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Enterprise Linux: Are We There Yet? 169

Posted by Hemos from the moving-towards-it dept.
Simon Crosby writes " Network Computing is running an special report on Linux in the enterprise. It evaluates strengths and weaknesses of Linux useage in the enterprise. It also discusses perceptions, roadblocks, security, clustering and other Linux enterprise issues."
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Enterprise Linux: Are We There Yet? More

Enterprise Linux: Are We There Yet?

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  • Linux in the Enterprise... (Score:5, Funny)

    by nsample ( 261457 ) <nsample.stanford@edu> on Thursday November 29, 2001 @03:36AM (#2629715) Homepage


    ...will definitely give Picard an advantage over the Borg.

  • Lack of Apps (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jeff Kelly ( 309129 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @03:43AM (#2629727)
    Are we there yet? certainly not. Linux has shown in the last few years that it is an alternative, although it still cannot compete in every Aspect with commercial Un*x Systems. (Especially Performance)

    The greatest drawback for using Linux in your Enterprise is not the Performance issue but lack of Applications. Many Porting efforts are still beta, (Or do you consider Oracle to be stable on Linux?) or simply not done.

    It is still difficult to convince the big software firms to actually consider Linux as an alternative, especially in the Enterprise computing field.

    There has still much lobbying to be done.

    Jeff
    • I think that before doing some lobbying, we need to continue to develop and change all of thoses Beta in stable V1.0. Then some lobbying could be done. Don't put the car before the horses...

    • Re:Lack of Apps (Score:5, Informative)

      by ppetru ( 24677 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @03:53AM (#2629748) Homepage

      While it's true that not all the un*x-based apps have been ported, most of them are there. Examples:

      • Oracle -- which is rock solid, and you can get support contracts from Oracle for the Linux platform (the company I work for uses Oracle/Linux in a mission critical environment and it works just fine).
      • All the other big databases (IBM DB2, Clustra, Informix, Sybase, etc)
      • Lots and lots of movie and animation production tools (Maya, Entropy, etc). Linux is really popular now amongst graphics and movie professionals.

      The list could go on, but you get my point. What's more important are the advantages of Linux: superb development tools, open architecture, world-wide support, and so on.

      On the performance front, it seems that you're not aware of the fact that Solaris (and other unices) scale up so well to high-end boxes at the expense of low-end performance. In case you didn't know it, the Linux kernel smokes away Solaris (in terms of syscall latency, throughput, response time, network performance and a couple other points) on servers with up to 4-8 CPUs.

      • Re:The list could go on .. (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        but doesn't.
      • I operate in the J2EE world, the java enterprise world. we don't give a rats ass what OS we run linux/solaris/windows same crap to us btw the state of virtual machines on linux trails windows just fyi...

        The modern application server the .net the j2ee should be in java just because is buys you teh app. then you compete solely on the vm field and that is a sweet position, level playing field.
        it is the app server stupid, the web-app server is the key to adoption.

        the article does mention linux+apache as a deployed solution "but it doesn't go much father" that is correct and why we need strong support of Java VM on linux, the J2EE open source groups are there: see JBoss [jboss.org], they have a full J2EE implementation and web services support

  • In certain areas... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alfredw ( 318652 )
    I would go so far as to say that Linux is now the choice solution for enterprise web servers - Apache is all its glory, etc.

    Doubly so, given IIS's press lately.
    • I would go so far as to say that Linux is now the choice solution for enterprise web servers


      *COUGH*
      bsd
      *COUGH*

  • Linux is as ready for the enterprise as any other offering (including those already considered to be enterprise platforms). Work with OS/400 or even a commerical Unix for awhile and you'll soon find out that most of Enterpriseness is political. (Some is also legal... if you run into a snafu with kernel 2.6.1, who can you sue??).

    Having worked with a large number of platforms, I can confidently say that Linux is up there with the best of them. It's not a leader in all niches (such as home computing or workstation graphics) but it's more than enough for almost all server, developer workstation, and terminal areas. In fact, I will go as far as saying that I would fully trust kernel 2.4.16 + ext3fs for almost any task with in reason.

