It's official. Last week,while I was talking about Fundamental Changes needed to make your IT environmentmore energy-efficient, IBM announced its "Big Green Linux" initiative at LinuxWorld conference.

You can read the IBM Press Release, or the commentary onDaniWeb,ZDnet, orInfoWorld.

IT managers looking to reduce their energy consumption are probably closely watching XenSource and VMware. CRN feels that a war is imminent between these two. Eweek recognizes thisbattle is bad news for Linux virtualization on x86,and that Oracle is losing patienceon their inability to work together. Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, compares performance between the two platforms, and feelsthat XenSource should get its rightful piece of the pie.

There is a ray of hope. Charles Babcock in Information Week explains thatpeace has been established on at least one front, XenSource and VMware are working together to improve virtualization in the Linux kernel.

Despite this, or perhaps because of this, over 30 percent of IBM's Linux server revenue is onnon-x86 platforms, avoiding the XenSource vs. VMware decision altogether. Both System z (traditional mainframe servers) and System p (traditional UNIX servers) are able to run many Linux images in a fully virtualized manner, without VMware or XenSource.

technorati tags: IBM, Big Green, Linux, initiative, XenSource, VMware, virtualization, Simon Crosby, mainframe, UNIX, servers

Tags:  green linux