Linux scores on the server

The Linux-x86 combination has turned out to be a popular alternative to RISC-Unix. While Unix to Linux migration is a simple process, maintaining the resulting heterogeneous IT environment can be complicated. By Heena Jhingan

Some years back, Linux was considered to be a platform best suited to meet the test & development requirements of enterprises. The CIO community had not imagined that open source Linux could evolve to support mission-critical applications. Owing to its robustness, reliability and low Total Cost of Acquisition and Ownership, Linux has got to the point where it is employed in the data center for running crucial enterprise applications today.

Slowly, yet steadily, Linux is gaining acceptance as an efficient server operating system. While Linux is run in over 60% of servers globally, the market share in India is just a fraction of this. Going by research reports, in 2010, Linux had a 8.3% market share in the SMB segment and 5.9% in large enterprises. Enterprises in India are slowly realizing the potential of Linux.

Explaining that there were several versions of Linux available in the market, Narayana Menon, Lead – Strategy and Marketing, The Attachmate Group (SUSE, NetIQ, Attachmate and Novell) India/South Asia, pointed that all of these versions were not enterprise-ready. Customization and commercial aspects were required and that was where players like SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu had a role to play.

Industry estimates show that over 10,000 Linux server deployments are happening every quarter, and Red Hat claims a majority share of this market in India.

A Gartner report released in 2011 sized the global operating system (including client and server operating systems) market at about $30.4 bn at the end of 2010. The study found that the server OS market grew by 5.7%. It also found Linux to be the fastest growing server OS.

Menon said, “This growth is relative. Microsoft still has a monopoly in the server OS space but they are probably stagnating or have slight variations in their market share. The share of Linux would be around 18-20%. The study pegs Linux to grow and gain about a 20% share in the overall server operating system space.”

The APAC is the fastest growing market for Linux, led by India, with Thailand and Vietnam close behind.

Analysts believed that, in India, a spike in Linux adoption was witnessed in the post recessionary period of 2009-10. Earlier, CIOs had a ‘good to have’ technology approach and after the slowdown, when IT budgets shrank, Linux emerged as a technology platform to invest in.

The open source OS has certain inherent advantages. Whereas proprietary operating systems carry limited period licenses that need to be renewed at regular intervals, that’s not the case here. Another issue is with the use of legacy hardware. The newer versions of proprietary operating systems require the latest hardware to run effectively, resulting in significant investment to upgrade hardware.

Yogesh Girikumar, Open Source Specialist, CSS Corp, elaborated, “In addition to that, security software has to be added (which again come with their own licensing issues) like anti-virus, firewall etc. In Linux systems, one can (in most cases) afford to manage without expensive security software. Open-source security solutions on Linux would be as effective as, or more effective than, expensive, proprietary security software on proprietary operating systems.”

Open to adoption

The most prominent early adopters of Linux servers in the country are the IaaS providers, the Government agencies and financial entities. Almost all providers of Virtual Servers and Cloud instances predominantly run Linux on their servers. Generally, SMBs and startups tend to use Linux for their services. This includes most of the online retail sites including classifieds sites.

Venugopal Arani Perumal, SME – Unix and Cloud, Logica India, that handles clients like Shell and British Council, informed that customers were ready to invest in open source consulting and that they were engaging in data analysis as to what kind of server configuration would suit them, estimating the right kind of capacity for the solution so that scaling would be easy.

A Balakrishnan, CTO, Geojit said that 85% of the company’s backend servers were Linux-based. However, on the front end, they still preferred to use Windows due to its ease of use.

Some large financial entities have been using Linux on a large number of their servers for quite some time now. They find Linux well suited for handling the heavy computing loads that their servers are subject to.

Agreeing that financial entities have opened their doors to open source server OSs, Sitaram Venkat,  Director for Enterprise Solutions Business, Dell India, pointed out that, although large enterprises like telcos, banks, manufacturers and media companies were gradually adopting Linux, they were doing so with a degree of conservativeness. “Most large players like the telcos still prefer to run their mission-critical applications like billing on Unix servers. In the case of banks, they would still prefer core banking applications like Finacle to be supported on Unix. They are putting their concerns around security behind and getting liberal, beginning with deploying CRM and BI on Linux servers, resulting in the creation of heterogeneous IT environments,” he said.

Migrating & managing complexities

A mixed IT environment in the data center is an obvious corollary as migration from Unix to Linux is bound to happen in a phased manner. It can never be a ‘rip and replace’ approach.

