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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.
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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.
I had a friend that was at the chicago stock exchange 5-7 years ago. At that time, he helped move them from VMS to Windows. It turned out that they were having all sort of issues and outlandish costs. So they switched up to Linux. Apparently, it was a bit of work, but their costs have gone below what the VMS was costing them (not to mention what Windows was).
Interestingly, he moved to a software company that owns a big chunk of the futures industry. Up till recently, they have been doing windows, but are now quietly working on Linux products for the trader desktop. Apparently, they have customers insisting on it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The finance industry does the most of EVERYTHING in the IT industry. The most Linux, the most Windows, the most COBOL etc... what the IT sector in finance REALLY excels at however is doing "cool stuff" with new technology....
When Linux really gets big is when those with more concerns buy into it... people in Manufacturing for instance, or in supply chains. Paid less, but normally with a better understanding of what it takes to build a system that lasts 20 years.
Linux is definately making it in those sectors, and that is better news IMO than the Finance sector.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
In the private sector, ever cent counts. I mean, we're talking about financial services, these people can do the math about the costs. If I worked for a company and had the option of save the company thousands of dollars in software and licenses, that's what I would do, switch to Free alternatives when possible and make my boss happy.
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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
Before you start complaining here about anything, maybe you should have asked yourself, what do I want to be doing with my computer? I only boot Windows to play a few games I like. Everything else I do under Linux - with absolutely no problems. I can log into my router - with konqueror or firefox - play video and music files without skipping, and use all of my nVidia graphics card's available resolution (well, not quite all, but monitor won't support the max the card will).
If your DSL connection is running into your router, there's no reason for your provider to have stated that 'linux is not supported'.
And I hate to break this to you also, but I've owned a couple machines (with nothing wierd in them) that only Linux would install and boot up. My parents' last computer wouldn't run Win95, 98, or NT. But Mandrake 6.1 installed onto it fine, found all the hardware (including the unusual printer they have), and ran fine. (It was a 400Mhz K6-II with 256M RAM.)
I've set up Linux for a bunch of 'real average Jane' students, and they don't even notice a difference. After getting one set up with Mandrake, Firefox, and GAIM, her roommate came in and asked "oh, is that a new version of AIM?" not "what happened to windows?".
My roommate MS work centered around using Linux machines with video capture cards, so I don't know what you were trying to do that you couldn't. the All In Wonder cards from ATI are pretty popular, and have extensive driver support.
So, I'm calling complete bull on you. I'm not an ultra fanatical linux geek, either. I just use it, and it works. It takes no longer to boot than XP, and has far more useful application to me (lack of viruses, ease of ssh access to other machines, higher granular control over individual resources) than Windows ever has.
I imagine realtime, up-to-the-second updates of servers are important in the finance world. I suppose stock exchanges and such have a lot to deal with given the volume and speed of the markets. That said, do such OSes as RTlinux or QNX have any place here?
Some might suggest that Windows' dominating success in the consumer market flies in the face of the ideal of excellence via consumer.
However, such an analogy does not apply to Linux. Windows' major shortcoming has always been -- though it has been almost irrelevant, for consumers, with the advent of XP -- its instability, a problem that most admit is not a character of Linux.
Unfortunately, there is some truth, though, to what Steve Balmer says regarding the true cost of Linux. That's not to say that Linux is simply inadequate period; it may, however, be unsuitable to some situations.
This is one of many *recent* articles with the same theme: Linux has/is making headway in the server room but it hasn't broken out into the desktop...
That Linux is now a major player in the server room has been OLD news for two or three years. What these articles imply is that Linux hasn't/won't make the leap onto the corporate desktop. Just like the arguments several years ago against Linux being a major player in the server room, these articles under estimate the effect of uncounted, free downloads, and the fact that a single copy can be used on many PCs. The Linux desktops where I work have not been included on anyone's count, and I doubt if our circumstance is not unusual. They also over estimate the need for "paid support".
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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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There goes all my plans of exploiting their MS-based "solutions" to engage in stock manipulation and diversion of corporate funds!
However a large userbase ala windows will provide a larger developer base, and allow for more applications in a given area.
Windows has managed to be a monster in the desktop side, but that are a joke in the supercomputing arena. Their clustering systems while complete just arent utilized by a signifigant percentage of supercomputers.
Storm
Ha!
I knew I'd read this somewhere before!
I know about Open Office and have plans to test it out. However, there are a number of Excel plugins that we use so any Excel replacement must also work with those.
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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.
I haven't been here that long (yeah yeah, I must be new here) but I've seen this exact same post a couple times before. Standard troll and lots of people bite.
The original poster, if not a total liar, was a moron to switch 7 machines at once without a trial on one of them. I have a feeling, it's more of a BS troll than anything that someone (or several people) just won't let die.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
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.