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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.
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.
I don't know what the presentation says because it is in PowerPoint, but I guess they don't use Linux to make presentations...
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!
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.
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?
Nope. Unicenter(-TNG), Tivoli and OpenView all epitomise products designed to sell to management. They cost a fortune, and provide negligible benefits over what can be accomplished using a handful of homebrewed scripts. Yes, it's all in a single supported bundle, but have you seen the cost? Yet management lap it up. Sometimes I despair of the IT industry...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
Not at all. Citrix Metaframe is allegedly gaining ground - simply because the idea is a good one. You don't use all the resources on your computer - so running several on a large box makes sense. Application/patch rollout becomes easier.
:)
However, web applications are even cheaper
Stop the brainwash
Since you brought up the TCO model, let's follow this through. The logic is that MS is increasing TCO annually while providing little improved capabilities. This is 100% correct but isn't where the real TCO problem is. Microsoft's hitting us with 4%-5% per year in increase. The real problem is that in most enterprises you have over 22 business systems drawing resources and contributing to the sprial (they even sometimes require you implement more MS stuff):
* Desktop OSes
* Server OSes
* Messaging (mail servers)
* Databases
* Office Suites
* Web Servers
* Enterprise Network Management (Tivoli/Unicenter)
* Accounting (sometimes ERP usurps this)
* Order Entry
* Billing (it's amazing how few comapnies use their accounting systems for cutting invoices)
* eCommerce
* Content Management
* Inventory Management
* Manufacturing (MRP)
* Sales Force Automation (sometimes CRM)
* Helpdesk
* Customer Service Automation (sometimes CRM)
* Internet Browsers
* Groupware (outlook, groupwise or notes)
* Misc. Productivity Apps (project management, CAD, graphic design, etc)
It seems to me that the proliferation of business systems is really a core problem in ever-spiraling TCO. What really gets me is the ammount of patchwork integration out there. I think the root cause of the TCO spiral is that most managers missed the lecture about "Be very careful spending today's money to get ROI on past purchases!" It never ceases to amaze me how well protected lousy, non-integrated, buggy legacy systems are by the IT departments that foist them on the rest of the company.
I'd love to work with a company that wanted to shrink the number of systems from 22 to a more manageable number.
$G
-- $G
Why would MS want to get into supercomputing? The money just isn't there.
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
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
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.
Can't forget to mention that their Data is always getting scrambled, and as of the most recent movie, imperfectly copied and lost.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.