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Linux in Enterprise Environments
watzinaneihm writes "Eweek has an Article about how Linux is getting accepted in Enterprises.IBM is releasing Tivoli for Linux. CA released Unicenter for Linux a few months ago.I got rumours about rumours that HP might do something similar with Openview. " One for those of you who dress nicer than me.
I always knew that Spock was logical
Just release Notes already. I realize that it runs under wine but...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
but mainly by people who are developing on the Linux platform. The majority of managers, marketing, and other folk are very tightly monitored by the IT department and are not ready for Linux yet.
Here, it's all RedHat 8.0. It was tough to get people to switch to 7.3, but once the developers saw 8.0 they loved it.
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Free your mind.
Linux is not just being considered, it's being used as a realistic, cost effective solution. See this presentation on what the Marine Corps now uses to manage its warehouse inventories. It's a bit old, but still very relevant as the system is being deployed here in Okinawa next month.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
Is it a perfect copy of the Windows GUI? If it's not, then this is not going to work.
I recently tried to make a shortcut to FreeCiv on my KDE desktop. Ok. Finding where the freeciv wrapper was was easy. However, the menu opened by right clicking on the icon did not have a shortcut option. WTF? Other buttons didn't bring a shortcut menu option out either. Then finally, frustrated, I just dragged the icon on the desktop. And that created the shortcut (which, obviously, wouldn't work because the working directory was now wrong but that's not the point). The point is that in Windows, dragging an icon means copying not creating a short cut. KDE's inconsistent behaviour would have meant that a Windows user would have never been able to create a link.
I don't know what the presentation says because it is in PowerPoint, but I guess they don't use Linux to make presentations...
Seems that it already exist as we use it on dozens of our servers on a daily basis !?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I could move about 250 desktop workstations to Linux if I could get a satisfactory Notes 6 desktop to work there. Web-based Notes won't cut it, I need the full client and R5 doesn't do all I need.
Hey, I got through this entire post without typing "fuck." Good for me.
Hey, did you see Oprah eat that chunk of feces on TV today? That was fucking awesome!
I've avoided several otherwise promising server products because they only run on Windows.
I like to spend my weekends with my family, not hunting for boot disks at 3am on Saturday morning in an darkened office block.
I hope the trend continues...
I have always been whating to see the day that Linux is fully accepted by Businesses and hardware companies. Maybe, this will be one step closer to Linux becoming the next "Standard" operating system for businesses. Maybe hardware companies will be sure to make their devices fully Linux compatible, or at least capable of having drivers written. Remember those days when winmodems were unheard of and internal modems all actually had hardware somewhere in them? I just hope that this won't make Linux get commercialized too much.
Opening windows is bad for computers and air conditioners!
I work as a CIO in large corp and know the costs involved with running a Microsoft centric enterprise. The TCO (total cost of ownership) is unsustainable. Microsoft is increasing these costs yearly with limited benefit outside the Outlook/Exchange arena.
Money, not reliability or security, will be the reason corporations switch to linux. The upcoming rise of network computers ala Citrix will also reduce the value of a Windows-centric enterprise.
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As a developer, I'm asked on average of once or twice every year to suddenly pick-up a new technology and learn it within a couple weeks so that I can write a new program for release 6-12 months later as itself or jointly with the hardware guys.
When it comes to good, thorough documentation and API releases, I've always thought that this is an area where Linux is truly lacking. Hypothetically speaking, I think a coder learning Java for a new Windows P2P program that he must write would have a much easier time than a programmer who must learn Perl or C on his Linux box and create a network-intensive application that installs and runs the same way on all distributions of Linux, as well as Mac OS X.
I figure opinions from the "non enlightened", as many of you will probably call me, will help you to improve Linux, especially its documentation and user-friendliness.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Just curious, I download a free operating system, then buy:
- Tivoli / Openview / Unicenter / whatever
- Oracle / DB2 / etc
- Storage manager (Veritas?)
- Enterprise backup software
- Four other things I forgot
- yet more stuff
- yada, yada, yada
- etc, etc
Once you add a gajillion dollars worth of 3rd-party software, do you still have a free-OS?
FWIW - I'm pro-Linux, I just don't recognize it beneath all this other stuff.....
Alan.
If anyone doubts Linux' inroads into the corporate environment, just read today's release from HP. HP now says they have 2 BILLION in annual revenue attribuatable to Linux. http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030121/tech_hewlettpackard _linux_1.html
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
Fellow farmyard animals:
Do we support the farmer or does he support us?
