Running on computers hidden in dark wiring closets and chilled server rooms throughout the wired world, for more than a year Linux has been delivering the mail, juggling the print queues, guarding the networks and serving the Web sites of businesses on the electronic frontier.
Often keeping the fact secret from the top brass, technology-savvy systems administrators have begun using Linux because they find it reliable, cheap and easily customized.
Now Linux is coming out of the closet.
In the last six months, a rash of big computer companies have announced support for business computing under Linux, companies that include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Oracle, Sun, SGI and Apple. Linux is taking its first serious steps into the mainstream as an operating system, the key piece of software that coordinates between computer hardware–such as the screen, network and disk drives–and other software–word processors or e-mail programs or databases.
Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT are the most common operating systems in homes and offices, but versions of AT&T’s venerable Unix operating system are common on mainframes and are widely used by the software development community. Linux is a version of Unix that can run on the same inexpensive PC hardware as Windows, as well as many other hardware platforms.
Since the early days of networking, machines running proprietary versions of Unix from large manufacturers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun have dominated the reliability- and performance-driven market for computer servers and firewalls, which perform automatic tasks such as routing e-mail, delivering Web pages and protecting internal networks from external threats.
When one of these applications crashes, business operations can grind to a halt, so vendors of operating systems in server markets focus their programming efforts on removing errors.
Developers of consumer-oriented software, in contrast, will frequently use their energy to add features rather than fix bugs, since consumers are willing to pay for new features and have been trained to put up with bugs.
A key reason for the rise of Linux in business settings is that PC microprocessors, such as Intel’s line of Pentium chips, have become significantly more powerful in the past few years–today you can purchase PC systems that equal or exceed the performance of older proprietary work stations at half the price.
Although there are other versions of Unix available for these PCs, many cost-conscious businesses are picking the freely available Linux to run their network servers.
“One of the most interesting things about Linux is that we’re finding clients are using it, but not necessarily under the watchful eye of the chief information officer–it’s in wiring closets and server rooms,” said John Prial, director of integrated solutions and Linux marketing at IBM.
In May, IBM announced that it would provide worldwide customer support for the Linux platform. A Linux version of its popular DB2 universal database was used on the servers for the IBM-sponsored Wimbledon Web site in late June and early July. IBM will release this version of DB2 commercially later this month, along with other Linux software products.
Caldera Systems Inc. of Orem, Utah, is one of several companies that sell Linux packages which include installation instructions and support. Ransom Love, president and CEO, sees this interest from traditional computer powerhouses as validation for the operating system.
In the last few years, he said, businesses were loath to officially adopt the system because they could not get the kind of vendor support that was available for the traditional Unix variants.
That has changed, said Love: “Today, I can connect you with services that could provide one-hour response time, 24-7, on-site, anywhere in the nation.”
The best reason for a company to adopt Linux, though, is that this support is rarely needed, according to Stelios Valavanis, president of computer systems integrator onShore Inc. in Chicago. Most of his Linux installations have been in “servers that people want to forget about,” and so reliability is a key attribute.
“I can’t believe that people think it is acceptable that they reboot NT once a week,” he said. Linux machines frequently remain up for more than a year at a time.
Linux’s famous reliability may stem from the fact that Linux is the most visible example of a newly popular trend in business software development called open source.
Most software developers, such as Microsoft, provide users with only the machine-readable, or executable, form of the program. Open-source projects also release the human-readable, or source code, version of a program.
The open-source movement seeks to harness the knowledge of the user: If a programmer using open-source software finds a bug, the programmer can sometimes fix it better and faster than the original developer could.
Since Linux was started in 1991 by then-college student Linus Torvalds, hundreds of volunteer programmers all over the world have removed bugs and added features, and the process is still going on.
With this many people looking at the Linux code and competing for the kudos given to those who contribute to it, bug patches have been known to appear only hours after a bug is first identified.
While the core Linux code is available to all, it does not include many features–such as an installation program–which most users require. So a number of companies have been formed to cater to the growing Linux market.
Caldera provides one of these so-called distributions of Linux. Other commercial distributions include ones from Red Hat Inc. of Durham, N.C.; TurboLinux Inc. of Brisbane, Calif.; and S.u.S.E. Inc. of Oakland, Calif. Non-profit distributions also exist.
Computer users familiar with the problems caused by the incompatible versions of Unix released by the major computer vendors need not worry, though.
“People are used to hearing about problems with the different Unix versions, but they all had different source code. With the Linux distributions, it is all the same source code. The differences are much smaller,” said Larry Augustin, president and CEO of VA Linux Systems, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company that has been supplying Linux systems and support to businesses since 1993.
The primary demand for Linux machines, says Augustin, is in businesses that use the Internet. For example, Netcraft, an Internet analysis firm in England, estimates that the number of Web servers running Linux has increased over the past year to around 30 percent, slightly ahead of the 24 percent running some version of Windows. Most of the rest run flavors of Unix.
Many agree that Linux is well-suited to these tasks. “We’re seeing Linux’s sweet spot being in infrastructure services, like Web, e-mail, proxy servers and firewalls,” says Wayne Caccamo, director of open-source solutions operations at H-P.
Caccamo views Linux as a good candidate operating system for server appliances, inexpensive machines that could perform server tasks for a company with minimal installation and maintenance costs.
Among other Linux projects, H-P announced in March that it would provide worldwide customer support for the operating system, and is involved with writing a version of Linux for Intel’s new Merced chip, which is scheduled to be available in the middle of next year.
But even for business applications, Caccamo warned that Linux is no panacea: It does not yet offer the scalability and high availability possible in proprietary systems from H-P, IBM, Sun or SGI.
In other words, Linux is not yet ready to handle a 16-processor supercomputer and on-the-fly hardware replacement, not a surprising shortcoming given the low-cost PC server hardware on which it usually runs.
Some companies are moving Linux out of the server room, though. Atlanta-based Home Depot will be testing Linux as an operating system for its in-store terminals this summer.
Mike Anderson, vice president of information services for Home Depot, is looking at Linux because it allows the terminals to be managed and upgraded remotely–leading to potentially significant support cost savings. The company projects having 90,000 such terminals by 2003.
Burlington Coat Factory of Burlington, N.J., is already making a similar move: Their new store terminals will run Linux.
Although one of the first companies to deploy Linux in an application used by non-technical employees, Michael Prince, Burlington’s chief information officer, does not consider himself a groundbreaker. “People think this is a bleeding-edge move, but it isn’t: We bought commodity PCs from Dell, and put a well-developed operating system on them.”
He points out, however, that “Linux would not be the solution for everyone. If we’d been a bunch of experts in Windows NT instead of Unix, we might have made a different decision.”
For companies considering Linux but who lack internal expertise in the operating system, the eight-month-old Linux Professional Institute is preparing to release its first set of certification exams for Linux system administrators in August.
And some new competition for Linux is on the horizon: Microsoft’s next operating system release, Windows 2000, aims to replace NT and 98. But if Microsoft continues to delay the launch of Windows 2000, then Linux may have time to build a significant market share.
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For more information on Linux, VA Linux Systems runs the link-filled www.linux.com site, and the www.linux.org site is owned by the not-for-profit business Linux Online. The Linux Professional Institute has a site at www.lpi.org.
