• Business Intelligence

Virtualization, Road Maps Lead the Way at LinuxWorld

SAN FRANCISCO—Upward of 10,000 IT- and open source-minded folks can be seen milling around the Moscone Center at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here through Aug. 17, and there is plenty of information about new products and services to keep their tongues wagging for a lot more than three days.

Big companies like IBM, Novell, Motorola and Dell, and small ones—such as FiveRuns, a 12-employee hosted systems management services provider based in Austin, Texas—shared floor space and took turns hosting press conferences.

So here for your further reading enjoyment is a virtual grab bag of random news, facts, figures and observations from the show floor and adjoining meeting rooms (as well as from candid conversations off-site):

  • You’ve no doubt heard the realtor’s mantra: Location, location, location! The hottest term overheard consistently in conversations throughout the show was virtualization, virtualization, virtualization! For example, Dell—not particularly known for its software products—was giving a demonstration of its new homegrown VMware- and Xen-based systems management software on some of its new Opteron-based servers, which was quite impressive.
  • Second-most uttered term at the show: road map.
  • Linux is the fastest-growing operating system in the world in terms of unit share, according to both Gartner, in Stamford, Conn., and IDC, in Framingham, Mass. Gartner gauges the overall 2006 Linux market as just shy of $7 billion in revenues, up 35 percent from the 2005 figure.

  • In 2007, Linux is expected to surpass Windows as the operating system for which more developers write applications, according to a recent survey of 400 developers conducted by Evans Data, of Santa Cruz, Calif.
  • Seventy-three percent of the world’s Top 500 Supercomputers run Linux.
  • The number of copies of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop that have been downloaded since SLED 10 was launched on July 17 is 170,000.

    Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Virtualization, Road Maps Lead the Way at LinuxWorld

    • Chris Preimesberger

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