Gartner says open-source operating systems—Linux in particular—have caught up to their fee-based counterparts, but a new report predicts costs will rise as well. Long considered the poor cousins of feature-rich, fee-based operating systems, open source in the server operating system market—notably, Linux—is now a virtual equal to commercial alternatives. Unfortunately, as go features, so goes price, and a new report from Gartner predicts that costs will rise as configurations and administration gets more involved.
According to Gartner's recent report, "Open-Source Software in the Server OS Market 2008: The State of Linux," the improvements are striking. In the Linux world, the report finds, improvements to the kernel have resolved most scalability issues, making it a good option for x86 servers of eight cores, with the capability for 16 cores on four-socket quad core systems. The improvements are so great, the report notes, that by the end of 2009, Linux enterprise versions from Red Hat and Novell will be running neck and neck with Unix and Windows in terms of performance on most applications.
Author George Weiss, a Gartner analyst, says that Linux is in the third phase of its evolution toward becoming a recognized data center operating system environment. This is an important phase, he said, because deploying Linux enterprise-wide in organizations with grids, service-oriented architectures, clustered databases and massively scalable farms requires this type of performance and reliability. Because of these advances, more companies are using Linux on higher-value deployments today, Weiss said.
Click here to read about how to ease into open source.
But Linux isn't perfect. Weiss warns, for example, that users shouldn't expect the same performance and stability as commercial operating systems when migrating large SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) database management system configurations to x86 servers—at least not yet. And before committing to a full open-source operating system strategy, it's imperative to have internal expertise in developing, staging or deploying the applications on Linux.
Weiss expects that by 2009, the capabilities of Linux and Unix will no longer be a differentiator in relational database workload performance, and that by 2009, most applications on Unix will run well enough on Linux. But he also expects the total cost of ownership benefits of deploying Linux to decrease as configurations, infrastructures and administration costs rise.
OpenSolaris, Sun Microsystems' open systems operating system based on the Solaris operating system, is also gaining traction, the report said, and will be a serious competitor to Linux distributions in the next 12 months. Weiss advised considering OpenSolaris if flexibility is important, you want single-vendor responsibility, your organization has existing Solaris administration and development skills, and you want to maintain legacy, mission-critical infrastructures across x86 and UltraSPARC systems.
