Sunday, August 12, 2007

Dell and Xen might help to undo windows dominance

Dell Inc. hopes to push the open-source Linux operating system into the corporate desktop environment by using virtualization so alternative Linux operating systems can more easily be run alongside Windows systems from Microsoft Corp.

Dell Chief Technology Officer Kevin Kettler detailed the company's still-in-development Linux desktop strategy during a keynote address Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Kettler demonstrated to his audience at the Moscone Center how Windows and Linux could run on the same desktop by using an open-source hypervisor. He switched from running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Windows Vista and XP, and a Mozilla Firefox Web browser on a Dell XPS notebook computer.
continued its move up and down the enterprise operating stack with the announcement this week by It was also revealed that DELL is making moves in the Server front as well. Red Hat Inc.Dell Inc. that it will offer its customers the Red Hat middleware stack on Dell PowerEdge servers.

When buying Dell hardware, an IT department will now be able to choose either a Windows or Linux operating system and combine that with either the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform or the Red Hat Application Stack.

However, one industry analyst says these are no longer strategic decisions.

"It doesn't really matter which one you go with. Both are open-standard compliant, and both are in the open-source space," said Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley, Calif.

According to Greenbaum, what this announcement is really saying is that Red Hat is having trouble deciding which horse to run with, and it wants to see who wins.

On the plus side, the ability to mix Windows and an open-source application server stack will give IT more flexibility and expand the amount of choice in using Windows while running JBoss server-compliant applications. While it may no longer be a strategic decision, said Greenbaum, it does take an issue off the table.
Computerworld report

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