Linux vendors are promoting the benefits of technology known as virtualization that allows multiple operating systems to run on the same hardware at the same time, saying it could crank up computing power and decrease costs.

At the 2006 Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference at New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel on Monday, Linux vendors such as Novell and Red Hat pushed the advantages of the technology ushered in by the XenSource open source product Xen 3.0.

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Vendors at the Linux conference promoted related technologies. Red Hat, for example, showed off its use of virtualization technology to allow hardware and operating system upgrades to be performed easily.
 
The company also promoted its use of storage virtualization by supporting the open source Logical Volume Manager 2 technology, which allows a single storage device to be partitioned into different virtual drives.

Novell also discussed its plans to package Xen with its Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. The company also announced a partnership with Reuters to offer the Reuters Market Data System on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to financial institutions.

Cisco Systems highlighted its server fabric switching and virtualization capabilities with its line of InfiniBand server switches.

A Lowell, Massachusetts-based company called Virtual Iron described its Xen virtualization capabilities as an alternative to VMware for running Windows and Linux on the same system.

IBM also highlighted its Blue Gene supercomputer technology. Michael Katz, president of email security provider Message Partners, was on hand to discuss an announcement that came out Tuesday about a deal with Cloudmark to offer Message Processing Platform email security software on IBM System p5 servers.