All's merry on the Linux front

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: Linux boxes are being deployed in HPC (High Performance Computing), oil & gas, manufacturing, EDA (Electronic Design Automation) and pharmaceuticals. The HPC market remains the biggest supporter of the Penguin, however. As Pallab Talukdar, Director, Enterprise Marketing & Alliances, Customer Solutions Group, HP India Sales, puts, "For lower TCO, you need an architecture that supports open source."

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Pune, is a one teraflop installation with 78 nodes in clusters based on the 64-bit Itanium 2 processor running Linux. The supercomputer is built around 78 2-way Itanium nodes with a high-performance Infiniband backbone. The Institute of Genomics & Integrated Biology (IGIB), Delhi, has a four teraflop supercomputer-India's first entry into the world's top-200 supercomputer club. IGIB is using XC3000 HPC cluster with 288 nodes based on dual-Xeon 3.6 GHz ProLiant servers running Linux. HP has other large deals with ONGC (in the oil & gas vertical) and Ashok Leyland (Manufacturing-CAE). Texas Instruments, Bangalore, is using the AMD processor-based HP DL585 server line and NPOL, Bangalore, is using an AMD-based server line, in this case the DL145. These deals were all clinched in Q1 05 pointing to a surge in Linux deployments this year. Most of these deployments are of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

HP led the Linux server market in both unit and revenue terms in Q1 05 shipping 1,049 units out of the total shipments of 3,607 Linux boxes. In revenue terms, HP has a 35.5 percent marketshare. Comments Faisal Paul, Country Manager, HPC & Linux, Customer Solutions Group, HP India Sales, "Our success can be attributed to the restructuring we did to create a team handling public sector sales which bagged many new accounts thereafter. The efforts of the past six to nine months came good in Q1 05." According to IDC India, Linux is just 10 percent of the total server sales, and its share is expected to grow by 20 percent in the next three years.