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February 2001 |
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Born Free
Linux challenges Microsoft in the commerce-server arena, but although the software is free, hidden costs and the lack of knowledgeable programmers may limit Linux’s growth
By Joseph McKendrick
Over the past year, nothing has generated as much excitement in the information technology community as the Linux operating system. Designed as open-source software, the core software of Linux is distributed over the Internet free to anyone who wants it. Once Linux is installed operators can open it and revise it, enhance it, or do anything else they want, as long as their changes are freely available to others. Linux is, for all intents and purposes, the first operating system built on and for the Internet.
Many web site managers have embraced Linux. U.K.-based research firm Netcraft Inc. found that 30% of all public web sites run on Linux-based operating systems, making Linux the most popular choice for deploying public web sites.
Linux’s popularity has begun to rival that of other major operating systems. The latest research from IDC, a leading industry analyst firm headquartered in Framingham, Mass., finds that paid Linux shipments grew faster than any other server operating system over the past two years, and Linux shipments hold 24.6% of the server operating system market. IDC research also shows 40% of all spending on Linux servers is for Internet-related applications.
Is Linux ready, then, to assume the heavy lifting required by Internet retailers for their growing e-commerce sites? Here, the verdict from analysts and industry participants is less enthusiastic. While Linux will continue to gain rapid acceptance for various server and workstation applications in companies, analysts do not see widespread adoption of the open-source system for mission-critical operations anytime soon and they caution that even though Linux is free, e-commerce companies face significant costs in implementing and supporting Linux-based systems.
And of course Microsoft doesn’t think Linux has the computing or staying power. In a prepared statement, Microsoft had this to say about Linux: “Windows 2000 provides compelling value through its leading performance and reliability over Linux. The lack of integrated solution services, tools and middleware and the focus on technology over customer-driven solutions prevents Linux from being viable long term.”
Two years ago at an IT conference, an attendee asked Bill Gates what he thought of Linux. He said: “With free software, you end up with thousands of versions that are incompatible. Different applications work with different ones, different drivers work with different ones. Businesses are not in a position to test all those things and fix them. The role of that software in the commercial environment will be limited.”
Linux is based on Unix, a high-performance computing system. Linus Torvalds, a graduate student at the University of Helsinki at the time, first distributed the operating system in 1992. Torvalds originally branded his system as “Linus’ Unix,” and looked upon his venture as simply a hobby. Today, Torvalds and his associates still oversee development of final versions of the operating system’s kernel, but leave features and functions to independent developers.
Commercial vendors—including Red Hat, Angstrom, Zelerate, and IBM—have leapt on the bandwagon, and offer enhanced features and support above and beyond the core operating system. However, Linux itself is free, and can be limitlessly copied and redistributed.
Linux’s collaborative development model is one of its attractions. Thousands of independent developers regularly look at the code and create new features. “When there’s a bug that someone recognizes, it gets fixed within hours,” says Lalit Jain, president of Angstrom Microsystems, Boston.
In contrast, problems with a commercial vendor’s operating system require an IT manager to contact technical support and wait for a software patch. With Microsoft Windows NT for example, users often have to wait until the next service pack release, which can take months. Even leading software vendors, such as Sun or Microsoft, can take weeks or months to deliver patches, says Rob Ferber, chief technologist with Zelerate Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., a Linux systems provider. It’s the best that can be done under the proprietary commercial vendor model, he adds. “These vendors are good at fixing bugs—they don’t drag their feet,” he says. Nonetheless, such fixes take time.
Another advantage to Linux is that it will run on any hardware—from Intel-based PCs to servers or workstations designed for Unix. The ability to recycle older hardware is a compelling value proposition for many companies, says Al Gillen, research manager for systems software with IDC. “It is a smaller operating system and it will run with less system resources. It’s a great operating system to deploy on a piece of hardware that might otherwise be retired.”
By contrast, each release of Microsoft Windows requires simultaneous hardware upgrades. Plus, Linux usually requires only a few megabytes of disk space versus a minimum of two gigabytes for the latest Windows 2000 server.
The greatest boost for Linux in the commercial space is coming from large vendors, such as IBM Corp., Dell Computers and Intel Corp., all of which have announced support for Linux on their platforms, and are promoting it through their sales channels and resellers. Leading independent software companies, such as SAP AG, SAS Institute and Corel Corp., have also announced Linux-based solutions.
Toying with Linux
One prominent Internet retailer to adopt Linux as a platform is eToys. The site has suffered few service disruptions, a fact which Ferber, who is the former CIO of eToys, attributes to the capabilities of the platform. The Internet retailer, which sells 100,000 different children’s items from more than 750 manufacturers, had revenues of more than $151 million for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2000. The company has more than 2.4 million customers.
EToys runs its operations on a large farm of multiprocessing Pentium III processor-based and Pentium III Xeon processor-based servers running Red Hat Linux. The company actually runs a variety of operating systems, including Unix on its large database servers requiring monitoring tools, high availability, clustering and immediate failover; Linux for application and web servers; and Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 for departmental applications, such as file and print servers.
This diverse architecture “gives eToys the flexibility to deploy just the right amount of computing power wherever it’s needed,” says John Hnanicek, senior vice president and CIO of eToys. “We can match different Intel processors at different price/performance points to different business applications, without over paying anywhere. We can then redeploy servers within the organization to distribute our processing power appropriately while preserving our server investment.”
Myhome.com, a home building supplies e-retailer, supports more than 20,000 SKUs on a single dual-processor Intel server running Linux. This includes a 6,000-page web site that can regenerate within 20 seconds, says Ferber, who helped develop the site.
Many mix-and-match approaches are possible. For example, a large site could consist of a server farm of Pentium processor-based servers running Linux to support web applications, linked into Unix-based database servers and Microsoft Windows NT/2000 servers for departmental applications. “You have a larger number of smaller systems, and you can afford online spares to build redundancy into those system,” Ferber observes. “You can have one machine backing up nine others. Your cost point is much lower than buying another Sun 10000.”
Flexibility and the preservation of choice are part of the appeal of open source software, says Ferber, currently chief technologist with Zelerate Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., a leading Linux systems provider. “Linux is not a single path; it’s got a bunch of minor forks to it. As the world changes, you’ve got a large family of solutions to re-evaluate. If you constrain people to using only one platform or one particular set of tools, you only get a certain set of problems solved. If they can deploy in a wide range of environments, people will tackle more situations, and gain more insights into new business processes.”
This flexibility extends to systems as well as processes. For example, IBM supports Linux running as a logical partition within its zSeries mainframes. A logical partition sets aside part of a computer’s memory to support a separate system, and runs separate from the rest of the computer. IBM plans to provide the same support soon to its iSeries 400 midrange servers. In addition, Linux runs on any Intel-based server or workstation, opening the possibility that it could grow along the same lines as Microsoft Windows. The widespread availability of Intel-based servers, a commodity of hardware that fueled the PC revolution, is now fueling the proliferation of Linux-based servers.
Rearranging deckchairs
Some online retailers find this cross-hardware capability appealing. A travel services site, Deckchair.com launched by former rock star Bob Geldof, ran a trial evaluation copy of IBM’s DB2 Universal Database for Linux, running on IBM’s pSeries servers, which usually run Windows NT/2000 and are powered by Intel microprocessors. IBM says Deckchair.com was the first e-commerce web site to be powered by IBM’s DB2 for Linux.
“Because Linux is an open source software solution, it has enabled Deckchair.com to run on any hardware configuration,” says James Page, cofounder of Deckchair.com.
Beyond running web servers, Linux’s raw potential at this point lies in specialized servers. In fact, analysts point out that Linux is still in the experimental or pilot stages at most organizations. In most cases, Linux gets deployed as a limited-function server, such as a firewall or e-mail server, says IDC’s Gillen.
One such specialized function that one Internet retailer has discovered, for example, is storage management. EMusic.com, an e-commerce music company based in Redwood City, Calif. that specializes in the distribution of MP3 audio files over the web, recently contracted with San Francisco-based BigStorage Inc. to deploy 10TB of its storage services on a Linux-based disk subsystem.
BigStorage claims the installation is the largest successful Linux storage network to date, and sets a precedent for Linux’s ability to power high-volume storage in enterprise environments. Since they deal with such a high volume of audio files, EMusic needed high-capacity storage that could sustain the demands of constant file transfer and be configured to meet archiving requirements. BigStorage also implemented a backup software solution to create a comprehensive storage system that would integrate with EMusic’s existing network. Such technology “really proves the potential of open systems technology for high-end storage,” says Neil Overmon, manager of server operations for EMusic.
While there have been many promising deployments of Linux-based sites within the Internet retailing sector, analysts agree that it will take some time before vendors supporting the open-source system capture a significant slice of the IT and e-commerce market. Plus, many of the same infrastructure and support issues associated with more proprietary systems hamper large-scale Linux rollouts.
In fact, despite its rapid growth and acceptance, it will be a long time before the Linux movement dents the coin purse in the multi-billion-dollar IT and e-commerce market. “There is effectively no revenue associated with Linux,” says IDC’s Gillen. “Before the morning coffee break, Microsoft makes more money than all the Linux vendors do on operating systems sales.” He adds that Linux server operating environment revenues will barely exceed $85 million in 2004, compared with Microsoft’s projected intake of more than $20 billion for operating systems. To date, Linux probably has not had an impact on Microsoft’s financials, mainly because Linux has been deployed to new systems or web sites, rather than replacing any Windows NT systems.
Hidden costs
Cost—particularly hidden deployment and maintenance costs—may be another hurdle to widespread Linux adoption. In terms of licensing, Linux provides significant savings. A fully configured Microsoft Windows NT web server installation may run about $4,500 in licenses, compared with a $50 Red Hat license. However, as with lunches, there is no such thing as a free operating system. Most costs associated with computing stem from the services that need to be wrapped around a deployment, says Ganesh C. Prasad, senior information specialist in the Internet Development Services group of EDS Australia, and a contributor to the Linux.org web site. “No organization will install software without a support agreement in place,” he points out. “Hype notwithstanding, Linux will never be a zero-cost solution.”
Companies still require an IT infrastructure to support networks of servers, databases, and applications, and the support that goes with it. “Those costs are real, they don’t go away even though you’re using Linux,” Gillen says. While IDC has not tracked the precise costs of follow-up investments for Linux deployments, Gillen estimates the costs per server run into the thousands of dollars. “They get a free operating system, but they spend several thousand dollars for hardware and software to leverage Linux,” Gillen says. “The costs of implementing Linux are similar to implementing a low-end Unix solution, from an infrastructure standpoint.”
Along with hidden costs, lack of skill sets may also pose a challenge to adoption of Linux for a number of retailers. Sites with Unix administrators and programmers already on board can make a relatively seamless transition to Linux, since the operating system is built on the Unix kernel. “Anybody who has a strong Unix background probably has most of the skills they need already to run Linux,” Gillen says. However, in Windows-only environments, adopting a turnkey Linux installation may be more difficult, particularly since users will be going from a graphical interface to a command-line interface. “Windows administrators may be able to figure it out, but it may be a little more foreign to them,” Gillen says. “That’s going to be an impediment for them to move into Linux.”
If Linux’s popularity continues to grow, however, many e-retailers may find themselves having to learn that foreign language.
Joseph McKendrick is a Doylestown, Pa.-based freelance business and technology writer. 
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