Use of the Unix operating system is set to fall as users
turn to Windows and Linux to run datacentre systems, analyst firm
Gartner has predicted.
Speaking at this month's ITexpo conference in Cannes, Gartner
analyst Andy Butler said, "During the next five years, new
implementations of Unix will go into steady decline."
The analyst group has seen a 70% drop in the number of users
buying upper mid-range Unix servers. Butler said businesses were
migrating to alternative technologies. "There will be a significant
role for Windows and Linux in the datacentre," he said.
According to Gartner, Linux servers running x86 Intel or AMD
processors were capable of replacing four-way Risc Unix servers. It
said businesses were showing a preference towards commodity server
hardware that could be linked together in a scale-out architecture
to improve performance.
In addition, Gartner expects Linux to take a big step forward in
terms of security and scalability by 2008 with the release of
kernel 2.8.
The impact of this migration from Unix will be a shift in
priority for application developers. Phil Dawson, research
vice-president at Gartner, said Linux and Windows were quickly
becoming tier one platforms and, as such, developers were targeting
them first for new application development. He said Unix was
becoming a tier two platform. The impact of this would mean that,
over time, Unix users would have to wait longer for new
functionality.
According to Dawson, the Xen open source hypervisor project,
which provides an x86 virtual machine monitor, will be a launchpad
for establishing Linux in the datacentre.
He said the biggest growth area for Linux applications would be
databases, business intelligence and datawarehouses. For instance,
Oracle's database strategy is based on its Real Application
Clusters technology, for which Linux is the preferred platform.
Dawson predicted that application servers and enterprise
resource planning software would be big growth areas for Linux.
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