That should give some context to your question.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
But I didn't think that vagrants had Internet access...
As Unicenter was originally coded for Unix it was an easy step for them.
Additionally, HP OpenView also already has Linux support. But, people need to remember, HP openView is a Network Management application while Unicenter is an Enterprise Management application. They are not the same.
This is getting to be old news. Kind of like Linux on the Desktop stories.
Yes, we know it's heading there. Yes, we know it's being adopted by big players. Do we need to hear about each article just because it has "Linux" in the title?
> What about the GUI?
What GUI? It doesn't have a monitor...
I've got a beloved Cobalt RaQ4 running a proprietary app server.
I've booted it once when I turned it on an that's it. That was a year and a half ago. I patch it when necessary, keep the fluff out of it's inlets and that's it. (Sometimes I stroke it, and sing to it)
On the other hand I have the same app server running on a Windows development box and, well, you can just tell what I'm going to say so I won't bother.
From the article: "Red Hat Network is a far more cost-effective implementation than Microsoft [Corp.]'s Systems Management Server and basically does the same thing. I get capacity planning benefits as well as hardware configuration, all sorts of good stuff like that,"
Imagine that...Linux, a more cost effective solution that Microsoft. That's just all crazy talk...next someone will say that Open Source would promote diversity and competitiveness within the computing industry. Proposterous!
I am an advanced MS system administrator at a fortune 350 company using mostly visual basic for application and office productivity development.
Before linux can EVER make it onto the desktop, somebody is going to have to come up with some type of scripting language besides C. I need the ability to interact with the inputs/outputs of the office productivity tools (delete, copy, etc) and linux just can't do that yet.
I will definately check out linux in a few years, but it looks like this egg is still about only 2/3rds baked.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Microsoft won't win in this area for several reasons. Large grid and clusters sometimes require really low level tweaking to optimize performance. When you start getting into shared memory architecture, windows is still 10 yrs behind. Plus, the researchers and high end computing need access to source code to tweak and optimize. Microsoft is it's own worse enemy in this area. MS effectively locks themselves out of the supercomputing world due to their business practices.
to any of us 'selling' open source to 'The Enterprise'. We've been finding increasing acceptance recently amongst medium size businesses in the UK, and a willingness in the media to accept that Open Source is 'Enterprise Ready', which, of course, it has been for years.
CmdrTaco wrote:
One for those of you who dress nicer than me.
According to this pic that includes many people!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Here at work I sometimes use Linux mail programs like Mozilla Mail with Notes. Notes supports IMAP for reading your email and LDAP for accessing the company address book. We've been doing this using Netscape Mail on the Macintosh for years (Notes client is available for the Mac but the Mac users didn't want to buy it) and it works just as well for Linux. For Notes databases (other than email) you can make them useable over the Web with a reasonable amount of work. Notes *developers* need the full client, but many Notes users could probably do without it.
Actually, you have a choice, you can switch to their advanced server line for at least $800 per server. They will support each rev of that product with errata for up to three years. As for desktops installs...
Imagine if Microsoft only supported an OS for one year from release...
I am not happy at all
We have been using NetSaint for years ... it runs on Linux, Solaris, and NT and exceeds our needs. It is tremendously configurable, supports remote reporting nodes, and is extremely light weight.
.. anyone care to tell me why I really care about this report, other than it showing how companies are taking Linux seriously? Because if they are, then it is time for them to start taking other Open Source software seriously, view what the competition provides, and start making their products more usable. I used to hear a saying, putting a dress on a pig doesn't make it a prom queen. Well, dressing up a pig using Linux doesn't get it a date on my server.
My prior exposure to Openview, Unicenter, and Tivoli are that they are bloated monstrosities better suited to pleasing upper management types who like pretty pictures (has anyone actually found 3D flythroughs to be effective?) than to sys admins and NOCs. They take way too much effort to setup, and suck system resources like crazy. Plus, the damn things cost a fortune to purchase and support.
So
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Openview is already ported to solaris.. and most of the backend stuff it does is written in PERL.. So how hard is it to port to linux.... probably not hard at all.
The only thing i like about openview that would be useful is it's SNMP MIB Browser... no one else has ever come close to it.. although i haven't searched in the last 6 months
ChiefArcher
I'm Brian Fellows!
