The announcement may make it 'official', but IBM has been selling turn-key style clusters for over a year now.

How do I know, and why do I care? 'Cause I work for IBM, and design and build Linux clusters for a living.

We rack purpose-built 1U's (x330's) built for easy large-scale mangement (built-in daisy-chain KVM capabilities, integrated service processor network, cool blinky lights, etc, etc), have internally developed mangement software and system imaging solutions, and ship them to customers at a point where all they need to do is plug them in and log on.

The only real issue is almost no one has a 'standard' cluster application. Almost every one uses a different IPC mechanism, and usually an app is only validated against one very specific software image. So to get the most out of a cluster, customers still need to spend time tweaking.

Maybe someday soon, we'll all be able to 'apt-get install damned_big_cluster', but until then... <shameless>just call IBM.</shameless>

--Matthew
slashdot at sigalrm dot com