Novell, HP to Sell Preconfigured Linux-JBoss-Oracle Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about proprietary minicomputers from the 1980s and 1990s such as IBM's AS/400s, Digital Equipment's VAXes, and Hewlett-Packard's HP 3000s was that when you bought one of these machines, it had everything you needed on it: server hardware, operating system, database, and development tools. It was an entire computing platform, nearly devoid of choice, which greatly simplified things. Of course, this lack of choice within a platform and the incompatibilities between such platforms is what spawned the Unix movement, which was all about standardization and driving down costs.

The Unix movement spawned a diverse ecosystem of software with a dizzying variety of applications, and because Linux is very similar to Unix (and in some important ways, essentially compatible with it), the Linux movement has been able to springboard itself using the large portfolio of Unix applications, which have been ported to Linux in huge numbers. And while all of this variety is great, for the small- and medium-sized businesses that would have acquired proprietary minicomputers one or two decades ago or the current ones who just move to Windows applications because that is what they are familiar with, the large number of options for Linux is as much a hurt as it is a help. Small businesses in particular do not want too many choices, and they certainly do not want to integrate their own operating system and middleware stacks. They want to buy something that looks and feels more like a minicomputer.

To that end, commercial Linux distributor Novell is working with a number of key players in the hardware and software rackets to validate a stack of mixed open and closed source software that can be acquired from either Novell or its hardware partner in the offering--in this case, Hewlett-Packard--and is certified to work together.

While idealists in the open source community would probably like to see a completely open source stack of software certified and prebundled on servers for easy consumption by SMB shops, the reality is and will continue to be that many customers will need a mix of open and closed source software that will be driven not by desire, but by the needs of their applications. After I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond many years ago, I was committed to the idea of using open source software top to bottom to host this company's business. But a number of the applications I needed were Windows-only applications, which pretty much killed that idea. Mixed source is going to be the way of the world in corporations for this very reason, no matter how much we all want to be open source idealists (some might say zealots). By announcing a mixed source solution stack that comes through its partnerships, Novell is being practical, which it needs to be if it hopes to make money in the Linux and open source software business.

The initial mixed source stack from Novell includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 running on HP's two-way ProLiant BL20p and four-way BL30p blade servers, which are based on Intel's Xeon processors. On top of that, Novell and HP have added the JBoss Application Server 4.0, the latest version of the JBoss Web application server and the first open source app server that is J2EE compliant. Then, Novell is adding Oracle's 10g relational database and Real Application Clusters extensions for parallel processing support for databases.

The mixed source stack is the first product to come out of the Validated Configuration Program that Novell announced at its annual BrainShare user group meeting in Salt Lake City back in March. At the time, Novell promised validated stacks of software running on HP iron in the areas of security, high availability, virtualization, systems management and monitoring, and application hosting, and said it would also deliver a stack for transaction processing environments. The mixed source stack appears to be an example of the latter.

Both Novell and HP will sell the validated stack, with shipments beginning in the third quarter. Novell says the validation data for the mixed stack--including performance testing, recommended configurations, and best practices for deploying the mixed stack--will be available sometime in June.

The two companies say they are working with Oracle to create more mixed stacks, and given what Novell said in March, it will very likely partner with other hardware and software suppliers. For instance, if you want to sell Linux to SMBs to run basic accounting or infrastructure workloads, a blade server is probably not as good of an option as a tower server because it is a bit too alien to them. So Novell and HP had better get more ProLiant servers certified to run the stack. And not all potential Linux shops buy HP iron, so Novell has to partner with IBM, Dell, and possibly Fujitsu-Siemens (particularly in Europe and especially in Germany) to be able to peddle the mixed stack offering.