Red Hat hopes its support of multiple open source applications running on Linux will make the platform more attractive to corporate network managers looking for cheaper alternatives to commercial serveroperatingsystems.
Its competitors and partners alike assume that, given free reign to behave the way it wants, Microsoft has the strategic and monetary leverage to make its serveroperatingsystems successful on Intel.
Open source software such as Apache Web server and the Linux serveroperating system have become popular systems to run not only on network servers, but also on server appliances (servers dedicated to single tasks such as e-mail and Web site hosting).
Wachovia analyst Phillip Rueppel says the beta version of Microsoft's Hyper-V isn't wowing customers because it lacks some critical features, such as so-called live migration, the ability to move operatingsystems and applications from one server to another while they're running.