and Open Source Red Hat and SUSE join IBM in
new Linux system, Canonical opts out

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | April 25, 2012, 3:27pm PDT

Over a year in the making IBM has just

unveiled its new IBM PowerLinux Systems and Solutions. This new series of
Linux-specific POWER7 processor-based hardware comes with a choice of
either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server . It’s
designed for analyzing Big Data, managing industry-specific applications
and delivering open source infrastructure services for the mid market and
above. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, opted out of offering its Linux
on this new server family though.

According to IBM, “The new PowerLinux Solutions and supporting systems are
designed to provide customers with lower deployment time and costs, and
greater performance, dependability and workload density than competitive
x86 platforms at similar price points.” This is meant to complement IBM AIX
Unix and IBM i application requirements on Power Systems.

These are: IBM Power Linux Big Data Analytics Solution; IBM PowerLinux
Industry Application Solution, which is for business applications like SAP;
and IBM PowerLinux Open Source Infrastructure Services Solution. The last
provides virtual machine (VM) machine program PowerVM for PowerLinux
virtualization technology. This is designed to let companies deliver edge
services such as Web servers, email and social business collaboration more
cost effectively by using PowerLinux Systems than can be done with
commodity x86 servers.

So where was Canonical? The Isle of Man-based company has been working with
IBM on delivering Ubuntu Linux for the IBM’s System p mini-computers. But,
the partnership came to nothing.

Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, told me, “We don’t support POWER
because, by mutual agreement with IBM, there’s little to no overlap between
the POWER user base and Ubuntu. People are choosing Ubuntu for farms of
commodity servers, and POWER has been adopted for highly-specialized
mission-critical roles. If IBM ever wanted to reach either the cloud or
bulk computing market with POWER, then I expect the stats above would be
relevant for their choice of OS, because they reflect the real choices of
those markets.”

Be that as it may, IBM, Red Hat, and SUSE still believe that middle to
high-end servers can still deliver the enterprise goods
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