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Networking Companies - Eh on Linux
netstat sent us
the story about the big networking companies and Linux. Much the same story as elsewhere, they already support NT and Solaris, and don't see the user base for Linux there yet. Much of the comments are candids taken from Networld Interop. As you would expect, most of them want to see more users before rolling out support.
I still believe that press release was the reason why one of the companies I do contract work for finally saw the light, and asked me to help them migrate their dedicated network monitoring boxes to Linux... And since several large telcos use those boxes, Linux will go unnoticed in the backdoor at the data centers of some pretty big companies :-)
I gave last week a talk at SD "Building Web Apps using Linux". It was talk about Apache, PHP and Linux. And as such I was expecting a fairly large crowd. What happened? The crowd never materialized. There was an ok sized crowd Why? The reason is because it takes time. .
I realized this with another talk I give. This talk I have given for two years. Only this conference is there actually interest.
The conference folks and I are not fretting because there is interest. People want to see, but it takes time. Rome was not built in a day. Do you remember Windows? Windows took 5 years to catch on after the first commerical adoption. Linux while being around for a long time has only really caught the eye of the public for about two years. That is still a baby. Give it another three years and we shall see.
I surely hope that the Linux people can rise above this "negative" comments and continue. Remember the success of LINUX is not something companies want. Consider the following.
Corporate companies believe in a pyramid information approach. The top of the pyramid is the company. They are the top because they create the information. Those that want to share in the pyramid fight to get near the top. However, since the company is at the top they can select who gets the near the top. They can control who becomes their friends and enemies. The size of the pyramid depends on the amount of users who want the information. And the companies compare against each other on the size of the pyramid.
Enter LINUX. There is no pyramid. Information is not hidden, but shared. There is no one specific entity controlling who gets the information. And as such it cannot be controlled who gets and does not get the information. This scares companies to death. You have just wiped out their business model. In an information age money is made, by those that have hidden information.
But I think this model is catching on. Especially among the young ideal programmers. Me I am a bit older and I have a problem with the "Open" nature of LINUX. But I am trying to adapt. And so are many other people. Be patient we will get there.
Christian Gross
First of all, a lot of driver development was funded directly by IBM. The Linux equivalent are the user-written drivers (thanks, Don!) out there now.
But not all the drivers were written by IBM. In fact, you can still find OS/2 drivers on fairly recent products. What motivated vendors to write OS/2 drivers and why won't they write Linux drivers for a similarly-sized market?
The important answer is that hardware companies don't see the market as a collection of end users, but as a collection of buyers: small, medium and large. The large buyers dictate what the products look like.
If 20000 people write and say "Give us Linux," that is considerably less important than one person calling up and saying,"I want 20000 machines with Windows 98 on 19995 of them and Linux on 5 of them." If you look at the cost per sale and the cost of custom configurations, that volume buyer will get her Linux, but the 20000 individuals will get the run-around. In other words, the "Market Size" argument is bullshit; it's a sales volume issue, but more complex than "how many Linux boxen." In this example, a 20000-unit sale hinged on only 5 corporate Linux users, just as it once hinged on a small percentage of corporate OS/2 users.
So, back to the peripheral vendors: Let's say that Dell has just announced they are going to ship Linux (oh wait, they did). Now, they probably did this because a Fortune 500 CIO asked their VP of Sales "what [their] Linux strategy" is. Viola! Now they have one -- not for us, but for a small number of key volume clients.
But Dell doesn't make their own peripherals. They buy video chips, SCSI chips and so forth. So, having decided to support Linux, they go to their vendors and say,"So, what's your Linux strategy?" Now, even if Dell only sells one machine with Linux on it, it has to run. So are they going to buy millions of SCSI chips from the vendor who doesn't have a Linux driver? Of course not. So... do you want to be the one chip vendor who doesn't have a Linux driver? Duh, no.
Once upon a time, OS/2 had that "necessary bullet item" status. Vendors shelled out thousands of dollars to consultants (like me) to write the obligatory OS/2 driver. OS/2 flamed out of the marketplace and nowadays most vendors happily ignore the OS/2 market. Linux is hitting that "hot" phase right about now. Unlike OS/2, Linux doesn't have a parent company to abandon it, so it's unlikely to decrease in popularity.
Bottom line: expect and exponential growth in hardware support, particularly server stuff.
I just sent this email to the Bay-ISP mailing list (bay-isp-request@bit.net.au, you guys know the drill..) comments?
h tml
---- Begin Email ----
I found this at http://www.data.com/story/TWB19990513S0030
"To add this [Linux] operating system along with the ones we already support
[which include Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris and Microsoft Corp.'s
Windows NT], I'd need a lot of users banging on my door," said Christopher
Cook, product manager for Optivity NETarchitect at Nortel Networks Corp.,
Billerica, Mass.
Hello? Nortel? *knock knock*? How hard do I have to bang?
I'm sure that -someone- from Nortel knows this person, and can take a clue
stick, go and hit him -hard- with it, amd then hand him this email.
How hard is it to port from Solaris to Linux? Take the source. Copy it
across.
type 'make'. Put a sticker on it saying 'This is only a supported product
when
used in conjunction with RedHat 6.0' or Debian, or SuSE or some reasonably
popular installation, basically whatever platform you typed 'make' on.
Speak
to your engineers. They probably -allready- have a linux version working,
that
you don't know about (this is what happend at Oracle. Now their highest
volume
in database sales is Oracle8 on Linux, seconded by Oracle 8i on Sparc. If
they
weren't selling a linux version, people would be using postgres, mysql,
msql,
or any number of other lesser known, but available databases.)
