Penguin cracks Windows servers

30/04/2003 Written by Peter Williams

Lead­ing soft­ware ven­dors ensure the future of Linux

The jury is no longer out on Linux. Ora­cle, Nov­ell and even Microsoft have acknowl­edged the Pen­guin as suit­able for the enter­prise.
Ora­cle, for instance, has begun actively rec­om­mend­ing Linux to cus­tomers over all other oper­at­ing envi­ron­ments, includ­ing the Unix flavours and Windows.More wor­ry­ing for Microsoft is Oracle’s claim that its user-​developers are mov­ing away from Win­dows to Linux.

“Since Jan­u­ary Ora­cle has been rec­om­mend­ing all cus­tomers deploy on Linux,” said Mark Jarvis, Ora­cle chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer, speak­ing in Lon­don last week. “This is a very strate­gic deci­sion. The eco­nom­ics of Linux make total sense.”

An inter­nal bench­mark test run­ning Ora­cle on Intel, with Linux ver­sus Unix on an equivalent-​sized Risc sys­tem, showed improved per­for­mance for one-​sixth the hard­ware cost, Jarvis said.

Nov­ell, whose Net­ware oper­at­ing sys­tem once held 70 per cent of the net­work oper­at­ing sys­tem mar­ket, has said it will soon offer key parts of its prod­uct port­fo­lio on Linux — accept­ing that co-​existence will not be enough.

Among the hard­ware ven­dors, IBM, Hewlett Packard (HP), Sun and Dell endorse Linux. This leaves only Unisys as still whole­heart­edly behind Win­dows, hav­ing carved a niche with its Windows-​based ES7000 enter­prise servers, although that now sup­ports Linux too.

For now there are a cou­ple things slow­ing Linux adop­tion: aware­ness at senior com­pany level and the qual­ity of man­age­ment tools. When both these issues are addressed, the sheer weight of sup­port should enable the Pen­guin to go on to own the server mar­ket.

Inde­pen­dent soft­ware ven­dors (ISVs) told Ora­cle that more cus­tomer aware­ness of Linux was needed. So part of Oracle’s new Unbreak­able Linux Part­ner Ini­tia­tive, with $150m (£96m) for ISV migra­tion and sup­port fund­ing, will be used to raise aware­ness.

Not that Microsoft will roll over and accept defeat. Sources close to the Red­mond giant say the com­pany is train­ing 140 of its sys­tems staff on Linux and Java — because it now realises Win­dows tech­nolo­gies will need to co-​exist and inter­op­er­ate with them in many enter­prises.

Ora­cle claims that a size­able num­ber of the ISVs that attended a recent Ora­cle New York event had moved sys­tems from Win­dows. The com­pany said it will soon pro­vide case stud­ies to illus­trate this.

Mean­while, Mer­rill Lynch now rates Microsoft shares as ‘neu­tral’, cit­ing Linux, sup­ported (espe­cially) by IBM, as a threat.