Ever since linux was introduced into our environment about a year and a half ago, linux has grown to be a major part of our organization. We proved to upper management that linux was a viable solution to MS products, not only in cost but in functionality for many situations. We have 6 RH servers now and more are forthcoming. It's a nice change since this makes me a linux professional instead of a hobbyist now. Granted, we have about 90 NT/2000 servers but 6 can be considered a nice start when a couple of years ago, my manager was telling me that he didn't trust open source because "if it's free, it can't be any good".
We're about to hire three more engineers and as part of the requirements to work here, a candidate must have at least a functional knowledge of linux or unix. That's a major step in the right direction for an MS shop.
Who cares what the management processes run on - Nagios is just as good a management process in most respects as manageit (sorry, unicenter).
But I've been trying to get CA to give me a knowledge agent for linux for a long time now - the knowledge agent is the bit that actually provides data from a host, such as what processes are running, what their states are, how much mem they're using, etc.
All we had to do to get 'approval' was do proof-of-concepts. Now that HP Omniback (aka DataProtector) supports Liunx, SAP runs on Linux, and we can do 95% of our job on the desktop using Linux we are past the sneaking in. Linux is still a pain to configure due to the many flavors. I also wish tools/applications would install easier. We'd don't have DLL hell as much as we used too - now we have gcc hell!
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Yes. I have.
Thank you for bringing it up. Now I will have flashbacks, and have to go back to therapy for a few months to get the nervous tics to stop.
More seriously, though, I shouldn't complain. It prolonged the project I was working on for many months, and I bill by the hour, the flakyness and flaws of Unicenter made me a lot of extra money.
Ultimately, it is possible to get Unicenter to work "well" on Linux, but if my experiences are typical, it takes a lot of time, money, and a crapload of workarounds before it does what its supposed to do.
I should, in fairness, point out that we were early adopters, had a very customized and not completely standard Linux setup for, and that we got CA to fix some bugs that we ran into. Future users of Unicenter on Linux may have a less bumpy ride.
We have a client running production SAP Instances on linux. Adoption of linux on mission critical enterprise applications shows it is gaining acceptence in industry.
a better Link with many more links , first linked on Google news 5 minutes ago.....
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
-- ac of course
One for those of you who dress nicer than me.
Why exclude tramps and vagrants?
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Yes, you might want to waste money on this software, but think of the alternatives:
So yes, there is a BIG reason to use Linux instead of Windows
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Tivoli already runs on Linux for quit some time. The importance of the news is in the widening of the support.
1
Notes client will be introduced by IBM. This is really important news as it makes it not mandatory anymore to have Windows on the desktop.
http://www.internetwk.com/story/INW20030119S000
Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
The reason it won't run well under Wine is that the clients just plain don't run that well anywhere. Unless it is way better than the last time I had to use it, this is already an obsolete product that any sane organization would be phasing out, and they certainly would not be creating new applications using this closed technology. Stay with it, and you will be burned, it is just a question of when.
These applications/systems will improve the reliability of your system - at least that is the justification. Since we're focusing on TCO, the free part is not too interesting. It's the part about "how good is it?" that's interesting.
Also, Microsoft has a tradition for a forced upgrade policy. That rubs many companies the wrong way. You'll find systems developed and put into production in the 80s and 70s still running, at less cost that reimplementing them with current technology. But those systems usually do not run on a Microsoft platform.
Stop the brainwash
Even smaller companies are starting to bring their products to Linux.
The company I work for is planning to release Linux version of our flagship product this winter... oh, I guess I better get back to work then...
I passed the Turing test.
Enough with "enterprise" already. It mostly means "business," but then it also covers a few other larger groups, like schools. "Business" is good enough. Does anyone ever ask what enterprise you work for?
For particular niches, Linux is already attractive. We have a server farm of around 100 Xeon rackmount nodes that comprise our server farm. We have a batch queuing system which doles out user jobs to some of these machines, and others are allocated for interactive use. We are running a mix of in house software, shrink-wrapped software, and open-source software written by others in our industry. Linux has proven to be as useful for these tasks as our commercial Unix versions have been. In fact, I would say that these Linux machines do over 90% of what our Solaris servers do.
There are a few drawbacks to Linux at this junction. The major thing that our Linux servers cannot do is handle large-memory footprints, above the 3 - 4 GB RAM level. This is more of a limitation of the 32-bit PC hardware than of Linux itself. For our large memory jobs we run on our large memory Suns, but all the other jobs use Linux as the computational platform. We do not run Linux for our file servers, as we've encountered problems with the NFS implementation on Linux that Solaris doesn't seem to have. Other than that, Linux gets a big thumbs up.
