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.

Comments

Linux is used in the enterprise

[Gortbusters.org]

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.

Not enough documentation

[Amsterdam Vallon]

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.

Re:Not enough documentation

[DeadSea]

Not everyone writes comments that support these tools however (myself included) which dilutes the dopumentation process.

I agree, its partly a cultural/precedent/ease-of-use thing. Because Sun includes the tool by default and uses the tool extensivly for all their stuff, far more Java programmers use it. In many ways, the advantages of Java don't come from the programming language, but from common practices that are associated with Java.

Stone soup?

[bunyip]

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.

Why use either ....

[johnlcallaway]

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.

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 .. 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.

Re:Microsoft TCO makes linux success inevitable

[salesgeek]

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