Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in manufacturing are not
generally considered to be at the cutting edge of IT. Strapped for
cash in a hostile world market, IT systems are often way down the
list of priorities for investment and in many cases IT skills are
provided by those in other roles who have the aptitude.
Having said that, the numbers of SMB manufacturers turning from
UNIX to open source operating systems seems to be increasing. One
thing driving this is the increasing availability of ERP
application suites ported to Linux.
A survey by research group Peerstone at the end of 2004 showed
that two thirds of ERP users were running their software on UNIX
platforms, but, while UNIX was still dominant in terms of numbers,
trends were running against it. In short, UNIX – and Windows too –
is losing ground to Linux variants. At the time 20% of ERP users
expected to ditch UNIX and most of those were going towards open
source. That fact is recognised by numerous ERP suppliers,
including SAP and Oracle, who have made Linux a key plank of their
software roadmaps.
So, why are SMBs drifting away from UNIX towards Linux and what
qualities does it possess that make it a viable choice to serve
mission-critical applications?
Go back less than 10 years and UNIX ruled unchallenged in
high-performance servers for core business applications. In fact,
it still has the bulk of the market, but changes in recent years
have begun to erode that dominance and allowed Linux to gain
momentum. Key push factors in this have been the rise of the Intel
architecture and a step change in the maturity of the Linux
environment.
The Intel processor architecture has such a degree of
standardisation and has become so widely used in business systems
that it has achieved commodity status. This contrasts sharply with
UNIX processors, which are unique to each server supplier, as are
the many flavours of the Unix OS.
So, driven by the evolution towards commodity hardware
platforms, Microsoft’s operating systems had by the turn of the
millennium begun to erode UNIX dominance. Meanwhile Linux -
originally derived from UNIX but able to run on Intel processors –
was making headway in non-mission critical applications such as web
serving, where it came to dominate.
The breakthrough year for Linux, in terms of it becoming a
serious contender for high-performance application serving, was
2003. In that year version 2.6 of the Linux kernel was released,
meaning the OS could now run on servers with up to 32 processors,
instead of the two or four it had been limited to previously.
The advent of version 2.6 has made Linux much more reliable,
scalable and robust, but what are its limits? Where can the open
source OS be used in the IT stack?
“Linux can replace Unix pretty much everywhere,” says Ovum
analyst Laurent Lachal. “At first Linux was more for
infrastructural uses such as mail and web serving but is now being
used to run application platforms for things such as SAP.”
While the multi-processor capabilities of version 2.6 have
allowed Linux to gain traction in new areas, 32 processors is still
not that many when you consider UNIX servers can be run with
potentially thousands of linked CPUs.
“To a certain extent Linux is viable across the stack,” says Ian
Brown, an analyst with Gartner. “However, there are provisos, such
as availability of applications and support as well as concerns
over the robustness of Linux for the highest end uses, such as back
end databases. These tend to be on big, scaleable platforms in
larger organizations and for large deployments many put their
confidence in UNIX for back end server purposes because x86 is just
not scaleable to the same extent.”
Another area where Linux cannot compete with Unix RISC platforms
is in hardware management and maintenance features, such as the
hard partitioning and domain controls you will not find in Linux
distributions.
UNIX still has control of the highest of high-end applications
but in most areas where customers are using it Linux is emerging as
a viable alternative. At the same this is reflected in increasing
mindshare – of users and suppliers. The result is that many
perceive the tide of software history to be on the side of the open
source contender.
“For a lot of companies there will be increasing amounts of
software available to run on Linux,” says Brian Green, UK technical
director for Novell. “Sage, Oracle, SAP, BEA and Lotus Notes are
examples. Add to that the high profile advertising from IBM, HP and
AMD and you can see an increasing market dynamic for Linux.”
“Also, software and hardware vendors are working together to
innovate, which means costs are going down and the level of
innovation is accelerating compared to Unix,” adds Green.
All that may seem a little nebulous if you’re looking for
concrete benefits of switching to Linux, but there are a number of
major advantages to the open source OS. The root of these is the
marrying of Linux and x86 architecture.
This means cheaper hardware that is more flexible and you can
now break the link between the OS and the hardware. Many businesses
have lots of servers inherited from many stages in their life –
which may include a number of UNIX flavours tied to specific
hardware - but by standardising on Linux on Intel you can reduce
those numbers dramatically and achieve a lower cost per
transaction. At the same time having to deal with only one hardware
platform and OS potentially cuts the cost of the skills needed to
maintain the system.
For one manufacturer, ease of use has been the major advantage
of moving to Linux. EWS – which employs 135 people making steel
window components in Wolverhampton – was prompted to move when its
core Sage ERP software was due for upgrade 18 months ago.
It had been running Sage CS3 ERP software on SCO Unix, but when
Sage discontinued the product, EWS needed to find a replacement ERP
system quickly. It engaged IBM partner CPiO to help it find and
implement a new ERP solution. CPiO recommended moving to Sage Line
500 on Suse Linux Enterprise Server V8. Hardware is IBM eServer
xSeries and the database is an IBM Informix Dynamic Server of
approximately 30 Gbytes.
David Thompson is planning and logistics manager – and also
looks after IT at EWS. For him the outstanding outcome of the
migration is that there has been no steep learning curve and
maintenance is now easier.
“We’ve not really learned any great lessons because you tend to
learn more when things go wrong,” says Thompson. “This runs so well
we just leave it and when we do need to do anything it’s far easier
than when we used UNIX. You had to know UNIX command prompts, but
now you use a browser window to do things like set up printers or
users.”
You don’t have to wait for a compelling event to try Linux out,
says Gartner’s Ian Brown. “Linux is easily available. You can
download a copy and experiment with it. That makes it particularly
good for greenfield projects where you can experiment with it on
x86 boxes for free.”
That’s the route taken by another manufacturer -
Shrewsbury-based automotive pressings manufacturer, Stadco. The
company – which has 1,500 employees at six plants in the UK and two
in Germany – is something of an early adopter and it was back
around the turn of the millennium that the company decided to trial
Linux as a platform for its QAD ERP software.
The company was involved in a JV that was setting up a new plant
in Brazil in 2000 and this was the perfect opportunity to try the
open source OS. “We had the opportunity to move to the latest
version of our core apps, which were now on what we perceived to be
the latest version of UNIX – which was Linux,” says group systems
manager, David Lloyd.
“It proved to be a success,” says Lloyd. “If we ran into trouble
we could have moved back to SCO Unix, but it didn’t fail, was
robust and performed well.” From then on the firm decided that all
future plants would run its ERP on top of Linux.
Now Stadco runs QAD on Linux at three of its UK plants and one
in Germany. Initially it used the Red Hat distribution but has now
standardized on IBM rack-mounted servers, which come with SUSE
Linux.
Like EWS all migrations to date have gone without a hitch. “From
our point of view it was incredibly straightforward and simple,”
says Lloyd. “We have some highly talented people and they
transferred their knowledge base across. We saw more problems going
from Red Hat to Suse than UNIX to Red Hat.”
“At the end of the day,” says Lloyd, “There is nothing wildly
esoteric or special about it. We wanted the OS to run the server
safely and it just does what it says on the tin as an OS,” adds
Lloyd.
EWS and Stadco’s experiences show that mid-sized companies can
get great benefits from a move to Linux as a server for core
applications, and that it can often be a painless experience that
brings many benefits. As Stadco’s Lloyd says, for many the next
version of UNIX will be Linux.