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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