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 NEWSLinux, at your service By Paul Krill August 9, 2002 1:01 pm PT ALTHOUGH LINUX still faces obstacles regarding application availability and scalability, the open-source platform nonetheless is becoming entrenched at ASPs that use the Intel hardware platform.
According to IDC, the Linux installed base, currently at 3.5 million units, will climb to 8.6 million server units alone by 2005. By contrast, Unix will drop from 2.61 million units to 2.53 million units. But Windows will still lead the way with an installed base of 8.6 million units in 2002 and 13.84 million server units in 2005. According to Gartner Dataquest, Linux revenues in the first quarter of 2002 grew by 54 percent, whereas other OSes faced double-digit declines compared to the same period in 2001. Year-over-year shipments for Linux grew by nearly 48 percent while other platforms declined or had slight growth, according to Gartner. Despite Linux's increasing popularity, limited application availability has made some companies leery of Linux. ASP Salesforce.com, which provides online CRM applications, is firmly in the Linux camp. "All of our Web and application servers are Linux," said Dave Moellenhoff, CTO of Salesforce.com in San Francisco. Moellenhoff noted that Linux offers advantages in reliability, price, and CPU power. The company uses Red Hat Linux on approximately 20 two-processor Dell systems to run Apache Web server and Resin application server, he said. "We think it's great because it's much more reliable than any alternative operating systems at that level," including Windows, Moellenhoff said. Eric Packman, CTO and cofounder of Boston-based Coradient, a provider of monitoring and management services for ASPs, agreed that Linux is popular among service providers. "The vast majority [of ASPs] I know use Linux up front [as a Web server] because [it's] really cheap and really fast," he said. "So any time you want to handle a larger load of customers and more people that turn up [at a Web site], you can turn on a bunch of Linux machines." Officials at Oracle, which uses Linux in its application outsourcing, see Linux becoming a deployment platform for applications. "What we're starting to see now is the real shift" to Linux adoption, said Doug Kennedy, vice president of the platform alliances, systems platform division at Oracle. "The combination of Red Hat and the Intel servers, we believe, is the best economic model for us to run our [ outsourcing] business right now." Oracle is deploying its E-Business Suite of applications on Red Hat Advanced Server, Kennedy said. The Red Hat Linux variant breaks down previous barriers to functionality such as asynch IO, while featuring enterprise-class support, he said. Additionally, Oracle salespeople access a pool of 370 Dell servers running Linux when doing remote product demos for customers. "It's a pretty significant move when you're betting your business on running well in front of a live audience," Kennedy said. But not all service providers running Linux are hooked. Digital Impact expects to drop the OS, at least for the time being. The company, which provides outsourced online direct-mail marketing for clients that include Victoria's Secret, plans to consolidate to two operating systems, most likely Solaris and Windows NT, said Gerardo Capiel, CTO and co-founder of the San Mateo, Calif.-based ASP. "Even though the license costs are a lot less, we have to have people to support three different operating systems," Capiel said. Linux may be cut "because not all our applications run on that OS," he said. "When you're relying on products like Oracle or Documention, you're just not going to find a lot of support. Either they just don't have a flavor for that OS or they just don't support it [very well]," Capiel said. Capiel said that Apache Web server tends to run best on Linux and finds the Linux licensing fees attractive. But Java on Linux has had its problems, he said. "We're a Java shop and the JVMs [Java Virtual Machines] on Linux have never been exactly the fastest," Capiel said. Salesforce.com opts to run its Oracle database on Sun Solaris rather than Linux. "Solaris is Oracle's primary build platform, so we get fixes faster," Moellenhoff said. Moellenhoff also cites a scalability issue. Salesforce.com can run its database on a 20-processor Sun Enterprise 10000 system, which isn't possible with Linux on Intel. Microsoft officials are skeptical about Linux's continued success. Peter Houston, senior director of the Windows servers product management group at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., sees Linux "making some inroads ... in two primary areas." The first is as a commodity platform for Web servers or network infrastructure servers, the other for one-of-a-kind systems such as oil and gas platforms. Also a drawback is Linux's lack of coordination of efforts, such as development of the core OS and file system, Houston observed. Linux is capturing a lot of basic infrastructure workload historically deployed on Unix, such as print file and Web servers, said analyst Al Gillen, research director of systems software at IDC in Framingham, Mass. But Linux application software "is in relatively short supply," Gillen said. Red Hat officials maintain that Linux is a good fit for ISPs. "It's more stable and it's a better value and it runs more securely," said Mark deVisser, vice president of marketing at Red Hat in Raleigh, N.C. "All these benefits exist for Web servers." How far Linux climbs in the OS market remains to be seen. "In five to 10 years, Unix will be overtaken by it. Whether [or not] we will get by Windows, we'll get close," deVisser said. Brian Fonseca contributed to this report. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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