6 hot technologies for 2006: Linux

Although having an open source strategy is becoming common in many enterprises, users and analysts say 2006 is the year the penguin flippers will hit the water in terms of Linux's evolution into an enterprise-application server platform. Linux usage started with lower-level admins, deployed on individual desktops or small boxes. Then it moved into e-mail, file-and-print and serving Web pages. Now those who use Linux say the time is right for the operating system to be running key corporate-software packages, including large databases, financials, sales, medical records and a host of other business-critical systems.

While some companies are expanding Linux's role from smaller to larger tasks, others are going straight to the core with the platform. At Germany-based Commerzbank, for example, the only place Linux runs is in the company's data centers, hosting core Oracle financial, ERP and database applications. The bank, which has 32,000 employees in 700 branches worldwide, moved to Linux when the IT staff found it hard to run new applications on its aging network of HP True64 Unix servers running on 64-bit Alpha processors originally developed by Digital.

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March of the penguins: Linux moves from low-end e-mail and Web servers to running business-critical corporate applications.

Although having an open source strategy is becoming common in many enterprises, users and analysts say 2006 is the year the penguin flippers will hit the water in terms of Linux's evolution into an enterprise-application server platform. Linux usage started with lower-level admins, deployed on individual desktops or small boxes. Then it moved into e-mail, file-and-print and serving Web pages. Now those who use Linux say the time is right for the operating system to be running key corporate-software packages, including large databases, financials, sales, medical records and a host of other business-critical systems.

While some companies are expanding Linux's role from smaller to larger tasks, others are going straight to the core with the platform. At Germany-based Commerzbank, for example, the only place Linux runs is in the company's data centers, hosting core Oracle financial, ERP and database applications. The bank, which has 32,000 employees in 700 branches worldwide, moved to Linux when the IT staff found it hard to run new applications on its aging network of HP True64 Unix servers running on 64-bit Alpha processors originally developed by Digital.

"We would get a vendor to come in with a nice business application or a nice utility that might help the bank, and when we'd ask if it ran on True64, it was usually not the case," says Rich Arenaro, Commerzbank's vice president of IT.

Because of Oracle's strong support for Linux, the bank decided to try Oracle on Linux for most of its back-office business applications. The first hurdle in migrating off a stable, long-used Unix platform to Linux was convincing bank executives that it was a safe move.

"Words like open source really stuck out with [management]," Arenaro says. "They might have seen open source and thought the environment was just a free-for-all."

What won over the executives was the flexibility of Linux running on the Egenera BladeFrame platform, Arenaro says. Egenera servers are racks of dual and four-way processors that attach to storage and can be set up and converged on the fly. Using Red Hat and Novell SuSE on the Egenera platform lets Arenaro virtualize server instances and deploy them where needed. Every server image boots from the company's storage-area network (SAN), and all images are backed up across the company's data centers in New York and Germany. This lets the bank run an active/active disaster-recovery setup, where the main and back-up sites are serving live users. If either site goes down, more server images and applications are pulled out of the SAN and put on the Egenera blades.

Although the hardware and software runs smoothly, Arenaro says the support model for Linux may not have grown up as fast as the power of the technology for supporting core applications. "What I would welcome is more of a connected partnership on the hardware-vendor side," Arenaro says. He would like this, because he still has two support contracts. "There is nothing formal in place from our standpoint," he says. "I'd like to have one contract that I can ultimately point to if need be. There's always potential for finger-pointing," when dealing with hardware and software vendors. "Not that this has happened. But it always could," he says.