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Wall Street Embraces Linux
Brian Stretch was among several
who sent in this story about Merrill Lynch
switching to Linux, this is interesting because it's actually companywide.
Talks about Red Hat, Linux threatening Unix and so on.
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Quoth the column:
Also, contrary to popular belief, Linux is not really "free." How are large-scale licensing agreements to be worked out?
"Some of these things make us very uncomfortable," says Carey, who is trying to hammer out the details.
I don't understand how Linux could be much more "free". Maybe Forbes has a different definition of "free" than the rest of us?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
and
Sounds to me like that means top-down. I doubt most of the brokers were using Solaris 8 (or whatever) on their local handheld.
Obviously Lisa DiCarlo really understands the comcepts in the story she just wrote. Yeah.
But I hate to see people moving to Red Hat based distros. I know they have the support network that compaines of that size need and all. But, I think that we risk building another monopoly in the linux market. There are already tons of people who think that Red Hat *IS* linux. Personally I can't stand Red Hat distros with all of their default bloatware. I would love to see a good comercial support company for Debian.
First, Merrill Lynch praised the portability of Linux applications and their ability to scale across the enterprise, with a swipe at proprietary applications. Maybe they'll wake up for a moment, and realize what their most locked-in platform is.
Second, this seems to be largely a matter of Linux moving into Unix turf. I expect to see some minor disasters happen with this type of migration, and that's a Good Thing. Why, because part of the savings is moving onto dirt cheap PCs from expensive hardware. Part of the expense of that old hardware is the label, but part is genuine quality, too. After someone starts to get a handle on money lost because PCs are too cheap, causing down-time and even some erroneous data, there will be a move to put some quality back in. We will all have a better quality spectrum to buy from, and it will be better labeled and reviewed.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
sPh
Yup your wrong unix based work stations .... sun ultra 5's for the display's and the heavy duty servers for radar and flight plan processing.
A few programs us Dec alpha's but for the most part its sun
Sun???? Are you sure? I'm a private pilot and the last time I visited a RAPCON facility and an ATC control tower (at an air force base, just before 9/11) All the hardware there was Tektronix and IBM.
I guess they are playing both sides.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/fe b0 2/02-13revolutionpr.asp
I work for one of the largest banks in the world (Top 5) and we almost ditched our entire Windows Server infrastructure in favor of Linux. Why? Not because it wasn't working.
Unlike a lot of MS haters, we know how to use Windows. Strangely enough, when used the way MS intended it works pretty well.
Instead we considered Linux for similar reasons as Merril Lynch. When we asked MS for a deal on licencing our 300+ Windows 2000 Servers the way they did for Windows NT4.0, not only did they say "No" they auditted our current licences and told use we owe them money! They were the ones who sold us the licences in the first place!
So on top of each Windows 2000 Server licence, they want client access licences for EVERY computer (6000+) and a yearly subscription fee for god knows what!
I mean, what's the point of a server if no one can access it? Per-seat licencing for 6000+ workstations?
It wasn't until we weighed it against the cost of redeveloping 120 applications for Linux that we decided to cave. MS knows this. They waited for companies to become dependant on their OS before jacking up the price. What Merril Lynch is doing is not whoop-de-doo! another company went to Linux!, it's truly amazing. For such an enormous organization to revamp on such a huge scale takes cahones.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
1) How do you work around the complete lack of server-side productivity software on Linux servers? By deploying Exchange, you can make scheduling a meeting as easy as sending an email with a time and having everyone click to confirm the meeting, which is then added to everyone's calendar. There is no solution like this without using Exchange (and I've looked.)
HP Openmail (recently taken over by Samsung Contact) does EXACTLY this, no Exchange required. We use it with MAPI drivers for Outlook 2000, and our users love it (because they can use Outlook) and I love it (because, well, no Exchange). You didn't look very hard.
Belloc
1) How do you work around the complete lack of server-side productivity software on Linux servers? By deploying Exchange, you can make scheduling a meeting as easy as sending an email with a time and having everyone click to confirm the meeting, which is then added to everyone's calendar. There is no solution like this without using Exchange (and I've looked.)
You can do this a couple of ways now. One is to use a Outlook with a good IMAP server. Then you configure the clients to publish their free/busy times via WebDAV. This is built into Outlook and works pretty transparently. No costly software on the server at all! This doesn't have all the features that Exchange has, but covers the biggies.
Another more complete approach is to use the software from Bynari. Complete support for Outlook with Unix servers.
2) How do you work around the lack of group policy controls in SAMBA? By this I mean forcing a computer to have the most up-to-date anti-virus software when it logs on to the domain; mapping network drives automatically; downloading OS patches automatically through a local server. AFAIK, Samba can't do any of this as well as a Windows 2000 Server can. And what about Active Directory? LDAP isn't as cohesive a solution if you are running Windows clients.
My impression was that you can use policies with Samba. You just need to use a Windows box to generate the files. Samba also allows you to run scripts on the clients to do whatever you need them to. The scripts can run based on computer name, login name, or domain name. Can be very powerful.
