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Linux To Take Over Microsoft In Enterprises
shougyin writes "For years, Linux has enjoyed much of its success as a replacement for Unix. Companies turned to Linux to replace Unix servers, or for new deployments within a Unix-heavy environment. Linux is still king there, but it's starting to encroach on Microsoft as well. Big companies are planning overwhelmingly (76.4%) to add more Linux servers in the next year, and less than half (41.2%) of the companies are planning to add Windows servers in the next year. Even more interesting, nearly half (43.6%) are actively planning to decrease use of Windows servers in the next year."
For a second, I read that as "Linus To Take Over Microsoft".
This week, bogus statistics pushing an increasingly boring anti-microsoft zealotry and a pro-"operating system that takes at least one more step than windows to run any popular application or game" agenda.
I agree. Percentages are tossed around without any evidence or explanation as to how these figures were arrived at. Who was surveyed? What industries were they in? Why are they planning to add Linux servers? What function will these servers have? Why aren't they planning on adding Windows servers?
This survey is not statistically representative by all means. It is done amidst users that already use Linux and done by a Linux advocacy. I am no MSFT fan. I have not had a Windows machine in my house since 1997 (and even that was Win 3.x running under OS2 Warp). However, the reality is not as rosy as this survey would like us to see.
First of all, the majority of Windows users are SMEs and they are Windows _ONLY_. They _WILL_ buy more of the same and that is a definite. A lot of the rest is desktop estate and its essential dependencies - Exchange and their friends. 95% of these will be buying more of the same. There are very few successful desktop migrations to account for anything more than that. Even that will be an underestimate. 99% buying more of the same is more likely.
That leaves "enterprise" backend use which is pretty much what this survey is about. There is a lively migration racket going on there nowdays as most of this runs in the form of Java and friends on top of middleware stacks. Every 1-2 years the latest and greatest backend idea comes along with its migration programme. As a result servers and stacks get chucked out and replaced by others.
There Linux is gaining and the numbers are about right. However that is a very small portion of the market and misrepresenting it for the whole market is to the very best disingenuous. Additionally, it also completely ignores the "Elephant In The Corner of The Room". The merger of Sun and Oracle has created a vertical stack which will once again effectively compete for their place under the sun (pun intended) in the server room. Any stats regarding enterprise migration that assign (Sn)Oracle a negative year on year growth are frankly wishful thinking.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Once Samba4 is released, these Windows servers could be replaced as well.
Samba 4 has been in various stages of alpha for the last five years - or is it six?
Personally, I have considered a Samba 4 installation in only one place - a volunteer organisation that simply didn't have the budget for anything else. I'm still sniffing around for a surplus Windows Server license to replace it.
For an alpha release, Samba 4 is remarkably usable. However the time and effort that I have spent installing Samba 4 would have cost this organisation a fair bit more than the cost of a Windows Server 2008 Standard license. I don't see that reducing a huge amount even when Samba 4 is released - there's a lot of configuration involved to get DHCP, DNS and Samba 4 talking to each other properly.
wake me up when Linux starts taking over Microsoft in Desktops.
I'm happy about it, but not surprised. As the old generation of IT admins go away, newer ones are more flexible and have ways of saving money without MS in the equation. Linux is not the only solution, but one competitive alternative. Different is the Desktop, partially because it is not baked up big companies like the kernel and enterprise tools are. Canonical is an exception, but sadly a more or less lonely one.
I thought it was very funny to see 41% called "less than half", and 44% called "almost half! :D
Technically correct and true, yes, but I smell bias...
Who was surveyed?
from the TFA:
the organizations surveyed were picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council
Next up:
10 out of 10 randomly selected stock brokers want more deregulation of the financial system
10 out of 10 randomly selected Taliban fighters don't trust the USA
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Any organization small enough to have trouble funding and domain controller Doesn't need one.
Just because the only tool you know how to use is a hammer doesn't mean every problem is a nail.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Don Marti tears the methodology and the point of the whole survey to pieces: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/hands-up-who-likes-me/
This sort of surveys may have value but used like this they're just embarrassing.
This is directly from the report. "This survey was conducted with members of The Linux Foundation’s End User Council, as well as other end users identified by The Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technologies. This report is being published at The Linux Foundation End User Summit, where many respondents will be in attendance. These companies include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Bristol- Myers Squibb, NTT, Deutsche Bank, Dreamworks, ADP, McKinsey and Company, Bank of New York, Barclays Capital, AIG, the US Department of Defense, MetLife, CME Group, NASDAQ QMX, the New York Stock Exchange, Goodrich, and many more."
However the time and effort that I have spent installing Samba 4 would have cost this organisation a fair bit more than the cost of a Windows Server 2008 Standard license
Does trhat count the time it took you to get trained in Windows Server 2008, Active Directory and all the other gubbins? IIRC there was a fair learning curve going from domains to AD. (and we'll ignore the cost of the CALs)
This annoys me a little about Linux migrations, people say how much more it costs based on the fact that they already know Windows, then compare that to the time taken to not only implement but also learn the Linux equivalent. Now you've done it once, you should be able to put in another Samba4 system without any fuss, surely?
and you can, of course, supply your config experience to the community - or to your own, ad-laden, blog. Might as well earn a little from getting people to come read what you did.
LOl, so true. The sad thing is Microsoft took Kerberos, bastardized it and changed the name to AD so most people are ignorant that "Single Signon" technology was not developed by Uncle Bill. But then most technologies gives Microsoft fits when they try to develop their own code. Anyone remember trumpet winsock from the early days of Win95? What a horrible POS that was and Microsoft finally threw in the towel and used the BSD TCP/IP stack.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Apart from the fact that AD was derived from a Unix technology that does exactly what you ask:
Install Likewise Open. That's your client problem solved. My school has trolleys full of Ubuntu netbooks that log onto the wireless network and allow any AD login on any domain they are joined too. It took three commands I think (install the package, name the machine, join the domain). Kids don't even need to know that the netbooks are Linux whereas the rest of the school is almost all Windows. And, yes, I can use the Windows Administrators to do privileged operations by just sticking them in the right groups.
Server is a bit more tricky but if you're keeping homogenous systems (Linux server, Linux clients), single-sign-on on Linux has been around for donkey's years. Server probably needs Samba4 if you want modern-Windows-clients on a Linux-only server.
Next, please describe how to use MS-supplied tools to achieve the same (i.e. log MS clients onto Linux servers, or even Linux clients onto MS servers). It's hardly surprising that nobody really supports joining the competition, so homogenous systems are infinitely easier to support. But your claim as a unit is bollocks. Wanna come see a Linux netbook join an unprepared, untampered-with Windows-only domain run by a Windows-only machine with no Linux help server-side, and support SSO for all its operations (including initial login, printer access, fileshare access, even desktop icons etc.)? A group of 8 year old's here do it every day.
41% is less than half in one sentence, but 43% is nearly half in the next. I guess 42% is the hard cutoff by which we begin referring to the statistic in the affirmative vs. the negative.
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