    Linux is at the point where the limiting factor is end user software, not the OS or its libraries. It is time to deploy linux far and wide. Linux will never be the perfect OS... no OS will ever be. It is time to deploy linux.

    • I'd mostly agree, except I'd exclude some high-end hardware. It'll take another couple of years before you're running Linux happily on a 64 CPU box.

      But if you're comfortable running NT or SCO in your enterprise, then Linux should be no problem. I'd even go so far as to say that Linux has always been more enterprise-ready than NT. The first version of NT that was reasonably stable was Windows 2000. Linux was solid much sooner.

    • if you run into a snafu with kernel 2.6.1, who can you sue??

      But can I sue Microsoft or Sun if I find a problem in their code? I would imagine (haven't checked) the license agreements give them a "get out of jail free" clause in the event of buggy code.

    • "who do you sue?" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kevin lyda ( 4803 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @05:08AM (#2629882) Homepage
      could this question please die? considering the realities behind shrinkwrap licenses and ever dedicated support contracts, you can't sue anyone. and even if you could - how can you hope to win? the us gov't sued microsoft and look at how victorious it was?

      a better question is: if things go wrong with widget x, what are my options to get it fixed? with closed s/w, the only option is the vendor you got it from (and really, knowing that, do you want to sue them?). with free software you can use your vendor, another vendor, your own staff, or private contractors (and knowing that, you could feel free to sue your vendor; assuming they failed to live up to their support contract).
      note: i'm assuming in an enterprise situation you'd have some sort of support contract with ibm, redhat, microsoft, suse, sun, linuxcare, apple, etc.

      • Re:"who do you sue?" (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fanatic ( 86657 )
        a better question is: if things go wrong with widget x, what are my options to get it fixed? with closed s/w, the only option is the vendor you got it from (and really, knowing that, do you want to sue them?). with free software you can use your vendor, another vendor, your own staff, or private contractors

        Someone, please, mod this up some more.

      • "could this question please die?" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @08:54AM (#2630395) Homepage Journal
        No, because the question itself is wrong, and is really a red herring.

        It isn't "Who do you sue?" because instead it's really "Who can I blame and send the heat somewhere besides me?" The IT management structure will take heat for any service problems, but with a Microsoft solution they have the perfect blame target. Between "Everybody uses Microsoft," which absolves blame for having chosen them, and the fact that Microsoft is essentially lawsuit-proof, between their EULA and size/tactics, things are nicely diffused. Doesn't keep the systems up an running, but at least you're suffering in the same boat with everyone else, and there's the general, "Nothing can be done any better," to protect you.

        Contrast that with Linux and outsourced support. First off, you've chosen something different, and hence inherently risky. Second, your outsourced support is probably less lawsuit-proof, and therefore maybe something might actually have to be done, rather than sighing in resignation.

        Also contrast with Linux and internal support. Now you're to your own resources, and directly and immediately responsible for anything that goes wrong.

        Note that NONE of this says a single thing about service levels, outages, or whatever. It's merely about adequate 'diffusion or responsibility' to keep the IT peoples' jobs protected. Microsoft provides a great 'responsibility diffusion sink,' one of the best at that.
        • Also contrast with Linux and internal support. Now you're to your own resources, and directly and immediately responsible for anything that goes wrong.
          Tell that to IBM. Actually, tell that to Red Hat, who's actually going to be doing the support (watch that stock price go!)...
          Note that NONE of this says a single thing about service levels, outages, or whatever. It's merely about adequate 'diffusion or responsibility' to keep the IT peoples' jobs protected. Microsoft provides a great 'responsibility diffusion sink,' one of the best at that.
          Yes, but the whole POINT of Linux is taking responsibility for the quality of service and making excellence instead of paying thru the nose for mediocrity. Part of what's wrong with America, yea verily most of the world, is that nobody wants to take responsibility for what's going on, and the world suffers.

