Fashion can deceive, but backing Linux is looking a cosy
fit.
Fashion often seems to rule the IT world, sometimes beneficially.
It used to be said that you couldn't get fired for buying IBM. Then
the trend became that you couldn't be fired for buying Unix, or
Windows servers. Fashions change, and the safety net is now moving
under Linux. This, however, could turn out to be a very good thing
indeed.
Linux has several attributes that make it of particular interest in
the storage world:
- It's cheap - often free - and Linux skills are plentiful
- It's free of the licensing restrictions that place access to
other operating systems under the whim of an intellectual property
owner n It's open to public scrutiny.
In the 1950s, science fiction writers thought the world would be
run by a single massive computer. But reality has proved the
opposite: the internet has no centre. Processing power in orders of
magnitude greater than that of PCs is shipped in cars and
cellphones. Even bus stops now have computers in them. Peripherals
often have more processing power than the systems they serve.
This trend is set to continue, with more intelligence appearing at
lower levels each year. Each unit will require an operating system,
and this is where Linux might take on a future starring role.
With the increasing processing demands placed on storage devices by
data virtualisation, it seems logical for processing power to
follow cache into the hard drive itself. Basic functions such as
error-checking code calculation are there already. Future storage
subsystems may use thousands of processors. This requires an
embedded operating system, for which Linux is ideally suited.
Versions using as little as 150Kbytes have been devised, such as
that for the Terapin "mine". PDAs and cellphones based on Linux
have also been produced.
Having no intellectual property owner to say "yea" or "nay" on a
whim frees product developers from strategic worries. Corporate
fallings-out can destroy products and sometimes companies - as in
the case of Sendo. Linux releases companies from such
considerations and makes many investments safer, lowering the cost
and risk of entry to the market and thus increasing choice.
Linux offers another great strength compared with other operating
systems: it is robust, secure, and improving in both respects.
IBM's z/OS is regarded as the most secure operating system on the
market, in part because it is based on earlier code that was as
open to inspection and criticism as Linux is today. Only when major
changes were made to MVS in a closed source fashion - Unix System
Services - did chinks appear in the armour.
Some governments, such as the Russian and the UK, have become so
concerned that they have demanded access to the source code for
other operating systems. But this monitoring cannot match the close
examination to which Linux is subjected by the hundreds of
thousands of programmers who have its source.
Dedicated storage subsystems with proprietary operating systems
come under the closed source umbrella. The systems being announced
by the major suppliers this spring may prove to be, at best, the
penultimate examples of their kind. Perhaps we will see one more
generation before they are all replaced by alternatives based on
open source and the standards that are currently being
established.
Management of storage capacity is both a problem well on the way to
solution and much less of a concern: storage capacity is now
outstripping data volume growth. Data management - especially in
complex environments - is much more of an issue than capacity
administration.
In the days of mainframe hegemony, database administrators dreamed
of a "data dictionary" to describe an organisation's knowledge
base, though few were ever implemented. But back then everything
was proprietary and development platforms were few and
expensive.
Today standards are open, accessible and can be downloaded from the
internet, and development platforms are in every back bedroom. Data
virtualisation techniques such as IBM's Storage Tank can supply a
form of data dictionary. Its metadata servers are already
Linux-based.
The Linux environment is famous for sudden problem-solving. It
doesn't seem to matter how complex the problem is, nor do we ever
hear how many attempts at a solution failed.
It seems inevitable that Linux because of its low cost, scalability
- especially downwards - and security will become dominant in
future generations of storage products. It will bring all the
advantages of the Linux world with it, including some surprises. So
sorely needed data virtualisation functionality may arrive sooner
than was previously thought, and it will certainly be more
affordable.
Phil Payne is managing director of Isham Research and one of
the UK's most respected analysts for storage and enterprise
systems
www.isham-research.com