Perhaps you should think about it this way. Only last week, I spoke to my
sales guy (Hi Grahame!) about a decent network management solution. As I
-am-, basically, a bay shop, I started thinking about Optivity. Only having
a
few (rather decrepit) Sun's lying around, and all my grunt in Intel
hardware,
I started having a look at the supported platforms.. Uh. No Linux there. Ah
well.. You miss out on a sale.
For me to buy a 'decent' sun box (eg, ultra5 or something) I'm looking at
what, $6k these days for a lightly spec'ed ultrasparc? Then another $5k for
Optivity. Total outlay, $11k. Now, instead of spending $11k, I could take 2
weeks off work (costing myself, say, $5k) and cobble together something
that's
not as nice, but does what I -need- it to do.
Yeah, sure, I'd love to have Optivity. It's nice. But I don't wanna go and
put
an -unreliable server- as my network management workstation (eg, NT) , and
then have it freeze with everything green, whilst the network around me
crumbles into a heap. I don't want to spend more than double what I need to
on
buying an ultrasparc to manage my network.
All -you- guys have to do is release Optivity on Linux. People will buy it,
and suddenly you'll be the good guys. And it's -real- rare for a geek to
consider a telco a good guy 8-)
For geek-type discussions on exactly this subject, please feel free to look
at:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/05/14/1258203.s
I'm sure there'll be -numerous- discussions on there by the time this email
gets to you 8-)
One small point of congratulations to Nortel is that I bought a few netgear
cards the other day. They had 'Linux' as a supported OS on the box. Sure I
paid a bit more ($7 more, each, than a D-link Tulip based card that was
sitting right next to it on the shelf - basically exactly the same card) for
it, but I bought it -because- it said linux on the box.
--Rob
Schlock Mercenary.
HP's OpenView division is porting a number of network management products to Linux - Firehunter is already there and others are coming.
:)
WatchGuard is a neat firewall device whose key feature is a team of security people who remotely update the rules and software as new exploits are discovered - all Linux based.
Interestingly, Cisco is going to bundle Apache with its NT-based web-based network management tools, apparently because it's too hard to set up the various flavours of MS IIS correctly.
Product support will follow Linux market share - the queso OS surveys make it quite clear that Linux is the dominant Web host with 30+ per cent market share, followed by Windows then Solaris - so it's likely that management tools focusing on web hosts will migrate to Linux quite quickly.
On a personal note... if there's anyone out there who wants bandwidth management / QoS support for Linux web hosting, please email me at rdonkin@orchestream.com as well as commenting here - I'm curious as to how much demand is out there, ideally from large enterprises or service providers. (My company, Orchestream, makes policy-based network management tools for QoS/CoS, and the Linux-DiffServ stuff looks like a very capable platform for this - I think web hosts will be the primary market for any Linux version.)
The key, as always, is to find the right person in a company (typically a product manager or marketing manager) and contact them with your request for Linux support, including details of the number of users, number of Linux hosts, so they can start salivating over the order size
This guy is waiting for more requests on linux???
God, he's missing the wave!
I know many companies that without knowing it, are using linux every day. And they do it because after asking solutions to companies like them, they get scared of their prices and run to smaller companies who solve their problems for 1/10 of nortel prices...
I saw linux boxes used in tiny rooms at big buildings roofs routing ip, and when I asked why I got:
"We were tired of going up and down the elevator 20 floors twice a day with NT, so we put Linux and now we do it once a month". But nobody in the company knoes except "techies".
"Techies" will exist always, so why big companies lie to their customers. They won't have a large network running with no techies. If they want it, they have to hire us, and pay good money.
I say: "Wait 5-10 years, let our generation reach managment levels in organizations and let's see how we run everything from desktops to critical mission apps in Linux". Remeber we are the GNU generation...
Netgear cards have been shipping with a linux driver for several months now. They include the source for a modified tulip driver so that people who have older distros can have the card working out of the box.
Even better, the Netgear cards actually display that liunx is supported on the outside of the box.
I'd say its just a matter of months before 3com follows suit on their cards... and I would bet that most router/switch management packages are in the process of being ported to linux (if they're not already web-based), no matter what the company marketing people think or say.
Linux users in general don't call for support. Especially slackers like me who are too lazy to E-mail in a bug report. So even though we hack around problems and make stuff work, _we_ never ring the right bells with vendors and PHB's. My experience has been whatever work arounds for the other unixen are there are similar work arounds for linux. We let each other know how to do it but we never spam the ppl who report to the ppl making the _business_ decisions. The moral of the story is call frequently with real issues and you will get a better response from the 'other' minded ones.
Even with an expontential growth curve, big numbers don't happen overnight. Note that they said they are watching. As ERP and other big applications happen, the support will come.
My martial arts instructor said to throw a large person, you have to pull very hard and for a long time. Big companies take time to be moved. Just keep pushing and don't let up. It will happen no other way.
This is one of the reasons I am using a Portmaster RAS instead of a Total Control. 3com's Radius software will only run on NT or Solarius. Lucent's will run on Linux. I made sure the rep was aware that it was one of the factors in my decision.
This is more effective in the long run than sending email asking them to port. With the email, they will assume that you will still use their software without it being ported. With a lost sale, there is no misunderstanding.
I also make it a point of asking salemen at retail stores if they sell Linux software, especially if I know that they don't. Then I get great satisfaction of saying "OK" and walking out of the store.
I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers