IBM, Novell to slash Linux prices for mainframes

“Commercial Linux distributor Novell has a more than 80 per cent
share of Linux revenues on IBM’s mainframe platform. The company
has been shipping its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 since the end
of March, and it wants to get more mainframe shops to add SLES 11
to Integrated Facility for Linux engines.

“These are special low-cost 64-bit mainframe engines that use
z/VM to partition the engines and manage multiple Linux instances
on them. Novell makes a lot more money selling a support contract
on a mainframe engine than it does on an x64 or Power server, so it
wants to keep pushing SLES 11 hard into mainframe shops.”

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