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November 16, 1998

Linux Takes Off

The free Unix operating system is poised to make a dent in the mass corporate market

By Martin J. Garvey

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nterest in Linux has never been more obvious. The implementation of the Unix operating system that won't cost you a dollar is suddenly gaining respect from big companies that laughed it off just a couple of years ago. After its recent backing from Intel, Netscape, and every major database vendor, nobody's laughing anymore.

Whether Linux will ever overtake SCO's OpenServer or UnixWare 7 as the leading Unix operating system on Intel platforms--or run data centers along with the AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris operating systems--is still unclear. However, the support that's expected to come from enterprise application vendors such as Baan, PeopleSoft, and SAP may open the gates that have kept Linux from pervading the mass corporate market.

Of course, the corporate culture that dictates companies choose big, viable system vendors for IT solutions isn't likely to change within, say, the next five years, especially with uncertainties around the year 2000 problem and global market fluctuations. At its height, Linux will remain an operating system choice for customers who have Unix kernel expertise, insist on Intel processors, and don't want to work with Microsoft. But within that group, there will be heightened business-critical activity on the system.

The grass-roots Linux interest that has existed for years took time to catch on with business-solution providers. Informix, for example, didn't pay it much attention until Linux support issues became the International Informix User Group's No. 1 concern last year. That led Informix to announce support for the operating system this past summer.

But that support isn't coming just because Linux can be downloaded from the Internet for free. Besides the attractive price, Linux is gaining steam because of its solid business benefits. According to customers, it's more stable and bug-free than Windows NT--with which it competes on the Intel platform--and it's the easiest operating system on any platform to maintain and operate.

Perfect Timing
The question on many minds is why now? At least part of the answer can be found in Linux's leading competitor, Windows NT. While companies are often drawn to the commodity model of computing that's promised by the Wintel platform, frequent downtime and demanding administration eventually undermine those users' enthusiasm for the system. Still, once the Wintel infrastructure is in place, not many organizations are ready or able to replace what they just bought with an expensive Unix alternative.

The solution for a growing number of IS managers is Linux, which runs on their Wintel infrastructure. They can usually get the approval to test it, then snap it in to the system infrastructure if it works as expected. It's not unusual for Linux to become the stable alternative when NT isn't living up to its reputation or promise. "We're seeing the birth of a solution for a market that NT was supposed to consume," says Tim Schaefer, an independent consultant working as a database administrator for Florida Power and Light.

At Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. in Kansas City, Mo., Linux is being used to help monitor the switches from 750 central offices across Kansas and Missouri. It's a 24-by-7 operation. "We have this very intense [voice network monitoring] Intergraphic application to monitor everything in close to real time," says Randy Kessell, manager of technical analysis for Southwestern Bell.

The monitoring center desktops began running the Intergraphic application on DOS, which worked steadily because it did one thing at a time very well. But when the company moved to Windows 95, the application would lock its PCs up often, Kessell and his team would have to reboot, and data frequently got corrupted. Last spring, the company moved to NT, so the monitoring department did, too--but a test user regularly locked the system up in under two minutes, and it took a hard-drive cycle to recover. "If I'm looking at a remote central office and the equipment fails, I can't tell what the switch is doing," says Kessell. "We set ourselves up for something really bad."

Meanwhile, Kessell was running Linux on a company notebook because he'd heard that it was a robust operating system and wanted to see what it could do. He ran three versions of the Intergraphic application for three days with great success. That test led to a feasibility study, and in May, Southwestern Bell deployed Linux monitoring stations, with software from Red Hat Software Inc. "The first night we had major problems--the application was failing occasionally and users had to reboot--and at about 2 a.m., my partner and I wondered how fired we'd be," says Kessell. As it turned out, the users demanded to stay on Linux, and Kessell and his partner realized that they'd overlooked a simple problem, which was easily fixed. "Now we spend four to six hours maintaining a single Windows 95 machine per week," he says, "and 15 minutes per Linux machine."

Jörg Schulz, an IT director for the Edeka grocery chain, the largest such operation in Germany, agrees that Linux plays off of NT, and he makes a connection to the demise of OS/2 to explain the timing of Linux interest. "Network and systems administrators do not like monopolies," he says. "As long as OS/2 was a major player on the market, there was no [great demand] for another alternative to Mi- crosoft's products." Edeka uses Linux for mail and running the company's Internet site, file transfers, and some data analysis.

