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IBM, Red Hat Partner to Bring Linux Skills and Services to Big Blue's Partners

Server maker IBM and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat late last week said that they would work together to make it easier for Linux application developers better support IBM's server products and to help application developers from other non-Linux platforms better support Linux running on IBM's servers.

IBM partners with both Red Hat and Novell for Linux support on its four key servers--xSeries, pSeries, iSeries, and zSeries--and the two vendors have forged progressively tighter relationships as Linux has matured in the IT market. With the latest expanded partnership with Red Hat, the two companies are equipping 15 innovation centers around the world with Red Hat servers and peripheral equipment so software developers can come to the centers to do development, porting, and testing of applications they want to create for Linux or to move to Linux from other platforms. According to Todd Chase, the program director for IBM's innovation centers, this deal with Red Hat brings that company up to parity with a deal Big Blue announced with Novell earlier this year.

Not only do the centers have lots of different iron running Linux as well as IBM's own software stack for Linux, but they have onsite experts from both companies as well as development tools and training. The use of the innovation centers is free for IBM's business partners. "But we're not going to write their code," says Chase with a laugh. "That's where we draw the line." Chase says that IBM had 400 software vendors use the innovation centers to port applications to Linux in 2004, and that it has helped that many vendors do Linux ports between January and August of this year. Now that Red Hat tools, training (including 29 Red Hat courses and human instructors) and expertise is on site, the number of ISVs coming in is bound to accelerate. By the way, if you want to port your Linux applications to other non-IBM middleware, you have to bring your own code and experts, since IBM is not going to help you port code to a competitor's middleware stack.

Teradata Picks SUSE for Linux Version of Its Data Warehousing Software

The Teradata division of NCR announced this week that it has ported its eponymous data warehousing software from NCR's Unix SVR4 MP-RAS implementation of Unix (which runs on X86 and X64 iron) to Linux, and said further that it had chosen Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 server as the official Linux for the NCR 5400 Xeon-based servers that are at the heart of the Teradata platform. Teradata's Unix implementation is still a 32-bit implementation, which means that it cannot take advantage of the 64-bit Xeon hardware that NCR is shipping. NCR already supports the 64-bit implementation of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 platform, and is now adding the 64-bit version of SLES 9 to the mix. The SLES 9 support is in beta now, and is expected to be available in early 2006. The Teradata data warehouses already have tools that support the loading of data from Red Hat and SUSE Linuxes as well as access to data warehouses from these two Linux platforms. No word on when or if NCR will deliver Red Hat support as a platform for its Teradata platform.

Dell Becomes Top Linux Server Shipper for the First Time

In a bit of news that is sure to annoy both IBM and Hewlett-Packard but which surely will not come as much of a surprise, Dell was crowned king of Linux-based server shipments worldwide in the second quarter by IDC. This is the first time that Dell has been the top Linux server shipper on a worldwide basis; it has been the dominant Linux server shipper in the United States and in Japan for a while.

Dell also announced that it was expanding its support of Linux on its OptiPlex and Dimension PC platforms, and has even gone so far of allowing customers to choose FreeDOS as a viable operating system on its desktops. While FreeDOS is interesting in that it is an open source clone of Microsoft's DOS, it is really just a way to get a bare-bones operating on the desktop PC that is not Windows or Linux but which makes the machine usable in some ways.n Dell needs to offer FreeDOS on its so-called "n-series" desktops because there are actually customers out there who do not want to pay for a Windows operating system that they never intend to use. Can you imagine such a thing? I'd bet Bill Gates can't.

Turbolinux Creates New Partner Program

Japanese commercial Linux distributor Turbolinux announced last week that it has created a new worldwide partner program called TurboLINKS that it hopes will help it improve the richness of hardware and application support for its implementation of Linux.

Unlike prior partner programs at the company, the TurboLINKS partner program is being offered to companies outside of Japan. While Turbolinux is arguably the dominant Japanese version of Linux, there are obviously companies who are from outside of Japan that make hardware (servers, desktops, and laptops as well as other embedded devices) that they would like to sell into the Japanese market, and they need operating systems to do that. Linux can be a key differentiator. Similarly, companies who want to break into the Japanese market have a much more limited set of platforms on which they can support their applications. And because Turbolinux supports Chinese as well as Japanese, the partner initiative can be a stepping stone into the Chinese market as well. The new partner program is in beta right now, and will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.

External Disk Market Continues to Grow, According to IDC

Moore's Law has not slowed down the server disk market, not even a little, according to research by IDC. In the second quarter of this year, IDC believes that companies sold $3.8 billion in external disk arrays, up 8.6 percent even after aggressive increases in drive and array capacity and vicious price cutting. Total disk revenue (including internal arrays shipped with servers) grew by 9.9 percent to $5.6 billion, the highest growth rate in the past two years. A whopping 457 petabytes of capacity shipping in the second quarter, up 59.3 percent from this time last year.

Across all types of storage, Hewlett-Packard was the dominant vendor of disk arrays, with $1.313 billion in sales, up 13.9 percent and giving it a 23.5 percent share of the $5.596 billion market. IBM was close behind HP, with $1.146 billion in sales, up 13.2 percent and giving Big Blue a 20.5 percent share. EMC came in third, with $807 million in sales, up 9.6 percent, followed by Dell with $463 million in sales (up 26.7 percent) and Sun Microsystems with $339 million in sales, down 10.4 percent. Other vendors accounted for $1.529 billion in sales, which was up 5.8 percent over last year's second quarter and which accounted for 27.3 percent of all array sales in the quarter.

Exabyte Says VXA and LTO Are the Fastest-Growing Products in Its History

Exabyte is one of the pioneers in tape storage technology for midrange servers, and got its start as the first company to bring 8mm tape technology developed by Sony to IT-related tape drives. Like many storage companies, Exabyte is located in Boulder, Colorado, which has been a hotbed for storage technology (pun intended) for years. Exabyte is one of the big backers of VXA and LTO tape technologies, and it was bragging recently about how well these two have been doing in the market, particularly in the SMB customer base where Exabyte has always been a key supplier of raw tape decks.

Exabyte also wants to sell autoloaders for these two tape technologies, and that is why it wanted to make sure that everyone knows that LTO shipments in the midrange market are expected to be up 35 percent in 2005, compared to 2 percent shipment growth for the overall market, according to forecasts made by IDC. And while low-end tape drive shipments contracted by 7 percent, VXA shipments are expected to grow by 86 percent this year. It is no surprise, then, that Exabyte's Magnum 1x7 LTO Autoloader and VXA PacketLoader 1x10 automated tape loaders are among the most popular products in Exabyte's 20-year history.

Oracle to Buy Siebel for $5.85 Billion

Oracle launched itself into the number one spot for CRM software in the world when it agreed last week to buy Siebel Systems for $10.66 per share, or $5.85 billion. While Siebel has struggled over the past few years, the Bay Area firm still commanded respect in the CRM sector, an area of the enterprise application market that the company and its founder, Thomas Siebel, largely defined. Oracle, which has its own line of CRM software (as well as two other lines of CRM software acquired from PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards), gains Siebel's 4,000 customers and 3.4 million end users--a sizable installed base by any measure.

The acquisition promises to be relatively quick and painless, especially compared to Oracle's 18-month hostile takeover bid of PeopleSoft, which eventually succeeded late last year. The Siebel board of directors has approved the acquisition, and Thomas Siebel, the chairman, has promised to vote his shares in support of the transaction. The acquisition does not require a vote by Oracle shareholders, and barring any unforeseen actions by government regulators, the acquisition should close in early 2006.