Server platforms Toolkit

The march of Linux in the enterprise

George Weiss, Edward Younger Gartner

Published: 11 Mar 2004 14:45 GMT

As Linux climbs the enterprise ladder, it becomes more commercial and is moving away from the ideal of being cost- and risk-free. The biggest variables will be the spread of cost and risk, and the ratio of proprietary vs open-source software.

The Commercialisation of Linux
The industry has entered a period of high commercialisation of Linux. Besides the open-source community, many vendors with Unix experience have endorsed the Linux value proposition as a positive force for change, which is good for customers and system suppliers working with the open-source software (OSS) community.

IS organisations must understand all the Linux benefits, risks and costs. Gartner expects various outcomes depending on the individual enterprise, government and industry segment, with intangible factors such as political power structures, skills, budget and shareholder pressures bearing down on IT architecture planners and decision makers.

However, Linux will become more expensive as it moves upward in functionality:

Support fees will be much higher.
Middleware will be as expensive as that of Unix.
Databases and clusters will get no favoured discounts.
More caution will be needed on dependencies.
Infringement threats linger.
The total cost of acquisition may be a misleading indicator for large enterprise deployments.

A Focus on Business Applications
Strategic Planning Assumption: With the next major Linux update due in the first half of 2004, performance will be eliminated as an inhibitor in business and departmental applications by year-end 2004 (0.8 probability).

Most Linux interest still revolves around the edge of the network and in clusters:

Gartner estimates that 70 percent to 80 percent of enterprises (typically larger ones with 500 PCs or more) have Linux deployed somewhere in the enterprise.
At least 80 percent of those deployments are in appliance and network functions, file-and-print services, Web front-end applications and computational server "farms".

However, increased interest has arisen in deploying Linux in broader roles with databases and front-end applications, which was confirmed by a survey at the latest Data Centre Conference in December 2003.

Obstacles to Linux deployments remain, but they are diminishing:

Support for an additional operating system
Management tools
Application availability
Support
Migration switching costs

It is not important for Linux to have a step-function increase in acceptance, but it should gradually envelop and displace more systems so that independent system vendors (ISVs) will be motivated by customer demand to deliver their applications with support services. Gartner expects this process to evolve during the next three to four years, with database back ends in the data centre following in the 2008 period.

Action Item: 2004 to 2006 is a reasonable period to consider the widening expansion of Linux into larger applications, and extending into database back-end systems through 2008.