* The growth of Linux and the storage services that support the open source OS
For those of us who attended last week’s LinuxWorld trade show in Boston it became clear that the worlds of Linux and business have intersected.
Linux has been moving into commercial IT centers for several years now, typically as a response to either – or both – of two separate economic pressures. The first of these is the need for shops using smaller servers to find an alternative operating system to what is offered by Microsoft. Managers are looking for a cheaper, better performing operating system that can run on their existing x86-based hardware.
The second driver has been the need at larger installations for a common operating environment across a heterogeneous mix of servers. Commercial IT has historically relied on a mix of mainframes, open systems and Windows machines. It was hoped that Unix, originally intended to stretch across machines from a variety of vendors, would provide a common operating system for all of these, beginning with mid-range systems and moving both towards the higher-end and simpler servers over time.
This however was never the case, as Unix early in its life fissioned into AT&T and BSD varieties, both of which gave rise to proprietary flavors of Unix from each of the various vendors, who put it primarily on engineering workstations. By the late 1980s, the Unix world had become a series of armed camps, with the result that Sun’s Unix never matched up with HP’s, which differed from IBM’s and SGI’s, and so forth. This became almost a religious schism, which continues to the present day.
Enter Linux.
Linux started in the academic world, gradually moving over onto servers doing engineering and scientific computations. In all cases, storage originally was pretty haphazard and at best an afterthought.
As Linux grew up and was applied to major computational challenges requiring high-powered, clustered and often parallelized computing capabilities, the need for improved Linux storage became obvious. Companies began providing sophisticated platforms of storage clusters and clustered file systems to support the demands of high performance computing.
Now, although the Linux operating system is itself essentially open source, a number of vendors have signed on to provide much-needed storage management and other services. The result is that you now can walk into a commercial IT shop and find Linux running on everything from IBM mainframes to midrange systems to small white box x86-based systems.
A key validation point for Linux as a commercial operating system will be how well users can manage and protect the data. Next time, a look at what LinuxWorld had in terms of storage management solutions.
