Guild Companies

Hewlett-Packard, boasting once again that it has sold some $2 billion worth of Linux-related hardware, software, and services since it started pushing Linux with increasing aggressiveness in the past several years, rolled out at LinuxWorld this week some key products for Linux that will help it peddle even more products in the future. The products are focused on systems management and clustering software that HP already sells for Windows and/or Unix platforms.

HP also boasts that it has over 5,000 Linux services and support people, which it calls the biggest such organization in the world, and it is clear that HP wants them to get to work installing this advanced software on behalf of new and existing customers.

HP has, after quietly promising to do so for nearly a year, rolled out the Linux edition of its HP ProLiant Essentials Rapid Deployment Pack. Up until now, this software, which is used to provision and reprovision Windows-based ProLiant machines (including its ProLiant BL blade servers), has only been available on Windows machines. What this has meant is that companies who wanted to install racks of Linux servers nonetheless needed to have some Windows servers to administer their machines if they wanted to use the HP tools. The Rapid Deployment Pack Linux Edition is, like the Windows Edition, based on systems provisioning software developed by Altiris, which also sells provisioning software for desktop environments. This tool allows to bring in new servers and populate them with a full software stack in a matter of minutes, and can also be used to reprovision a server in the event that its job in a rack or cluster needs to change quickly.

HP has also announced a basic network management program for Linux system administrators called OpenView Network Node Manager Starter Edition for Linux. The new OpenView GlancePlus for Linux is another OpenView program that has been ported to Linux that allows administrators to monitor the performance of Linux applications in real-time and perform diagnostics on machines when applications go haywire. HP has also announced the OpenCall Media Platform for Linux, which is a carrier-grade multimedia server that can act as a voicemail and voice portal application as well as providing mass alarming and mass alerting support to such systems for internal communications and external ones with partners and customers. The OpenCall Media Platform is based on a derivative of XML called VoiceXML.

On the clustering front, the company announced an enhanced version of HP ServiceGuard for Linux. ServiceGuard is the high availability clustering software that HP developed for its HP-UX servers. The enhanced version for Linux supports HA clustering for Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for clusters with up to 16 nodes. The tool has support for clustering MySQL and Oracle databases, and has specific tweaks for the ProLiant server and StorageWorks storage arrays that work with them. Later this year, HP will roll out support for ServiceGuard on Red Hat and SuSE Linuxes running on its 64-bit Itanium Integrity server line.

For customers who want to buy ready-to-run Linux clusters for high performance computing, HP rolled out the High Performance Linux Compute (HPC-LC) line of ProLiant clusters, which include clusters based on the entry two-way ProLiant DL360 and DL380 servers. The HPC-LC clusters come prefabbed from the factory with 16 to 128 nodes in a cluster. HP's Parallel Database Cluster for Linux on Oracle is what HP is calling a do-it-yourself cluster kit for Oracle clusters. (Not a pretty concept.) HP is also rolling out a clustering option for companies using IBM Domino groupware and e-mail servers on Linux machines called ProLiant Server Solutions for Lotus Domino. This bundle includes ProLiant servers running Linux, SteelEye's LifeKeeper clustering middleware for Linux, StorageWorks Modular SAN Array 1000s, and the Rapid Deployment Pack for Linux.