SDA India is an online resource for Software, Development,IT, Architecture, Open Source, Mobile, Security, Databases, Delphi, C, OS, Asp, .Net, Php, Xml, Java

IBM is teaming with AMD and Novell to create an integrated Linux offering built around IBM's next generation Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) data server, code-named 'Cheetah'. IBM also revealed that Cheetah has now entered an open beta testing for customers and business partners.

The new Linux offering will combine IDS Cheetah, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell and IBM xSeries 3105 servers powered by second-generation AMD Opteron 1000 Series processors to provide new availability and security features in a low cost solution to help Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) meet their critical needs.

"The IDS data server provides an environment with low administration needs, which in turn lowers the total cost of ownership and frees up DBAs to focus more attention on their overall Information on Demand strategy," said Arvind Krishna, vice president IBM data servers.

Scheduled for release in 2007, IDS Cheetah is designed to offer new capabilities to help customers meet their changing data management goals by enabling users to extract more value from their business information, the company said.

"Data is at the heart of every business, and being able to access it efficiently and reliably is paramount to success," said Terri Hall, vice president, Commercial Solutions and Alliances, AMD. "The combination of IDS Cheetah and the xSeries 3105 powered by AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture will provide customers with a solution to meet their critical data management requirements."

According to the company, Cheetah features significant enhancements to application development that are aimed at helping customers accelerate time-to-value for new applications and in porting existing applications to IDS. Cheetah also will offer extended support for applications collaboration and integration for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Also included in the new version will be enhanced support for hierarchical data structures, built-in flexible text searches unstructured documents and enhanced support for datatypes support for distributed queries across multiple IDS instances.

"IDS Cheetah's support for open source applications development combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server's high performance and reliability will allow us to deliver to customers a solution to maximise their application investments and to benefit from the vast application resources available," said Roger Levy, Novell vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions.

Early Cheetah customers include ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion, the technology competence center of Germany's largest private television company the ProSiebenSat.1 Group, who plan to utilise the next-generation IDS data server to help manage their comprehensive range of TV, mobile and multimedia production services. With the IDS software simplifying and automating many database management tasks, the company is able to employ only three database administrators, the company added.

"As a participant of the 'Cheetah' closed beta program, we are impressed with the new capabilities that IDS will offer," said Markus Holzbauer, senior database administrator for ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion. "Specially, the high reliability and superb transaction throughput really appealed to us. With the development of 'Cheetah', IBM makes it clear that IDS continues to be a key strategic product in its portfolio."