          Fine. Y'all go ahead and suffer. I'm going to keep right on downloading the best software in the world and I'm going to take all that money I would have paid You Know Who for it and buy She Who Is Secretly An Ubergeek a nice anniversary present and we'll be very happy, thank you bloody much... meanwhile I'm just going to rub some more Corn Husker's into my calluses and start building that buttload of Linux boxes we just got orders for.

          Yeah, we're There Yet.

    • Re:Are we there? Will anyone ever be there? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fanatic ( 86657 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @06:36AM (#2630032)
      (Some is also legal... if you run into a snafu with kernel 2.6.1, who can you sue??).

      You sound like you've got a good view of the issue, but this sentence cries for rebuttal. When, oh WHEN, will pople stop parroting this nonsense? Any CIO that uses this as an argument against OpenSource/Free software is a moron. I challenge anyone, anywhere, to give evidence that anyone has ever collected a single penny from suing a mass-market software maker for shoddy code. If MS didn't lose their shirt over putrid crap like win3.x or win9x, with it's dll-hell and semi-annnual re-install schedule, how can anyone get sued?
      • If MS didn't lose their shirt over putrid crap like win3.x or win9x

        And while I'm at it, how about a business app that caused measurable damage in the workplace: MS Word. I don't even want to think about how much time I've lost fighting that piece of shit because a file became unprintable after I inserted a graphic or because a line of '=' characters became some sort of non-deleteable meta-section break bullshit or because the formatting of one file was hopelessly and irreparably ruined because I had the temerity to copy and paste text from another file or....

        I've lost days of my life fighting the wierd horse-shit that just happens when you use MS shitware. (All of this would be fixable if they would just implement the "Reveal Codes" function that workdperfect has (had?) so you could get at the formatting codes, but it's clear they never will. 4 years after conversion to MS Word, my co-workers (who are not geeks) still long for wordperfect for this one feature alone.) This, along with their despicable business practices, is why I hate them and all their works.
        • And how about windows NT? I installed the package that allows printing from NT to an IP printer. (I'd been doing this for years, but it magically stopped working. Wierd shit Just Happens in MS crapware...). After the mandatory reboot ("windows has detected a parameter change somewhere in known space. please reboot") NT automagically created a new profile for the same userID I ALWAYS login as. All attempts to switch back to re-using the previous profile (including those with the GUI tools) failed utterly to have any effect. Palm Pilot Desktop stopped working altogether and had to be re-installed. Ditto Notes (oh oh, there's another piece of hard-drive sewage, but that's another rant...). All other apps reverting to the revolting default behaviours (e.g. typeing "PCs" in MSWORD yields "Pcs" because some moronic asshole of a programmer thinks he knows what I want to type better than I do, and buried the nerd-knob that undoes this offensive behaviour behind seven layers of incomprehensible menus in 3 different places).

          Summary: Linux may not be ready for the enterprise, but NEITHER IS WINDOWS.
        • > And while I'm at it, how about a business app
          > that caused measurable damage in the workplace:
          > MS Word.

          And one that has caused even more: Outlook'

          How many enterprise wide virus scares have shut down communications? All thanks to Outlook and its "wide open and pre-lubricated" approach to security.

          dave
      • I challenge anyone, anywhere, to give evidence that anyone has ever collected a single penny from suing a mass-market software maker for shoddy code.

        mass-market != enterprise

        Much of the work that goes into deploying enterprise-level solutions is concerned precisely with ensuring that there is accountability, so that when problems occur it is clear whose responsibility it is to resolve them, and how quickly.

        The "who can we sue" argument is nonsensical to the extent that if you get to that point, you're already bleeding resources or at worse going out of business. But it's a great comfort to know that if the project goes bad there'll be a way to muddy the waters about who was to blame for a bad choice at the initial planning stage.

    • Say I paid good $$$ for a Win95 license and a bug in the 'a' version deleted 3 months of hard work. Who do I sue?? Why, Microsoft, of course. Except I won't win because the boilerplate I, you and everyone else in the enterprise agreed to clearly states:

      LIMITED WARRANTY

      CUSTOMER REMEDIES. Microsoft's and its supplier' entire liability and your exclusive remedy shall be, at Microsoft's option, either (a) return of the price paid, or (b) repair or replacement of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT or hardware that does not meet Microsoft's Limited Warranty and which is returned to Microsoft with a copy of your receipt.

