With the operating system growing in popularity, customers look for management help.
When Sean Lentner made the decision to move a dozen servers from Windows NT to the Linux server platform, he also had to consider changing how he managed those boxes. Specifically, the systems analyst at NYFIX, an electronic trading firm in Stamford, Conn., says he needed to find software that would let him manage the 12 Red Hat, Debian and Gentoo boxes alongside the 1,000 or so Windows servers in the network.
“Because we still have a lot of Windows servers, we needed to use something that would let us manage everything – monitor general aspects of the machines, distribute patches – from one console,” says Lentner, who made the server switch about three years ago. “We couldn’t risk shutting a server down or having a box act flaky, and we needed to have a solid management plan to apply to all servers.”
Lentner made the switch to Linux to guarantee his electronic trading application a stable platform, but he also needed to ensure the operating system could be managed with his enterprise-class tools.
As more corporate users are considering Linux as a viable operating system, they are looking to vendors to provide better management tools to support larger Linux deployments.
A recent SG Cowen survey of more than 500 IT users found that 65% of respondents planned to increase their use of Linux within the next few years, including 29% of companies that have yet to deploy Linux. Today, Linux is used at more than 80% of the firms surveyed, with 72% using it on servers and 15% using it on the desktop. As far as server deployments go, Linux is used most at the Web access tier, although it also is starting to gain traction in database and application tiers, the survey found.
According to the survey, the move to embrace Linux is driven primarily by improved reliability and better scalability of the operating system, with companies opting not to deploy Linux saying that application availability, service and support concerns were holding them back.
Linux software vendors such as Red Hat, SuSe (acquired by Novell) and TurboLinux provide system-monitoring tools with the operating systems to help automate server management tasks. Linux hardware vendors such as Dell, HP, IBM and Sun provide management software to keep track of Linux boxes. But the move is on from Computer Associates and HP (with its Systems Insight Manager) to provide an all-in-one server management tool that brings Linux management data on the same screen with Unix and Windows monitors.
As Lentner puts it, “I think you get less ulcers” when you can watch all machines from one location.
In the past, he and his team used a lot of scripts and telnet sessions to keep track of Linux and other server status, but Lentner says the demands of NYFIX’s e-business grew faster than his staff could work. Lentner decided to work with CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management software. He had been a customer of the company’s software distribution tool and started using the enterprise management software to manage his heterogeneous network.
Because of the immediate nature of electronic trading and the number of small brokerage firms NYFIX supports, Lentner wanted to be able to apply patches to Linux servers that support a specific Internet application on the fly without shutting down operations. He plans to migrate NYFIX’s Windows-based trading tablet to Linux when more clustering options become available.
Jerald Sheets, senior Unix systems administrator at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La., refers to his 15 Red Hat Linux instances as a “Godsend” for the nonprofit hospital. He uses the operating system for DNS, Web and e-mail servers, and in that capacity, management isn’t much of an issue. Yet Linux used in the wrong scenario can cause problems.
“If you need a database that will support a 100 million row table, don’t choose Linux,” Sheets says. “A full-table scan in that scenario on inadequate hardware will bring your application to a crawl and give Linux a bad name.”
Another potential downfall for managing Linux is mixing and matching too many flavors. Multiple Linux distributions running side by side also can cause management glitches, says Rick Beebe, manager of systems and network engineering at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn. He says “Linux is Linux” is not the case. “There is a lot of ancillary details done differently” that can wreak havoc when trying to manage and maintain multiple Linux servers running different flavors of Linux, he says.
“You spend a lot of time hunting things down if you use different distributions, and it’s just confusing,” Beebe says.
Beebe runs Red Hat Linux on 12 production servers, and for the most part he can manage them manually with the help of an application called Webmin. He says now he doesn’t see the need to use an enterprise management software tool for his Linux servers because he doesn’t think the operating system is ready for data center deployments.
