Unisys Offers Linux On ES7000 Servers

Unisys Corp. is now offering Linux on the company's ES7000 servers, a move that the company says reflects customer interest in using the open-source operating system in big data centers.

The company said it's working with Novell and Red Hat to provide the operating system on the powerful servers, which are also available with Microsoft's Windows. The announcement was made at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

"Our enterprise customers are demanding industrial-strength Linux solutions and we are responding in a revolutionary way," Joe McGrath, Unisys' president and chief operating officer for Unisys, said in a statement.

Unisys said its offering of Linux on Intel chips will compete with proprietary Unix servers, matching the latter's ability to handle dynamic partitioning--the ability to automatically shift processing power to applications as they need it. The feature is a key capability for handling complex workloads in data centers.