I use linux in enterprises and have been using it for 3 years.
It isnt any different to deploy than any other Unix technology (okay, its easyer). Its a killer proxy, redirector, webnany, IDS, Web Server and i have it serve all collaboration facilities for VERY large companies (Like, one of the largest autopart builders in latin america).
Im tired to see "oh, it wont be adopted until it looks like w2k admin interface"....
Get a LIFE you MS BIOTCH.... if you dont learn linux, real Linux, and the network protocols you are deploying (which is actually the difference between de3ploying in win vs lin -that you have to know the protocol, and wtf you are doing in Linux-), you will go out of the market and the biggest box youll be able to deploy will be a fucking xBox.
We already won as far as i can tell. More and more ppl in large enterprise environments are looking into migrating all infrastructure to Linux. We have proven ourselves worthy.
For the sick bitches not wanting to accept this reality, i recomend another industry or a move to desktop system's support, where you can still go click-click and have your wonderfull users finally copy paste that spreadsheet into your mommas POwer POint.
+5, Offensive
NO SIG
Back when I started my career in the late '70s and early '80s, the prevailing wisdom was that nobody could get fired because they bought IBM systems, but I found their dominance disturbing and felt it held back progress. At that time, I speculated that IBM's days of market dominace were numbered, but I wasn't confident enough to predict their downfall in about ten years. With MicroSoft in a similar position today, I am willing to make predictions. Things are moving faster, so I give MS less time, probably 5-10 years from now. The very thing that propelled them to the current position, the desire of managers to standardise on one OS, will lead to their downfall just as quickly. Linux is much more ready to move into the desktop than Windows is to take over enterprise server apps. While Sun and IBM can say, go ahead and run Linux, but buy our hardware for the performance and support. MS doesn't have this lever, so when the fall, they will fall hard.
Although I actually do think it is likely that Linux will become the new standard, and probably one or two distribution vendors will win big time, I don't think you should worry about commercialization. The commercially oriented vendors and support houses will go this way, but that's already what they do. The core development will remain with the widely dispersed project teams, and GPL (and similar) licensing guarantees that it will remain so. I would worry if one company hired everyone in one of the core teams (kernel, Gnome or KDE for example), but that isn't likely to happen. They don't need to hire the whole team to be influential, just hire people to work on the areas valuable to them.
Notes is "teh sux." It has the worst interface ever conceived, and is a bitch to administer.
Use MS Exchange + Ximian Evolution. Problem solved.
NT
Many companies do have too many systems, and an overall architecture that is "designed" bottom up (by departments making independent decisions) rather than top down. But don't underestimate the costs of ripping out something that works and is running a crucial part of your business. Sometimes it is better to set up an integration bridge that will get one system's data into the other systems that need it, while keeping the ends of the bridge intact.
BMC Software (www.bmc.com) has supported Linux with its monitoring and management products for a while, even including Linux/390.
You can read why they don't want to build a native client from the horse's mouth at LDD Today
For those that want to see a Domino Designer for platforms other than Windows, I'd ask a simple question: what do you think DXL is for?
I'm not trying to troll here. And to most of you this may be a dumb question. I just would like to know why I hear so much about Outlook/Exchange, and why so many companies use it? I've read the marketing stuff from Microsoft on Exchange, but are all of those features really needed by most companies?
Any customer with a large installation (the kind that costs ~5M rather than just a half mil or so) has been able to get Linux support for a long time. I know it's becoming an official product now and thus is newsworthy but let's look at some facts; No one has had a shop with enough linux to justify using Tivoli to manage it until fairly recently, and anyone with a shop big enough to need Tivoli has already had TME10 (or whatever it's called now) or that crap from CA (Unicenter-TNG) for some time now. In addition Tivoli has loads of opportunities for customers to come and meet service reps and company mucky-mucks (at one such event, I happened to meet the VP of the company which led to us having several discussions about what was wrong with customer support. Martin Neath, he's a great guy, and he has a great first name, since it also happens to be my own :)
Anyway amusingly Tivoli also supports or supported OS/2 for two reasons: First, IBM bought them. That much is obvious. Two, the UK Post system uses OS/2 extensively.
