As Wladawsky-Berger pointed out, Linux has been incredibly popular on X86 servers and other types of boxes RISC boxes – according to IDC, Linux accounted for 17 % of all server revenues in the third quarter of 2003 – and is even driving mainframe sales – Berger said that Linux drove 20% of MIPS and 17% of revenues for the zSeries mainframe line in the fourth quarter of 2003.

Here’s the premise: at the low-end of the market, small computers are going deeper and deeper into devices, ranging from game machines to embedded controllers in all kinds of manufactured goods such as cars and appliances.

At the other end of the spectrum are high performance computers where IBM’s Power servers have a certain amount of prestige (in large measure thanks to Wladawsky-Berger, who championed IBM’s parallel supercomputers back in the early 1990s).

In the middle is a mix of machines and architectures, and the funny thing is, most of the machines from the embedded machines up to gargantuan clusters can and often do run Linux.

For now, IBM is setting its sights for Linux on Power mainly in the server arena. The 64-bit Power architecture is proven, and we want to bring it to the same places and price points as other platforms, explained Brian Connors, vice president in charge of IBM’s pSeries Linux initiatives who speak for all Power servers. He added that he was not focused on the desktop when reporters pressed him about this ever-present question.

Part of the server push will be to get DB2 ICE, the future cluster-enabled and grid-aware version of IBM’s database, up and running in 64-bit mode on Linux for Power. IBM will be making a lot of noise about the future release of DB2 called Stinger, which is being previewed at LinuxWorld and which should be commercialized in the next six to nine months. The developer release of Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters is running in 64-bit mode on Linux on Power, and presumably Oracle 10g will also be available.

One of the technologies that IBM will be pushing for Linux on Power is logical partitioning, which it will scale up considerably with the future Power5 Squadron servers that will start rolling out perhaps in April or May as midrange boxes and as high-end machines later in the year, if the rumors are right.

IBM has already mastered how to put 10 Linux partitions on a single Power4 processor in the iSeries line, but still only allows one partition per processor in the pSeries. IBM is rumored to be able to offer this fine-grained logical partitioning granularity of the iSeries on the Squadron machines, but it will tap out at a few hundred virtual servers maximum for a single SMP machine.

The question is, then, can IBM wean itself off Intel servers as Linux goes mainstream by promoting its own Power architecture over X86 servers? It can if ISVs get in line and the Power architecture delivers big benefits compared to X86 machine – and it has to be more than breaking the 4 GB memory barrier of a 32-bit processor. IBM, of course, knows this.

The scuttlebutt is that SAP will deliver a version of its ERP applications running on Linux on Power, and that Oracle and PeopleSoft could be working on versions, too. Getting all the right security certifications for Linux on Power will help as well, especially in government accounts, which Stalling said accounted for $2bn in Linux-related sales in 2003, presumably across all products and vendors.

To that end, IBM announced that IBM and Novell had certified SuSE Enterprise Server 8 with service pack 3 running across the eServer line (xSeries, iSeries, pSeries, zSeries, and eServer 325 Opteron-based machines) to the Common Criteria CAPP/EAL3+ level. The Common Criteria certification is different from but similar to the US Department of Defense’s Common Operating Environment certification, which is administered by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

IBM and Novell announced yesterday that SuSE 8 running on xSeries and zSeries platforms had COE certification, and that pSeries and iSeries servers would be certified before the end of June 2004. While Red Hat has attained COE and CC certifications, it did so on different packages of its software. To get the EAL3+ rating, which is higher than the EAL2+ rating SUSE got at LinuxWorld last year, the two companies added an auditing subsystem for critical security events and an additional security feature that protected data transmitted over networks.

IBM is now working to get its z/OS and z/VM mainframe operating systems, the latter which IBM sells as the Integrated Linux Facility for managing multiple Linux partitions on a single zSeries machine, certified at the EAL3 level.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire