Novell says SUSE with its Xen virtualization is now certified on SAP NetWeaver and mySAP. SUSE's high-availability storage infrastructure, developed with SAP's LinuxLab, and including clustering software that monitors parts of an enterprise system like SAP apps and initiates failover, is also available for the SAP stuff.

Computer Industry Turns Cannibal
We've been waiting for projections like this to come down.

IDC says that virtualization and multi-core chips are going to cost the computer industry 4.5 million x86 server shipments and $2.4 billion in customer spending between now and 2010.

According to its calculations x86 server shipments should have increased 61% by 2010, but now it's just gonna be 39%. The revenue pinch won't be as bad as the shipment shrinkage because users will deploy richer systems in terms of memory, disk and I/O and it still expects processors to grow at the rate of 25% because of multi-core advances.

Virtual servers, it calculates, will grow 40.6% CAGR between 2005 and 2010 so that the 1.7 million physical servers shipped wind up being 7.9 million logical servers, representing 14.6% of all physical servers in 2010 compared to 4.5% of server shipments in 2005.

IDC also expects server and component vendors to "optimize around quad-core technology before moving ahead to octi-core technology."