IBM Expands Its OpenPower Linux Server Portfolio

Hoping to further capitalize in the rapidly growing Linux market, IBM on Monday will expand its fledgling OpenPower server portfolio.

IBM introduced the first member of the eServer OpenPower platform in September--the four-way 720--and now is adding the 710, which is offered in one-way or two-way configurations.

"The Linux market is more than a $5 billion market this year, and the two-way portion will represents more than half of the total market in the next two to three years," says Joe Doria, program director for Linux on Power offerings at IBM.

The Power5-processor-based OpenPower 710 provides a low-cost and small-form-factor alternative to Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems entry-level Unix and Linux systems, Doria says.

Available Feb. 18, the OpenPower 710 will use a 1.65-GHz Power5 processor and will support Novell SuSE Linux ES 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS3 operating systems. A one-way version of the OpenPower 710 will start at $3,449, and a two-way version will start at $3,999.IBM has seen significant support for the OpenPower platform since its introduction, including the addition of 250 third-party applications in the past four months, which brings the total available applications to 900, Doria says. "Add that to the thousands of open-source applications," he says, "and we have a lot of momentum."