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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.
Just release Notes already. I realize that it runs under wine but...
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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.
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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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> 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.
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.
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.
I still recommend that if you are using Java, Linux is the way to go. The Java from Sun runs on Linux just as well as any Windows platform. It beats Java for Windows 9x by a mile. If you will only use opensource software, GCC's Java compiler (get a nightly build and compile it yourself rather than relying on what comes with your distribution, as those are older) is getting pretty darn near usable. It works for 97% of my stuff now. Similarly, the classpath libraries are reaching a point where I can usually substitute them for the sun libraries.
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.
One thing I have noticed about Linux documentation is that it will usually come in one of these forms:
- man pages
- info pages
- how-tos/readme
- HTML or postscript file with full documentation in an indexed format.
Also a big help are one gazillion web pages devoted to any Linux specific topic, programming or otherwise.Microsoft languages and API documentation have been really frustrating for me personally, either because the documentation source example doesnt work as it should, or a kludgey workaround is assumed to be acceptable get everything to work for MS oses 95 through XP. Check out differences in RAS implementation from 95 to XP as an example.
At least in linux IHMO the solution(s) usually isn't limited to purchasing a proprietary 3rd party hack to get an app out in a timely manner.
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.
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