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IT Minute: Linux in the Enterprise Grab your RealPlayer and get the inside scoop on which applications you'll need to put Linux to work in your organization. |
Although no one we've talked to is pleased with the pricing structure for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat says it will provide increased ISV support for Linux as well as additional technical support options, and these niceties do not come free (see our review of RHEL). An alternative, of course, is to move to SuSE, which Novell now supports and offers; taking this tack reduces the cost of acquisition to far below that of Solaris or Windows.
There's also a large disparity among the hardware requirements for Windows, Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. Many flavors of Unix require beefy, proprietary (read: expensive) boxes, and the minimum hardware cost of entry for Windows 2003 is also substantial. A low-end Intel machine, on the other hand, can run Linux quite happily. In our own NWC Inc. and Green Bay, Wis., Real-World Labs, we have a number of Dell Optiplexes that are too underpowered to run Windows 2003, but they run Linux just fine as servers. It is this repurposing of hardware, the leveraging of existing investments, that makes Linux appealing for redundant, large-scale data-center deployments.
A reason for this resource-needs gap between Linux and Windows is that while you can use the GUI to configure Linux, the GUI does not need to be running after configuration on a Linux installation--meaning that a whole lot of CPU cycles are freed up to complete the tasks a server should be performing, rather than drawing pretty pixels and interrupting tasks to check for GUI events. The GUI can be separated from the operating system, meaning cycles are used only during configuration when necessary, not 24 hours a day. Yes, X Window is a pig, but only when it's running.
So Where Does It Fit?
Linux is most often deployed on the edge of the network, for TCP/IP-based applications such as Web and mail servers, DNS, FTP servers, and proxies/caches. Generally, Linux lives where redundancy is required--in most Web farms, you'll find racks of Intel-based Linux servers running Apache and serving millions of Web surfing clients a day. Indeed, Apache on Linux dominates Web-hosting providers and large-scale search engines, such as Google, proving that this combination is more than capable of providing Web- and Internet-based services for even the most demanding high-availability environments.
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