Cover Story

All’s merry on the Linux front

Sales of Linux servers are booming, and HP is riding the wave. Akhtar Pasha finds that Penguin-powered servers are doing just fine

Healthcare software for Hospital Information Systems and Linux in defence establishments are emerging growth opportunities waiting to be tapped Faisal Paul Country Manager HPC & Linux Customer Solutions Group HP India Sales

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

The 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 that runs 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 and Ashok Leyland (Manufacturing-CAE). Texas Instruments, Bangalore, is using the AMD processor-based HP DL585 server line, while the Naval

Physical & Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL) 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; the team bagged many new accounts. The efforts of the past six to nine months came good in Q1 05.” According to IDC India, although Linux’s share is just 10 percent of total server sales, this is expected to grow to 20 percent in the next three years.

For lower total cost of ownership you need an architecture that supports open source Pallab Talukdar Director Enterprise Marketing & Alliances Customer Solutions Group HP India Sales

Meanwhile, rival IBM has many Linux server customers in India, including the Indian Institute of Science for its OpenPower Linux server, the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology that runs xSeries on Linux, and the Department of Company Affairs which has an e-governance application on Linux. Affirms Jyothi Satyanathan, Country Manager, pSeries & OpenPower, IBM India, “Linux has moved from the trial-phase to the developmental phase. We have seen Linux server deployment in high compute-intensive applications such as EDA and Digital Content Creation (DCC), and in the HPC space.”

Observes Paul, “Having built the Linux momentum, we would like to ramp up Linux projects in Q3 & Q4 05. Healthcare software for Hospital Information Systems and Linux in defence establishments are emerging growth opportunies waiting to be tapped. We are working in this domain with a third-party ISV, a non-profit organisation.” Additionally, HP is bidding for large million-dollar projects from Motorola, Intel and AMD, which could materialise during late Q3 and Q4.

Notes Narendra Karmarkar, Head of the Computational Mathematics Laboratory (CML) at TIFR in Pune, “We do a lot of research in computation and mathematics, and open source Linux gives us the flexibility and freedom to make any changes. Had it (our legacy application) been on a proprietary system, we wouldn’t have been able to make any changes.” TIFR has adopted the largest 64-bit Linux Itanium cluster in India that will permit CML to run complex algorithms with up to a billion variables. On the choice of HP and Itanium, Karmarkar says, “We needed high-performance computing deploying the latest technology, and HP fits the bill.”

Major verticals

Says Paul, “HPC, EDA, oil & gas, manufacturing and automotive are driving Linux server shipments, and 90 percent of our HPC server deployments are on Linux.” GM, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, GE and Delphi are outsourcing CAE services to India; such engineering design needs systems that can churn out huge data in real time. Schlumberger and Paradigm are setting up huge processing and visualisation labs in India, and the Government of India has passed a resolution that any data abstracted in India from activities below the earth’s surface should not go out of the country. The emergence of India as an EDA base (with Motorola, TI, AMD and Magma having design centres here, and UGS PLM, Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor having development and testing centres in the country) is leading to an uptake in the sales of Linux hardware. Drug and clinical research work is being outsourced to India. DCC services are also being outsourced to India, for example, to Crest Communications. The auto ancillary export market is booming. All these factors will drive Linux server sales in India.

Talukdar of HP says that there is an interesting trend sweeping the nation, and that is joint alliances between enterprises and academia to set up research centres. JK Tyres has formed a joint venture with IIT Chennai to set up a Radial Tyre Research Centre using 16-way Integrity Itanium 2 servers to study the impact on radial tyres when trucks race from 48 kmph to 120 kmph with full load. The study is expected to help the company develop tyres that can withstand the impact, and bring better truck tyres to the marketplace.

ISVs play a critical role

Linux has moved from the trial-phase to the developmental phase Jyothi Satyanathan Country Manager pSeries & OpenPower IBM India

HP has a large Linux team in India, almost on par with IBM. The company has 30 ISVs addressing the enterprise, PSU and SMB segments for HPC. In addition, it has 40 engineers including sales, post-sales and support. Research has another 30 engineers. IBM has 35-40 Linux partners offering consultancy, help in integration, and implementation services for customers using Linux. IBM also works with ISVs and large SIs such as Wipro, TCS and SlashSupport. It also has a special focus team driving Linux server sales through channels.

Sun Microsystems is pushing its AMD Opteron boxes running Linux through innovative bundles offered through its partners. It has a marketing alliance with PortWise to bundle a VPN/SSL solution along with Sun Fire machines. The company has also tied up with Corazio for bundling Business Process Management Solutions. CVS IT (a SAP partner) is bundling SAP All-in-One with the Sun gear. Office in a box is bundled with Nitix, while Quantum Link and NetCore with messaging solutions, Trend Micro (anti-virus) and Checkpoint (firewall). Comments K P Unnikrishnan, Marketing Director, Sun India, “We will leverage the success we had with a bundle offering through our multi-partner alliances. We would like to repeat the success we had in Q3 04 and Q4 04 in the next few quarters.”

Today, HP leads the Linux server business in India. Linux boxes are more popular than ever before—be it HP, IBM or Sun gear. We expect, and analysts concur, that the sales of Linux hardware will grow robustly in H2 2005.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com