'Lintel': The new frontier.
Operating system choices for the forthcoming IA-64 platform will become much more abundant when a group of vendors finishes collaborating on a port of Linux to Intel's 64-bit architecture.The "Lintel" effort, known as the Trillian Project and funded by Intel, is currently being cobbled together by a consortium led by Linux developer V.A. Linux Systems. It includes Hewlett-Packard, SGI, Intel, and Cygnus, and will soon include IBM. The first open-source code should be available early next year, or about the time Intel's IA-64 chip -- Merced -- is ready.
"The goal is to bring it to open source within the next six months, and the code is on track,'' said Brian Biles, vice president of marketing at V.A. Linux Systems, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
The genesis of the Trillian Project was an agreement earlier this year between Intel and V.A. Linux Systems to deliver a version of Linux for the high-end IA-64 server and workstation markets.
Since that initial agreement, the project has grown to include the participation of other vendors.
HP, for example, is contributing operating system kernel expertise to the project, and SGI is pitching in with operating system and compiler technologies designed to extend the robustness of the operating system. If Linux is to compete on an enterprise level with the other offerings that will be available, such as IBM's Project Monterey, that robustness could be key.
"You've got to be sure that if you add [processors] that performance goes up proportionally," said Jan Silverman, vice president of marketing of the computer systems business unit at SGI, in Mountain View, Calif. "If you add [processors] and the OS gets bogged down, you have serious problems."
It is in the area of scalability that some worry Linux will not be able to live up to the needs of IA-64 users. Yet the openness of the operating system could actually be an advantage for hardware vendors, which will be able to do their own work on improving scalability.
"Linux addressing IA-64 will take a quantum jump into the enterprise, and that's where we can add value," Silverman said.
The biggest Unix competitor on IA-64 could be IBM's Project Monterey, but Big Blue, currently in discussions with members of the Trillian Project, may need to cover its bases as it pushes further into the Linux space. Project Monterey itself will have strong Linux compatibility, according to Tilak Agerwala, vice president of Unix marketing and project management at IBM, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Agerwala and other executives tied to Project Monterey believe that their forthcoming OS and Linux for Merced are complementary, with Monterey better suited to industrial-strength transaction processing or business intelligence applications, and Linux better suited to departmental chores.
But with the Trillian Project, the forthcoming version of Merced could be on a performance par with Monterey, thus muddying any clear choice between the two for enterprise-level applications.
"I would expect over the next one to two years [that Linux for Merced] will catch up and in some cases exceed Monterey, for no other reason than the sheer number of people contributing to Linux,'' said Drew Besser, vice president of engineering at Caldera Systems, in Orem, Utah.
Noticeably absent from the Trillian Project are Caldera and Red Hat Software. However, that does not mean the Linux leaders have been without input.
"It's not like it launched without us knowing anything about it. We did contribute a lot during the due diligence process," Besser said.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Lattig, Michael; Scannell, Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Network World |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Aug 2, 1999 |
| Words: | 572 |
| Previous Article: | France Telecom, Integra offer global 'Net services. |
| Next Article: | Cisco beefs up Catalyst. |
| Topics: | |