According to Tom Manter, director of the enterprise Linux program at Unisys, the company is not just going to let Novell come in and get all of the service and support money for customers who decide to put Linux on the boxes. What Unisys is doing, according to Mr Manter, is pre-installing the open source, downloadable version of SLES 9 on the ES7000s and then selling its own Linux support services for that SLES 9 license.
This is not something that Unisys is bragging about in its press releases, of course, and it may just be the first time that a major server vendor has taken this approach with Linux. When you think about it for a second, this is a smart tactic, particularly considering that Unisys has a respected support organization with a worldwide reach with which to build its own Linux support offering.
Because of the GNU General Public License for the open source Linux operating system, there is not a thing Novell can do to stop Unisys from selling support against it. And Unisys will be able to do the same thing in a month or so when Red Hat launches Enterprise Linux 4, which is also based on the Linux 2.6 kernel. In fact, says Mr Manter, this is exactly the game plan Unisys has in mind for Red Hat 4, which it is in the process of certifying in its labs right now.
What Unisys is being cagey about is what it is charging for its Linux support services. Our pricing is very competitive, is all that Mr Manter would say.
This is, of course, the same kind of tack that Unisys could take in the Unix market now that Sun Microsystems is taking its Solaris 10 operating system open source. Unisys executives are now being asked questions about supporting Solaris, particularly since Solaris already runs on 32-bit Xeon processors, which are used in the ES7000 500 series of machines, and Unisys has been targeting the vast Unix installed base to push its ES7000s.
While Solaris 9 was created for the Itanium processor, which is used in the ES7000 400 series machines, Sun never delivered it as a product. (IBM never did release its Project Monterey AIX for Itanium, either, even though it was finished.)
However, now that Solaris 10 is out, will soon be open source, and supports the 64-bit extensions in the Xeon and Opteron processors, Unisys will soon have a real shot at going directly, rather than indirectly, at the Unix business.
At some point this year, the 64-bit Potomac Xeon MP processors will be out, and OpenSolaris will have been out for a few months. All the pieces will finally be there – and it seems unlikely that Unisys will pass up this chance. Unisys could support Solaris 10 on its 32-bit machines right now, but they would hit the 64 GB memory bottleneck of 32-bit, 32-way machines.
