Vendors ready to showcase latest wares at LinuxWorld

Despite the specter of The SCO Group's legal scuffle with IBM and Linux users, big players such as BEA Systems, HP, IBM, Sun and Veritas will roll out products and services at this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

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Despite the specter of The SCO Group's legal scuffle with IBM and Linux users, big players such as BEA Systems, HP, IBM, Sun and Veritas will roll out products and services at this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

The legal battle is expected to have little effect - save for being a hot topic of conversation - at LinuxWorld, the first since SCO filed its $3 billion lawsuit against IBM alleging the company had inappropriately used portions of proprietary Unix code to beef up Linux scalability. Instead, show-goers can expect to find a long list of announcements from major vendors that are pushing Linux into more-critical data center roles.

IBM jumped the gun last week in announcing a pre-integrated Linux cluster. The cluster includes Linux on the company's new 32-/64-bit AMD Opteron-based servers packaged with network switches and storage. It also comes with IBM's new DB2 Integrated Cluster Environment, which can support up to 1,000 nodes, the company says.

HP also will announce pre-integrated Linux clusters and a tighter relationship with BEA to support BEA's application server on Linux. HP and IBM are expected to announce a slew of management products for Linux, enabling their flagship management systems to run natively on the Linux platform.

For its part, Veritas will unveil clustering tools for IBM DB2, MySQL and Oracle databases to increase recovery and step up availability of those applications running on Linux.

"Linux is moving into database and application server environments beyond just the very early razor-edge adopter of last year and the year before," says Pierre Fricke, executive vice president at consulting firm D.H. Brown Associates. "You've got more mainstream business users putting this stuff into play at that level."

Pushing that trend are products and services from major vendors that view Linux as an increasingly important and viable data center platform. The show will feature more than 150 vendors unveiling and demonstrating products, about the same number that had booths at the LinuxWorld in New York in January.

In addition, the show will feature its first Hands-On Lab, which will offer show-goers computer training on a variety of Linux applications, from managing a mixed Windows and Linux environment to network security issues for Linux and Java. The show will feature a financial summit to highlight the growing use of Linux in the financial community, and a CIO Agenda, which is aimed at helping CIOs make sense of the Linux platform and where it's headed.

Attendance at the show is expected to be on par with last year, when about 20,000 people showed up, according to show organizer IDG World Expo, a sister company of Network World. While the show will include the expected number of "geeks [and] techies, we're seeing larger numbers of attendees from manufacturing, finance/ banking, government and education," an IDG World Expo spokeswoman says.

One of the reasons for the interest in the show is the cost-savings customers have realized by running Linux on standard platforms vs. more-expensive proprietary machines, analysts say.

Petroleum firm Amerada Hess, for example, traded in IBM Unix systems for Linux on Intel-based boxes. Jeff Davis, technical lead at the firm in Houston, says the company is saving "several million dollars" by running its supercomputing applications for seismic analysis and reservoir simulation on Red Hat Linux.