Another landmark event for Linux is the intrusion of the Internet into everyday operations. A stronghold for Linux is the Internet service provider market, where the freeware Web server Apache has proved to be very popular and successful--and that has opened the eyes of some IT managers to the viability of freeware. The Internet and Linux belong to each other because the Internet is the infrastructure that made Linux so accessible--and ultimately popular. "Linux would not have been born without the Internet," says Cliff Miller, president of Pacific Hi Tech, which sells Linux on CD-ROM, along with technical support. "It was the womb for Linux in the early days, and now it is the nurturing ground."

Higher Risk Tolerance
What's more, using technology via the Web isn't considered as big a risk as it once was. "It's not how risky it is, but how much freedom do we have for work like file sharing," says David Sklar, chief technology officer for Student.Net Publishing in Cambridge, Mass. "You get much of the same software you'd run on Hewlett-Packard or Sun, but available over the Internet to run on any Alpha-based, Intel-based, or Sparc-based systems."

Student.Net publishes an online magazine for college students, as well as specialized TV listings. Without any special tuning, Sklar is able to process 72,000 mail messages in six hours using a $3,000 Pentium machine. The software is free. "We save a lot of money and get tremendous performance," he says. Using Linux and the freeware MySQL database, Sklar can also process 1.5 million search requests per day for the TV listings on a $5,000 Pentium II PC.

Edeka's Schulz agrees that Linux and the Internet feed off of each other. "The Linux users need the Internet for updates and downloading new components," he says, "and parts of the Internet [that is, many ISPs] rely on Linux."

Available to run on Alpha, Sparc, and Intel processors--something no other operating system can claim--Linux might also be the most stable operating system available. Schulz says, "It's more stable than NT, all components are freely and immediately available and supported by the Internet and commercial supporters [such as Red Hat, Pacific Hi-Tech, and SUSE], and Linux components demand much less hardware than comparable NT or even NetWare components."

Informix saw that over the summer. "When we brought Linux into our labs, we realized immediately how stable it is and scalable it is," says John Downey, the Informix senior marketing manager for Linux. "Because it's open-source software, we're also impressed with how fast bugs get fixed."

A worldwide community of Linux engineers continually updates the operating system, and users add modules as they choose. No single vendor is in charge, although companies who need such assurances can turn to Linux vendors.

Stable Source
The stability and control of Linux comes from its source code, which every customer can access, change, and improve. That's not the case with commercial Unix or NT, to which customers are locked in. "Microsoft and the Unix guys say 'We know better, so pay us,'" says McNeil of SUSE.

Intel says that the shrink-wrapped, simple-to-install, and simple-to-run nature of Linux makes it easy to maintain. "That's also how it differentiates itself from the other operating systems," says Scott Richardson, director of server marketing for Intel.

"We sell you the car with a hood that opens," says Robert Young, CEO of Red Hat, which received capital from both Intel and Netscape last month. "Microsoft and the commercial Unix vendors sell you the car with a hood that's bolted shut."

Informix got on the Linux bandwagon because of the way it returns control over the cost of ownership to customers.

Oracle jumped on because it sees Linux as the next de facto operating system standard for databases and a standard approach for running applications on Intel: The leading database vendor says that in addition to being so easy to maintain, Linux will catch up to the functionality in commercial Unix over the next few years.

"Developers can do their work with no overhead and no heavy costs," says Schaefer, "and we can get 10 times the software for Linux that we can get for Solaris or HP-UX."

Still, not everyone is a believer. Martin Marshall, an analyst with Zona Research, says the number of Linux seats (estimated at 7 million) is based on downloads--not actual deployments. He adds that while Linux will have some effect on the market share of SCO's OpenView and UnixWare 7 and Novell's NetWare, it will have no effect on NT, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. Ultimately, he says, Linux will have equal market share to what Apple Macintosh enjoys for the desktop market.

Marshall cites three reasons for the interest in Linux: "Linux received some legitimization by big companies, the press needs the next subject to overhype, and people are easily mislead."

But the Linux proponents aren't easily dissuaded. "We had quite a few fights to get Linux in the door," says Kessell. "Information services worried about maintenance, and the legal department worried about who we sue if it fails. Red Hat said to sue them, and the questions have all died down."

Downey agrees. "I can't see why it won't be used for very large systems, once the third-party software is there," he says.

And Sklar speaks of the maturity Linux already displays today. "We started using Linux because it's great to save money," he says. "But it also does much more than more expensive products can do."

Photo by Tony Arruza