Lining Up For Linux

Linux has made dramatic progress in the past few years. It is well-known that a handful of early adopters like Burlington Coat Factory, Amazon and Google run key back-end systems on the open-source platform. Customer spending on Linux is projected to increase from $80 million in 2001 to $280 million by 2006, according to researcher IDC. That's not a huge market, but one that is growing significantly. And while customers still haven't based their infrastructures on Linux to the extent they have on Windows or Unix, they're at least expanding their Linux presence, typically because of its lower total cost of ownership and efficiency.

Examples of this are increasing as Linux vendors report customer wins with businesses of all shapes and sizes for applications such as messaging, file transfers, testing and some productivity and infrastructure support. Case in point: Online video-rental company Netflix recently migrated from Sun's Solaris platform to IBM's hardware running Red Hat Linux software to increase Web performance, search and queuing capabilities for its more than 16,000 DVD titles.

Other new IBM Linux customers include Marinalife, a small to midsize (SMB) partner that uses Big Blue's KeyLink systems to help boaters reserve dock space in marinas in the United States; Softbank Uway, a South Korean company that manages online university applications; the Taiwanese government, which is increasing its Linux procurement from 5 percent of its IT budget to 30 percent during the next two years; and NYFix, which operates electronic-trading systems.

"A lot of customers are changing their business models and doing a lot of exciting things with Linux," says Jim Stallings, director of IBM's Linux division. "It's not just Fortune 500 companies. We're seeing SMB adoption because of the lower TCO and quicker implementation."

For example, NYFix switched to Linux from a mainframe-based structure because of the problems it had automating its operations on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Today, the company runs some 1,500 booths that handle up to 1 billion shares per day.

"We've been a Unix shop for years, but have been moving to Linux because we need advanced features to guarantee the availability of our connections," says Jim Strasenburgh, NYFix vice president of systems. "You'd think you couldn't bet your business on an entry-level Linux operating system, but the opposite has been true."

One of Linux's prime sweet spots is its ability to improve Web-site performance.

Online travel company Orbitz has roughly 750 servers running Linux after migrating over from Sun E4500 servers. It runs 97 percent of its CPUs on Linux. Orbitz chief Internet architect Leon Chism says Linux gives his company a huge CPU density in the server rack for a price licensed software companies can't match.

"We've always used Linux and the Apache Server for our search engine; I can't find a server that rivals Apache's for these types of applications," he says. "When our Sun lease was coming up, we had a Linux infrastructure in place, and Sun just can't compete on price and performance. We cut our customer cost by a factor of 10 and doubled our capacity, so it's a 20-times increase for us. Sun talked to us, but there wasn't much of a conversation to be had."

Of note, Orbitz has been buying its servers directly from Compaq. Given the amorphous nature of open source and its relative newness to the enterprise, customers that don't require too many value-added services still might skip over the indirect channel. That should change, however, as broader Linux deployment results in more demand for integration, solution providers figure out the best way to attack the space, and vendors, such as IBM, Red Hat and SuSE Linux, advance their partner programs.

The Linux Plunge
One systems integrator that has already plunged headfirst into Linux is Ricis, Tinley Park, Ill., which brokers SuSE Linux solutions. The company recently merged more than 900 e-mail clients from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes into the SuSE Linux Open Mail Exchange application for Ohio Caterpillar (Ohio CAT), an industrial equipment dealer with 26 locations throughout Ohio. Ricis CTO Gregg Rosenberg says the migration was the first of its kind anywhere in the enterprise world, and "we did it on the fly."

"In 1996 or '97, we saw that Linux was here to stay, and by about 1999, it became apparent that it would be a significant force in the industry," he says.

Ohio CAT uses Linux for its e-mail, DNS and FTP applications, deploying it on 34 servers in the company's offices across the state.

"There's a little more work on the front end to get it up and running, but once you're done, it's rock-solid," says Ohio CAT systems administrator Eric Traub. "Linux is much more stable than Windows, which, as we've found out in the past few months, is much more vulnerable," he says. "When it comes to firewalling, Linux just does it better."

Another enterprise that deploys Linux as a customer is Deloitte Consulting. The technology consultant uses Linux to run its VMWare productivity and testing applications at various facilities on the East Coast, buying the SuSE Linux tools through HP and Lindon, Utah-based solution provider Altiris.

"Every time we use it, it's one less Microsoft license we need to buy for the host, which saves us $500 to $1,000 per box," says Deloitte systems architect Patrick Hanifee, adding that the company has begun testing SAP applications on Linux as well. "We don't deploy Linux in a production environment yet, but if we were able to run SAP on it, that would be a step up for Linux and a huge cost savings per box."