While customers in the telecom and financial services areas who are tired of paying high prices to run their applications on Sparc/Solaris gear are considering Linux (as well as Sparc/X64 options) on Linux machines, they certainly do not want to change their underlying databases. And to that end, IBM Corp and Sybase Inc have been doing a dance with each other born out of necessity.
Just before the LinuxWorld event got underway last week, Sybase announced it had extended its agreement with IBM such that IBM can now pre-load its Adaptive Enterprise Server database on its OpenPower Power5-based, Linux-only servers. The bundle the two have cooked up includes the ASE Express Edition for Linux database.
The two companies also announced Sybase IQ, the database and analytics bundle that Sybase has created for big data warehouses (typically deployed by financial services and telecom companies) has also been ported to Linux running on the OpenPower platforms. Sybase offers ASE Express edition for free on machines with one processor and 2 GB or under of main memory allocated for the database. The production version of ASE Express Edition costs $24,000 per processor core, while Sybase IQ costs $30,000 per core.
