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“We are exactly on track to meet that summer deadline, we are not running even a single day late at this point,” Markus Rex, SuSE Linuxs vice president and general manager told eWEEK in an interview at Novels Brainshare conference here on Monday.
The server upgrade will be based on the recently released Linux 2.6 kernel, giving users the good performance improvements in that kernel as well as new features and functionality that SuSE helped contribute to 2.6, including Direct I/O and large memory support.
The product will also be released for all six hardware platforms it supports: x86, IBM mainframe, IBM Corp.s i-series and p-series, Intel Corp.s Itanium processor family and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.s 64-bit architecture.
“The product releases for these different hardware architectures will be very close together. They will all have the same code base and there will be an unprecedented degree of similarity between the versions of the software for these architectures,” Rex said.
SuSE Enterprise Server 9.0 will also stick to the same pricing model as for the previous version, where some maintenance is included in the base price, but technical support is offered for an additional charge.
“We have no intention of moving to a model that includes the forced bundling of support for customers,” he said.
While Rex said no decisions had been made on pricing for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0, he did not expect it to be much different from the current pricing structure.
The release of a SuSE enterprise server based on Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel follows last weeks news that the company would be selling its retail consumer Linux products, SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal and Professional, in May. Those products are also based on the 2.6 kernel.