Guild Companies

There are very few top-tier server vendors that do not have their own Unix operating systems. Unisys sells proprietary mainframes and is the staunchest supporter of Microsoft's Windows Datacenter Server, which is geared for its 32-way ES7000 enterprise servers. Dell doesn't have such a big box or its own Unix, but it has thrown its weight behind Linux as a commercial server OS, as it demonstrated at the LinuxWorld show held this week in San Francisco.

While Sun Microsystems has finally woken up to the real threat that Linux poses to its Unix server business (see the separate story in this issue about Sun's new Linux server), vendors like IBM and Hewlett-Packard have long since figured out that they were going to lose a big portion of their more-or-less-proprietary Unix server sales to Linux boxes, especially for uniprocessor and two-way machines running infrastructure workloads. The two big threats all of these Unix players face is first and foremost each other, especially as they pound on each other relentlessly to win all the midrange and enterprise Unix server business they can in a market that is severely tight. But the other big threat they all face is Dell, which doesn't have a high-profit Unix business to protect and doesn't want to do anything but cut all three of these vendors off at the knees. Windows servers and Linux servers are the battle axes that Dell is using to take business away from the Unix players. Linux is an increasingly important weapon for Dell as it aspires to not just be the dominant Wintel server vendor (a position it held until HP bought Compaq this year), but to effectively take a big chunk of the vast installed base of Unix servers and convert them to Linux running on its PowerEdge servers. There's about $25 billion at stake in the Unix server market, and Dell can surely make a dent here with Linux if it positions Linux as a version of Unix that is appropriate for all entry machines, most midrange machines, supercomputer clusters, and even some small enterprise machines (this is what an eight-way server is).

This is, as Dell announced this week, the company's exact plan. Dell announced that it has extended its One Source Alliance with Red Hat with a set of services to help migrate users from Unix to Linux servers. Dell is also gunning for new Unix business with a set of new applications running on Red Hat's Linux Advanced Server (which scales to eight-way SMP on Intel-based servers) and supporting Oracle's Oracle9i database and Real Application Cluster database clustering software. HP announced a similar deal with Red Hat and Oracle back in June, you'll remember, so Dell is not alone in seeing that the combination of Linux and Oracle is the way to push into the datacenter. Incidentally, it was the dynamic duo of Sun's Solaris Unix operating system and Oracle databases that got Sun to be a contender in the data center against proprietary mainframe and minicomputers from IBM, HP, Digital, Data General, and others. This trick works, and the fact that Digital and Data General no longer exist as separate companies only proves it.

The techies at Dell's Professional Services organization, who have been recommending and installing Linux on Dell's PowerEdge machines for three years, have brushed up on their Unix knowledge and will work with the techies at Red Hat who also know a thing or two about Unix and, after a few years of wrangling with the enterprise, commercial applications that are suited to Unix or Linux environments. As part of the One Source Alliance between Dell and Red Hat, commercial Linux server customers can talk directly to Dell and Red Hat engineers and can even get access to some of the core coders behind the open source Linux development effort. As part of its Linux offering for PowerEdge machines, Dell is offering a three-year subscription to Linux Advanced Server from Red Hat, which matches the three-year premier enterprise service maintenance contracts from Dell. Pricing for the Unix-to-Linux migration projects is based on the scope of the porting project; Dell says that, for instance, it can do a total cost of ownership assessment on Unix platforms migrating to Linux platforms for about $5,000. Custom services for integrating Linux and the Oracle database and middleware are available now, and packaged solutions that can be dropped wholesale into datacenters are expected to be ready by the end of the year.

In addition to the Red Hat and Oracle deal, Dell also announced this week at LinuxWorld that it has enhanced its High Performance Computing Clusters program, which was announced in February and which provides ready-to-run Linux supercomputer clusters for commercial, government, and research institutions. Dell says that it can now deliver 128-node machines in its HPCC configurations, with each node being a two-way PowerEdge server running either Pentium III Xeon or Xeon DP processors. Dell sells prebundled Linux clusters with 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 nodes. An eight-node Linux cluster sells for about $75,000.