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Hindsight as Foresight

Hindsight is a great thing. It allows us to re-create history, typically in our favor. For example, a husband and a wife have an argument. The next day, he's sure he won and she's sure she did. And when they kiss and make up, each thinks he or she was the victor.

Certainly, this applies to the computer industry, as well. In 50 years, everyone will be saying that of course they knew Linux would become a computing standard. That it was once a niche player little known outside the open-source community will have become a mere footnote in the history of the industry, conveniently forgotten in a haze of selective memory.

Now that IBM (in a remarkable fit of foresight) has embraced Linux, allowing it to run on all of its eServer platforms, its customers are taking second and third looks at it, and many of them are deciding that if they're going to run Linux, they might as well run it on IBM* iron.

A marketing coup, certainly, but more important, this marriage of Linux and IBM POWER* technology has become a boon to IBM customers. They no longer have to rely solely on PC servers to run it, if they ran it at all. They can now consolidate those myriad Linux boxes onto a single server--or a group of tightly integrated servers--and realize the benefits of the reliability, availability and scalability of the IBM eServer line.

While Linux can run on the iSeries*, xSeries* and zSeries* servers, not to mention the IBM eServer BladeCenter* JS20 POWER-based blade, it's perhaps being adopted most prevalently on the pSeries* server. This may be because the UNIX* OS and Linux share common functionality. As a result, the Linux learning curve for pSeries administrators already familiar with UNIX OSs is short, making it the perfect environment for Linux to proliferate and eventually become ubiquitous.

As Brian Connors, IBM's vice president of Linux on POWER, remarks, "Once users get Linux running next to their main operating system, they're likely to turn to it when they begin looking at new workloads, 64-bit computing, their future growth and their need to consolidate because they already have that asset, that knowledge in place."

Make no mistake about it, however--IBM is clearly committed to the AIX* 5L OS (IBM's version of a UNIX OS) for many years to come, having a road map out to 2008 and many developers working full time on AIX 5L development. As the recent news that AIX will now run on the recently announced iSeries systems proves, this is simply about giving customers choice.

"If you have new workloads and new applications coming, then you may want to look past the here and now. That's where Linux on POWER comes in." -Brian Connors, IBM's vice president of Linux on POWER

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