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Linux Virtualization: Can DELL succeed where IBM failed?



Linux Virtualization is coming of age. You have KVM, Xen to name a few. Yet I have to say that the big blue has been on top of this way back in the late 90s and beginning 2000. Whatever happened to the big blue? I have always wondered and when I saw this nd do check out the links provided by the comment (which is far more interesting).

When I read the links it looks like IBM may have just been sitting and watching this to gobble up the whole data centers when they have been virtualized (VMware, Xen, whatever). It is very much possible that they might pull of the big one with the consolidation move my moving all those (20 vms per box, say) into their own mainframe. After, by 2010, would anyone care if my system runs on Windows or Linux, let alone what Virtualization platform. I don't think that they care today either.

This news article of IBM running 41400 Linux instances on one server:

Ironically, IBM hopes to beat these upstarts at their own game. Thanks to the massive number-crunching power of the S/390 mainframe, it is capable of running hundreds of virtual servers simultaneously.

"Instead of buying 200 Intel boxes, you could run 200 Linux servers on a single mainframe," said Greg Burke, an IBM vice president.

About the size of a big commercial refrigerator, the S/390 is a super fast, crash-proof workhorse used for things like telecom systems, airline ticketing, and big corporate networks, IBM said.

"It's the mother of all servers, without a doubt," said IBM spokesman James Sciales.

The machine, which features up to a dozen 637-MHz processors that between them can execute a mind-boggling 1,614 million instructions per second, in tests ran up to 41,400 separate copies of Linux simultaneously.


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