Now for those who are claiming that Tivoli is just stupid bloatware and doesn't provide any value which equals its cost; You don't know jack. Oh, it's a big, complex product which can be difficult and is always expensive to implement, but you are forgetting what it gives you; seamless management support of an absolute shitload of different operating systems. They may have dropped some platforms by now but it used to support Pyramid, Convex, SunOS4 and 4, AIX 3 and 4, HP-SUX 8, 9, and 10, NT, OS/2, Linux, IRIX (latest couple of major versions) and a bunch of Unixes which I can't even remember. You could do software distribution, software inventory of all nodes, hardware inventory of windows machines, and so on... Security with ACLs implemented through RACF on non-NT platforms, job scheduling, very granular resource monitoring... And what's most significant, if your machines were properly maintained and patched, and your network wasn't horribly screwy, then it really wasn't that tough to get going.
Once you have tivoli going, one person can reasonably manage tens of thousands of nodes (save for hardware issues) from a single interface and the nodes need not be the same operating system, yet they still appear the same to the Tivoli administrator.
Finally, Tivoli uses its own GUI description "language" and then renders to local Graphics APIs, unlike Mozilla (Sorry, couldn't resist a dig) so you can make cross-platform customizations (Especially if you write any new methods in perl) and deploy them across varying platforms; It doesn't matter WHAT platform you bring your changes to. All this from a common codebase across ALL platforms, mostly built with gcc, last I looked. How can you hate it? Because it costs money? This is the really real world. Because it's big and "bloated"? It does an IMMENSE number of things, and it's a general-purpose CORBA-based framework for distributed application development, it's GOING to be big. It's a complex system.
Me? Martin Espinoza, former Level 2 CSR. Lived and worked in Austin, TX just around the corner from the office so I could walk to work, which I did once barefoot with wet hair in below-freezing weather. TX ain't always over a hundred, remember.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, "enterprise" doesn't mean "business", "Enterprise" means "big". It's basically (in this context) a category of business software which is distinct from SOHO (small office/home office) software. (At least, it's distinct in theory -- in practice, there's a lot of overlap, and a lot of business software that doesn't fit neatly into either category.)
Does anyone ever ask what enterprise you work for?
Does anyone ever ask what small office/home office you work for? No, the question doesn't make sense. It makes an unwarranted assumption about the size of the organization you work for (among other problems). Doesn't mean you don't work for a place that uses enterprise software (or SOHO software).
Actually, the people who use openview probably don't dress any better than you (unless you're naked, in which case, there's probably a few that can match you). It's usually used in the Network Operations center, and if the guys in ops wear better clothes than your average admin or code monkey, it's news to me.
The guys who buy openview probably dress better, but then the same can be said for most of the guys who buy anything for enterprise, including the hardware to run Linux.
4) Can't back out of IE install because it's integrated into OS.
5) Had to reinstall entire OS from CDs.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
there is no thing
what else could you want?
I don't know what type of services are required by those 400 users, but I bet I could build a network of PCs with Linux and get the same level of service. $1,000,000 seems like a lot of money to me for a couple servers. I've setup million dollar servers before, a Sun database for a startup and an SGI reality monster, but I've never messed around with a mainframe. But I have yet to find anything that is more fault tolerant than a cluster of PCs designed the right way the first time. Failure MUST be planned for. So as long as we do our job what is the benefit of having a mainframe over a bunch of PCs besides the TCO?
:)
PCs: $0* initial, $120k/year TCO
MFs: $1M initial, $?/year TCO
*This assumes you have a bunch of PCs already and doesn't take into account the design and implementation cost of the network.
It would take you at least 5 years to make back your initial investment, assuming MFs have a lower TCO. With PCs you get the latest technology (fast chips + buses) at a discount, but you have to manage the extra hardware. You almost need to have the system manage itself and report on statistics, parts failure, etc. so you can make the proper purchasing decisions. So with PCs you get more work (which can be done by computers), but you should save a bundle and be extremely scalable, limitted only by current technology (because its totally modular).
Not saying mainframes are bad, I'm sure there are certain situations which require a mainframe, but I don't know what they are. I only know about processing data, dealing with nets and the separation of the logical services from the physical infrastructure that provides them. And that PCs are really cheap.
I forgot to mention; I don't know anything about the people involved (someone told me once, but it was at a beer bash, you know how that goes) but Novell support came about because a sales rep told a major account that Tivoli supported Novell. True story.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The main appeal of Notes is that end users can create simple tracking applicaitons and so on. It's really not any harder than using a spreadsheet, and it scales much better on a network than something like Access.
Even 'simple' web applications are an order of magnitude more complex when you consider setting up database schemas and connections, writing SQL and so on.
I would love to see a good, modern, web-based replacement for Notes that's just as easy. but so far, nobody's provided it.