A strategy for ensuring enterprise Linux support
- Posted:
- 16:05 16 Apr 2004
- Topics:
- Open Source Software | Operating Systems | Linux
Deploy Linux alongside commercial
products to get the best from your firm's application
portfolio.
IT departments should maintain at least one piece of commercial
software within a Linux or open source stack and allow at least one
company to be responsible for complex service support and
integration issues.
If businesses choose not to, they must understand the risk inherent
in such stacks and scrutinise open source software and
applications.
High-performance computing and research or technical applications
are well suited to Linux, where the rich development environment
and tools help to benefit the versatile performance attractions of
the Lintel (Linux on Intel) platform. High-performance computing is
best deployed on Linux clusters.
Packaged applications, such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft or JDE, are
moving Linux deployments to development platforms or primary ports.
For an IT organisation the risk relates to the application
supplier's support of Linux and how aggressive the supplier is in
sales, marketing and support. An increase in packaged applications
on Linux will help application suppliers attain a larger share of
the total project portfolio.
Similarly, packaged groupware and messaging applications, such as
Lotus Notes, are subject to support and commitment to Linux from
the individual supplier. However, some open source products overlap
with these productivity suites (such as Open Office) and are a
distraction.
Java-based home-grown applications are not as easily considered on
an open source stack. Complex J2EE applications using BEA or IBM
extensions, when moved to Linux platforms, are best kept on BEA or
IBM respectively.
Simple J2EE applications can be considered on JBoss, but support or
integration costs may offset any initial licence savings. When
considering J2EE applications for Linux deployment, a reflection of
overall costs is fundamental.
Proprietary applications written for a specific platform, such as
Unix, with complex scripts or direct hardware access, are the least
likely candidates for migration to Linux. Here, the skills and
resources of the source (Unix) application-independent software
supplier and the target Linux deployment are important for
migration.
These open source tools are unlikely to make it into mass
commercial deployments before 2006. As they mature, open source
tools will become attractive for small and medium-sized businesses
and gain increased acceptance.
When selecting Linux services or applications, a uniform set of
criteria should be considered in the non-uniform open source
environment.
IT organisations must balance the relative cost of development and
integration of open source products with that of canned, proven
products on commercial stacks.
Philip Dawson is senior program director in
infrastructure strategies at Meta Group
www.metagroup.com
How does Linux fit into the enterprise?
Web server
Web servers are a commodity, almost appliance-like in their single function. There is a simple choice for the open source world: Apache or Microsoft. Any other web server platform is a niche platform.
Application server
Application servers demand more resources from the operating system and the platform but again, these are near commodity and Linux platforms running JBoss for non-complex workloads should be considered.
DBMS server
Prior to the 2.6 kernel, Linux scaling as a database management system platform had been restricted to an Oracle or DB2 scale-out model. The 2.6 release increased scaling, threading and input/output capabilities benefiting DBMS deployments. Open source DBMS software such as MySQL or maxDB is now being considered for small workloads.
File and print
File provisioning is best done under network-attached storage or a storage area network within an enterprise service portfolio. These services can be fulfilled by Linux and open source products, but they are immature and dependent on directory services in either an open environment (DNS and LDap) or Microsoft Active Directory.
Directory
Directory services are not well established on Linux or for open source in complex enterprise deployments. These services will mature in 2005, following Linux kernel changes that will enhance parallelism and input/output scaling.
The bottom line
When selecting Linux services or applications, you need to balance the relative cost of development and integration of open source products with that of canned, proven products on commercial stacks.
