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Linux And the Enterprise Environment
aword writes "Computerworld cites that private financial services sector have moved to Linux more than any other sector. This too is mostly on the server side only. Enterprisewide linux deployments for desktop users have been few and far between. From the article." From the article: "On the server side, perhaps no single industry has tested Linux's enterprise mettle more than the financial services sector. Companies were facing mounting pressure to cut costs at the turn of the millennium. The Internet bubble was about to burst. Prices were fluctuating wildly. Order volume and data traffic were spiking in the wake of the electronic trading boom. Revenue was not."
The coders and engineers working for finance (Wall St. especially) are some of the best in the world and the best salaries in the world.
They obv. know what they're doing and have chosen Lunix.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
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The techs can look over the code, tweak where needed, and run it on commodity hardware at a big upfront savings. The *ix heritage means they're already well up on running the OS and can port over their apps with little effort. What's not to like?
I'd say it's rather the fact that it's easier to use Linux to replace those UNIX in such uniform environments - clients are mostly browsers or terminals, clients don't need any special features (as long as they can connect), and servers/apps were UNIX-based anyway, so it really is easy to switch and doesn't matter to the IT guys - as long as it is cheap, it works, and can do what they want, they don't care what it is.
If Websphere, Weblogic, Oracle and DB2 supported BSD, it could have as well been BSD. I don't think they're Linux funs or anything like that. Business as usual.
It's not surprising that Linux is only making inroads in the server market; it is simply not user friendly in the way that most computer users define that concept. In addition, most of the Linux applications out there, regardless of what all the tech-savvy geeks here say, are difficult for most computer users to install. The Linux community's resistance to GUI installers and GUIs in general is also a major block. The Linux market share will grow beyond server when Linux geeks start to understand that not everyone wants to know the details of how a computer and OS work.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'm definitely not seeing it at my company, which is a hedge fund. Maybe it's because I work at a hedge fund that things and the rules are different than the rest of the financial market. But the key issue for us isn't cost. It is reliability. We cannot tolerate downtime at all. The more data we can get continuously, the better we are. Linux is reliable and so is Windows if you have good administrators.
What's pegging us to Windows are our desktops. Until Excel or an equivalent like Excel runs on Linux, this won't happen. Does Bloomberg run on Linux? Until then, the desktops will stay Windows. So this leads to the servers staying Windows. From our experience, Windows plays better with Windows. MS products don't like to play nice with other companies' products. So our domain controllers, etc. are all Windows. I have to admit, our AD works fine and so do most of our Windows servers. Windows XP on our workstation leaves much room for improvement but Linux isn't an alternative on the desktops. It's not Linux itself but third party software that's making us stay on Windows XP.
I've been trying to push Linux since I started and haven't made too much progress and I can understand why. Windows works for us. Why undertake the risk of a major overhaul, especially when we know Microsoft products don't like to play nice with non-MS products? We have the money to stay with MS. However, I am happy to say that open source software is making progress. We're in the process of switching to Cacti to monitor our servers. Firefox has caught on with some of our uses and traders (they love tabbed browsing). I've seen a trader reading a book on R (OSS stats software)
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Ha!
I knew I'd read this somewhere before!
While I switched people over to Linux with the same experience, the non-complainers tend to be newbs or people who really only do webbrowsing/IM or another set of limited functions.
I've run into problems with more advanced people who could and should be able to figure out Linux on their own but don't bother and start complaining when they can't install certain software they are used to on Windows and yet don't want to learn the *nix equivalent.
It's just that I've been hearing too many glowing switch-over stories lately and to be sure, with distros like Ubuntu, linux is easier than ever. But again, in my experience and as counter-intuitive as it seems, the total newbs to computers are easier to nab than the people who've been doing Windows for a few years.
The financial market had been a huge buyer of Sun and IBM midrange equipment. While I don't see some brokerage going out and buying a pallet of white box systems at the local flea market, the cost of even high-end x86 equipment is markedly lower than what they've been accustomed to.
If they can keep the same statistical level of reliability by running a pair of Dell Deminsions running Linux and at a lower cost, would you pass the company on your search for investment managers?
What if they charged you 6 bucks a trade instead of 7?
If Linux enables you do do this, to save money by taking advantage of the current weak computer prices while maintaining a quality setup, why the heck not?
Linux is good on the server. No doubt.
But most users don't need or want a server on their desktop.
Until a Linux distro strips the Linux server off the Linux desktop we will continue to have a geeks system being touted as desktop ready. Which is ridiculous.
There are a lot of other step, but none of it can really be taken seriously until companies/foundations really decide what kind of operating system it is they are working on.
You can't be everything to everyone.
Quack, quack.
In the financial market, companies spend big money for Linux support -- usually more than Windows' licensing costs. In either case, they're running software that costs $10K+ per server, so the OS cost is immaterial.
The move to Linux is finance was driven by cheaper hardware, not freebie versions of Linux. Despite your little fairytale about "Joe Geek", Linux is doing phenomonal in the cost-insensitive Enterprise market, but Windows still rules the tight-wallet SMB space.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Now, I'm 180 degrees from you on this point. I think Linux is perfect for "parents" (i.e., those who could care less about computing, and just want to use them. For instance, my mom is terrified anytime she uses my dad's computer to check her email, to the point that she's phoned me about some otherwise straightforward items, but when she's using her own system (an old system with Mepis), she's much more relaxed about it. Yes, part of this is that if she messes up dad's computer, she'll have to listen to him, but mostly, she knows she can explore and do things with Linux, and as a normal user, cannot mess up the system too badly.
More importantly, the Linux system has a ton of software, whereas my dad's has a minimal amount (MS Office, Act!, a couple super cheesy things, etc.) In essense, she can "play" with things on the Linux system that she would never be able to afford on a MS OS.
So, despite the fact that Linux is more difficult to understand fully (it's a much larger and varied system), for those who barely understand the concept of "copy/paste", Linux is a lot more interesting and comforting. After three years, my mom's almost annoying when she brags about how her system isn't taken down when her friend's get infected.
That's just my experience, though.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.