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 on the Enterprize?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always knew that Spock was logical

Re:Linux on the Enterprize?

[macdaddy357]

They must not use Linux on the holodeck. It screws up all the time. That's windoze for sure.

Re:Linux on the Enterprize?

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Computer, what time is it?"

"command not found"

*sigh*

"Computer, time."

"It is 39284.23429 seconds since the designated marker was set."

*grumble*

"Computer, man time" .....

Lotus Notes, Please!

[swordboy]

Just release Notes already. I realize that it runs under wine but...

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.

Linux in the Marine Corps

[kryonD]

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.

Microsoft TCO makes linux success inevitable

[Argyle]

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.

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

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]

This is one of the reasons that I love Java. Everybody who writes code in Java puts in javadoc comments directly into the code. Java comes with a tool that pulls out these comments and makes web pages, pdfs, or pretty much any other format documentation out of it. Sun does this with the java.* classes, I do this with my classes, other third party libraries all have this. Because the documentation is in the source, it beats external documentation like man pages. It sure makes programming in Java a pleasant experience.

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.

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.

Empirical Evidence

[DASHSL0T]

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

GUI? We don't need no stinking GUI!

[Inflatable Hippo]

> 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.

Financial Corps

[Anonymous Coward]

Large financial corps have been aggressively looking at clustering linux for future generation platform. All the work IBM and research facilities have put into clustering linux has proven it's reliable and scalable. There is no equivalent in on windows. How many windows clusters are listed in the top 100 supercomputing clusters?

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.

Re:Obviously...

[Inflatable Hippo]

> Huh? I guess the only Windows system you have ever maintained is your mom's WindowsME.

I remember one delicious incident supporting a windows server.

1. Needed to upgrade the database.
2. Forced to install IE to do so.
3. IE won't run because Graphics card not good enough.

CmdrTaco dress code

[lovebyte]

CmdrTaco wrote:
One for those of you who dress nicer than me.

According to this pic that includes many people!

You *can* use Notes under Linux

[nicestepauthor]

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.

Re:Office productivity and visual basic.

[finkployd]

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'm going off this assumption that this is either a joke or troll, but in case someone actually thinks this:

(1) C is not a scripting language, never was, never will be.

(2) Scripting languages available and commonly used on Linux are Perl, PHP, tcl, shell scripts (bash, tcsh, csh, zsh, et al), Python, Java (I kind of lump that in with scripting languages), and a bunch of others I am forgetting.

If you specifically mean Visual Basic, no it does not exist for Linux. Clones of VB do but probably are not exactly the same.

Finkployd

Re:Office productivity and visual basic.

[syle]

Yes, because if there's one place where Linux is lacking, it's that there are not enough scripting languages.

Tivoli is an update; Client for Notes IS new

[GerardM]

Tivoli already runs on Linux for quit some time. The importance of the news is in the widening of the support.

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/INW20030119S0001

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen