Griddy up

However, this does not preclude the use of distributed, virtualized computing in enterprises.

"Businesses tend to use [a distributed Linux] model in certain specialized enterprise applications, such as actuary or risk management applications," IBM's Leahy says. "You could build a stand-alone environment, which could deliver these processes in minutes or hours, but it would be pretty expensive and dedicated to one thing." This single-purpose system also would remain idle most of the time, he adds.

This is popular in Wall Steet firms, where trading desks have very powerful workstations that often sit idle during the hours when the markets are closed.

"Some people would like to have a series of distributed resources, the kind of work you used to do on a mainframe," IDC's Bozman says. "This is a work in progress, but clearly people would like to do that."

Whether Linux users deploy virtualization in a consolidated deployment, or in clustered applications or grids, Bozman says there's a common thread shared among trends.

"It's like back to the future. What we're doing is reinventing the economics of computing, but we still want the same results that we had before" in the mainframe and large-system days -- "lots of reliability and lots of availability and utilization. But we're doing it today at lower price points than we did in the early '90s."