ARMONK, NY -- IBM announced a new program that is designed to help customers transition from the Sun Solaris platform to the Linux operating system on IBM machines. IBM committed to support Linux across its product line more than two years before Sun Microsystems, and now IBM is deploying a special team dedicated to help customers move from Sun Solaris to Linux on IBM eServers. As part of the company’s three-pronged program, IBM will update its most popular Intel-based server for Linux applications, and it announced a new generation Linux cluster system designed to increase price/performance advantages for customers. To kick-off its Solaris-to-Linux program, IBM has deployed a dedicated team of Linux migration experts who work closely with IBM sales teams around the world. Skilled in a broad spectrum of operating systems, team members can quickly prepare an assessment of a customer's Sun Solaris infrastructure and develop a step-by-step blueprint for transitioning to a Linux environment on the IBM platform. The team members include system architects, database administrators, project managers and operating system specialists. The team also provides a detailed list of potential benefits, which can include substantial improvements in total cost of ownership and system performance. Once a customer chooses to move from Solaris onto an IBM Linux server platform, work can begin on the following steps: -- Migrating components such as the Solaris operating system, databases, applications and servers, as well as storage, networking and security systems. -- Testing the new infrastructure, both one unit at a time and all systems together. This is followed by a final "acceptance test," run by the customer. -- Deploying the infrastructure into production by populating all databases with the customer's business data. -- Financing the pieces of the infrastructure -- including hardware, software and services -- through IBM Global Financing, which helps customers in more than 40 countries more affordably acquire business IT solutions. Customers in the IBM migration program can choose from many solutions, including the first Xeon based 1U server from a major vendor like IBM. As a second part of the company’s three-pronged attack, IBM also introduced the powerful x335, a rack-optimized server that sets the design standard for Web application serving. Based on Intel’s fast Xeon processors, the two-way x335 is designed to deliver price/performance features and integrates mainframe-like class technology in a server in roughly the size of a pizza box. Some new technologies in the system include support of Ultra320 hard disk drives, integrated dual gigabit ethernet, and two 64-bit/100 MHz PCI-X slots. Able to run both the Linux and Windows operating systems, the IBM x335 offers customer flexibility to link together many servers in powerful clusters or computing grids. Based on the new IBM x335 and x345, the IBM Cluster 1350 is an integrated and validated Linux cluster offering that includes storage products, third-party networking, and robust cluster management software. Customers demanding high performance at a lower price can easily order and deploy this offering to handle extremely complex workloads. With its high degree of scalability and centralized manageability, the Cluster 1350 is also ideally suited for Grid deployments and will be available later this fall.