NEW YORK - Several Linux hardware and software makers launched wares on the opening day of the LinuxWorld Expo here. The vendors' goal: make Linux faster, stronger, better, for large enterprise application deployments.

Egenera announced support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for its Bladeframe product. The Bladeframe is server virtualization hardware that uses diskless multi-processor Linux server blades in a chassis that attaches to a storage area network or network-attached storage system. In a Bladeframe, operating system images can be loaded and unloaded onto clusters of processors on the fly. SuSE, which was acquired by Novell at the end of 2003, is the third operating system certified to run on the Egenera Bladeframe, joining Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.
 
Linux server and workstation vendor Penguin Computing launched three AMD Opteron-based 64-bit products that are available pre-loaded with Linux. The Altus 1100 and Altus 12000 are dual-processor, one-rack-unit boxes that could be used either as stand-alone servers or as compute nodes in a larger Linux cluster. The difference between machines is that the Altus 1100s use serial ATA drives while the 1200s have SCSI drives. The Tempest 2100 is a dual-processor Linux workstation. Penguin Computing offers most major Linux distributions on its hardware and also supports clustering technologies such as Scyld Beowulf, which is being demonstrated at the show. Penguin Computing said it is also releasing a line of Itanium-based Linux servers and workstations in the second quarter of this year.

On the software front, Arkeia announced a plug-in for its Arkeia Server Backup for Linux for protecting servers running the MySQL open source database. The software allows administrators to schedule incremental data backups or full-system archiving jobs on MySQL servers while keeping the database servers online, the company says. The MySQL plug-in for Arkeia Server Backup for Linux is available now for $480.