The other conclusion I must draw is that the companies that are migrating to Linux as a workgroup server (i.e. replacing Windows NT/2000 Server with Linux) did not have a cohesive Windows network in the first place. Unfortunately, Linux is nowhere near a solution to Exchange, and it's perhaps 25% of the way to replacing a Windows 2000 primary domain controller's capabilities.
Go to http://www.bynari.net/ and check out their solutions. Very nice.
Samba can work as a PDC quite easily now. It can also allow Unix boxes to join into the domain. Samba takes care of the SID to UID mapping. Very slick. The only thing they don't have completely done right now is Kerberos/AD support. That is coming in Samba 3.0. You can start playing with it right now.
So what servers is Merrill Lynch migrating? Linux does have its core competencies -- web servers; application servers; network storage to some degree -- but they didn't mention what part of the infrastructure they were replacing. I would thus take the words "companywide" with a grain of salt in this case.
Cisco runs all the printers in the company off of Linux. So Linux *can* do file and print quite well.
BTW, you might want to check out a little program called "Directory Administrator." It's a program that manages users in a LDAP directory. The latest version also takes care of managing Samba accounts in LDAP. You get Active Directory without Microsoft.
Well, you might be interested in knowing that one of the applications that are used to handle air traffic in this country is running on Linux right now.
Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) has been in testing on site for some time now. Currently it is used in the western part of the United States and in Mexico.
Reports from the field for the last 6 months have been very positive. These boxes will be replacing either HP-UX boxes, or in some cases the hated Windows boxes connecting to HP-UX via an Exeed session. Those users who will be doing away with their Exeed session have been jumping with joy. As for the users coming off of the HP-UX systems they do not seem to notice much difference (but the accountant who pays the bills sure does).
Mexico held of their trial of the ETMS system until a Linux version was available because they felt the cost of the HP-UX system was simple unreasonable.
Read the article. Do you really think Merrill Lynch is revealing something here? Trust me, every major financial institution are doing some form of linux project, in order to evaluate the costs of migrating to the platform. And if Merrill is utilizing IBM consultants, the fact they are using linux would not be secret for long.
The reality is that most financial applications running off a database backend will be processed using UNIX (or mainframe). Its a hell of lot easier to display those remote windows to UNIX platforms than M$ platforms. And since stock broker/analysts do not require Counterstrike to run on their machines, I would imagine quite a few desktops will be replaced as well.
What is driving this actually Microsoft .NET and its licensing costs. With the recession this year, a lot of managers are looking to shine. Upper management may consist of assholes, but rarely are they actual idiots. Alot of them in the tech departments may even have been system admnistrators at some point in their lives. This is totally doable, and management knows it. The problem is risking their ass to make an implementation attempt.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
But presumably it would be cool for them to loose it because MS marketing said ``don't worry about out-of-bounds pointers ... most customers will never be affected and it won't impact our revenues''.
I haven't looked at the license agreement between ML and Sun, or who ever they were dealing with before, but I'll bet that Sun wasn't on the hook for anything except gross negligence, and probably not that either, under the license. Their support contract might have been a little better, but as you indirectly point out, Sun simply isn't big enough to indemnify ML and its customers for a major bugger-up. IBM probably isn't, either.
This whole liability/accountability issue is really a non-starter. If you don't have a bond posted, you're just a quick chapter7 away from off the hook, if the problem gets past your lawyers. Neither Sun nor MS nor IBM nor ... have a bond posted for the performance of their software. Yes, MS has deep pockets, but they won't risk a cent of their shareholder capital by promising a customer anything that isn't fully disclaimed in the fine print.
> The article talks about linux as if it is not remotely related to unix - I view linux as another version of unix like solaris or aix. Does anyone else think this - everytime I read something in the press about linux it's allways the same (and it drives me crazy!).
Stop reading these like a developer, and read like a businessman. From a cost point of view, there's quite a difference between the traditional Unices and their associated hardware and the free/low-cost alternatives.
Technically you're correct - but that's not the point of view expected of the readers of these articles.
This about it this way: the sales people at Microsoft are out there every day selling their product. They are out there telling your PHB every day that Exchange is better, that SAMBA won't do the half of what Windows 2000 Server will do, and that an all-Windows infrastructure is the way to go.
The real question is: what can you tell your PHB to dispute that?
The small company I work for had to do a server upgrade recently. We had a NT 4 server with insufficient licenses running in a multiplatform environment (Linux/Mac/Win) with a technical staff comfortable in all platforms.
After a review Linux won because of the following reasons:
1. Netatalk is much more stable than MFS for W2K.
2. W2K doesn't provide NFS shares.
3. W2K license cost was $4000. Antivirus software for the W2K box was another $1000. Backup software was another significant cost.
4. Performance benchmarks we ran showed Samba 2x faster than W2K on the same piece of hardware.
5. Samba provides all the services we need.
6. Applying patches to the Linux box is less intrusive (fewer required reboots).
7. We also don't have to keep track of license documentation for the Linux box.
8. We will never be forced to migrate because of Microsoft's planned forced obsolescensce program.
Initially the PHB was dead set against using Linux for this application. When we showed him the real story, he changed his mind.
When we were done we also found we had a system where many of the bugs and glitches that annoyed the users mysteriously disappeared.