According to Menon, typically, in the data center of a large MNC with a lot of servers, the distribution of servers would be 60% Windows, 25% Unix and 15% Linux. Ideally, the company would have started with a farm of Microsoft servers and—the moment they start rolling out an ERP or CRM like mission-critical application—they would have begun deploying Unix systems. Initially, companies deployed Linux servers around test & development. Once they understood that these were comparable in performance to the high investment and high maintenance RISC-Unix servers, the adoption of Linux servers kicked off.

“Interestingly, Unix’s share is being eaten by both Windows and Linux. Unix is a highly efficient, yet high cost, high maintenance OS. In a way, it ties you to a particular architecture. Down the line, the composition might be altered to 50% Windows, 20% Unix and 30% Linux once the adoption of Linux on the server side goes up,” he explained.

Anuj Kumar, General Manager, Red Hat, India Subcontinent, stressed that Linux was unique in terms of efficiency with utilization levels running as high as 80-90%. “Unlike Windows, you do not need to virtualize right off, which translates to the fact that to run the same workload on Linux you will probably require a third or a quarter of the system capacity that is probably required on Windows Server, leading to higher availability,” he said.

He argued that Linux was something of a Unix consolidator as it worked and behaved like Unix. However, it gave the full advantage of commodity hardware that comes with x86 systems. “It is ready to deploy across multiple hardware vendors like HP, Dell and IBM.”

In a heterogeneous environment, interoperability is critical. SUSE claims to be the only Linux vendor to have an interoperability agreement with Microsoft.

Venkat of Dell said, “Solution providers are gearing up to tackle these complexities with unified management tools. Besides, with our new generation of servers we have tried to eliminate these complexities by offering hypervisor level redundancy,” he said.

Support is at hand

All these years, Linux got a lukewarm response from the customers, owing to the belief that a structured support system for the Linux platform was lacking. However, in the present day scenario, this is nothing but a myth.

Vendors offer commercial support which is faster and more process oriented than community backed support.

“Almost all Linux server applications offer commercial support. Most Linux distributions (like Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE) themselves are backed by large commercial entities that provide services around the distributions and various kinds of support licenses depending on the needs. Other applications like Gluster, FreeNAS, Zimbra, etc. provide extensive choices of commercial enterprise level support to customers,” Girikumar said.

Naveen Mishra, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, reasoned that the enterprise version of Linux negated all of these concerns. “In fact, the pricing models for these solutions revolve around support SLAs,” he said.

Amitabh Misra, CTO, Snapdeal, felt that it was not about commercial support alone as even seeing a huge community working together and offering support gave users the confidence to adopt these solutions.

Besides, over the last few years, India has built a large pool of skilled human resources in Linux. In the state of Tamil Nadu alone over 300 colleges have free software/Linux labs set up with thousands of well trained students, thanks to the effort of several volunteers and user/enthusiast groups for Linux.

Enterprise quality applications are available in plenty for Linux. Both open source and proprietary server applications have been made available with commercial support licenses for those who need it. Certain popular Linux applications are quite well known including Apache, MySQL, Zimbra, etc. Zimbra which is the third most popular messaging system (after Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes) is known for performing exceptionally well on Linux.

According to SAP nearly 65% of its deployments are done on Linux. Oracle has its own flavor of Linux. Worldwide nearly 80% of mainframes run Linux. SUSE is globally certified for 8,500 applications and 13,500 hardware platforms.

For SMBs & CSPs

A large number of SMBs choose open source based servers. Since they are starting their IT environment afresh, they can mix and match and they are not stuck with a large IT infrastructure that they have to make use of. If they have a clear IT road map, they needn’t go through the entire cycle of deploying Windows, Unix and then go to Linux and have a combination of all of these. If they pick applications to support their business that work on Linux, they can earn an RoI that much faster.

A few enterprises are embracing Linux on their own, but in a large number of these deployments, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offering Iaas and PaaS have played a role. Most of the IaaS providers choose to go the Linux way. According to Red Hat’s Kumar, nine out of ten Cloud players, especially IaaS players, had deployed open source technology. For them it was easier to get a good ROI without compromising on quality of service.  

One of the key verticals that is fast adopting Linux on the server end is the Government. A number of the upcoming government projects are designed to be Linux-based.

The government projects are tender based and, to be able to bag the deal, a player has to be L1 on cost and T1 or technologically superior. In such a scenario, the system integrators benefit by designing a solution on an open source platform like Linux, where the entire stack offers robust performance at a lower cost. An important factor in Linux’s favor, as per Venkat is the user friendly GUI, that was absent earlier.

The future of server Linux is promising. Many enterprises are moving their businesses on to the Cloud and others are contemplating the same. There are enterprises that want their Cloud to reside on premise. Linux would evidently play a large role in these on premise private/hybrid Cloud deployments.

heena.jhingan@expressindia.com