This week IBM made another major product announcement (following on from IBM PureSystems earlier this month) with the launch of the PowerLinux platform. These systems, running the industry leading Power7 processor, will be a dedicated Linux platform for Red Hat and SUSE distributions and closed off from running AIX and IBM “I” operating systems.
With the PowerLinux platform, IBM are going after the Intel/Linux market with all guns blazing. In the past Linux houses have been reluctant to use IBM’s Power servers as their primary Linux platform as Intel was a cheaper alternative. However, whilst costs are yet to be announced, it is widely rumoured that the IBM PowerLinux servers are going to be priced very aggressively against Intel-based platforms and by including the PowerVM hypervisor, VMware houses will now have a fantastic alternative for running their Linux virtual machines.