      [etc., more limitations of liability, etc, then the rest shouts in ALL CAPS].

      NO OTHER WARRANTIES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, MICROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS DISCLAIM ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE (i.e., whatever manure the marketing dept. is spreading these days) etc etc etc.

      NO LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS (heheh), BUSINESS INTERRUPTIONS (it's going to take me at least a day to rebuild this database server), LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION (what do you mean last nights backup didn't execute!? I need last month's district earnings report now!!) OR ANY OTHER PECUNIARY LOSS ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR (I like this part :) INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT, EVEN IF MICROSOFT HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. etc etc etc.

      And that isn't just Msft, it's pretty much industry standard boilerplate whether you shelled out ten grand for the SOFTWARE PRODUCT or got it on a free CD at a Linux expo.
    • Linux is not enterprise-ready because it is an immature platform. Point kernel releases result in large changes to the operation of Linux.

      If linux is to be enterprise-ready, it needs to adhere to some standards like the IEEE POSIX or the Open Group's Unix spec.
    • Linux is as ready for the enterprise as any other offering (including those already considered to be enterprise platforms).

      Wrong. It's certainly making good progress, but it's still quite deficient in several important areas.:

      • Support for truly large block devices, or truly large numbers of devices, still lags behind most of the commercial UNIXes.
      • The SCSI stack is still a mess, lacking features, robust error handling, and overall coherency. FC drivers aren't in great shape either.
      • The journaling filesystems available for Linux are still relatively immature.
      • The VM system is effectively only a couple of months old. We don't really know how it will perform on many types of systems, except that it will be *horrible* on NUMA machines.
      • Linux's error logging and general RAS functionality is still nothing like what's provided by the commercial UNIXes.
      • High-availability clustering does exist for Linux, but at a level roughly equivalent to what AIX had in '95 and most others by '98 or so.

      That's far from an exhaustive list, of course. As I said, it's making good progress, and if you're comparing it to any flavor of Windows then it looks pretty good. In the real world of the enterprise, though, it's just not there yet.

  • Is this TOS, TNG, or ENT? I think Linux could make a lot of headway in ENT or even TOS. It's got years before it can compete with the system in _The Next Generation_.

  • marketing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kraada ( 300650 )
    my thought is that linux will eventually pick up, but it's going to take a while. Why? Linux works great and people will eventually realize that, but there really isn't much marketing as far as I can tell. IBM with it's Peace Love and Linux campaign has probably done a lot, but compared to MS . . .
    *shrug*
    Once linux's PR is going well, poor MS will probably be in for the fight of it's life . . .

    • Re:marketing (Score:2, Informative)

      by iBod ( 534920 )
      IBM with it's Peace Love and Linux campaign has probably done a lot,

      Probably done more harm than good.

      See... San Francisco takes IBM to the cleaners [theregister.co.uk]

      I don't think IBM are the marketing geniuses they once were!

      • I don't think IBM are the marketing geniuses they once were!

        You're sure about that? Consider that the preaching was aimed more at the choir than anyone else. Effective? Youbetcha. IBM with attitude, rock on, big blue boy!

        (Hey, did anyone see Osmosis Joe? Remember the scene where Drixenol gets in on in the gangsta club?)

        Don't worry, IBM has their own way of targetting the buttondown IT crowd, and it doesn't revolve around stenciling sidewalks with indelible penguin images. As for the great mass of frontline desktop users, well for the moment it's strictly guerilla warfare there. Emphasis on the 'for the moment'.
        • >Don't worry, IBM has their own way of targetting
          >the buttondown IT crowd, and it doesn't revolve
          >around stenciling sidewalks with indelible
          >penguin images. As for the great mass of
          >frontline desktop users, well for the moment
          >it's strictly guerilla warfare there. Emphasis
          >on the 'for the moment'.

          Well, the button down IT crowd now were hippy kids thirty plus years ago. IBM are just playing on their nostalgia. It's a case of "Remember those ideals you had when you went to Woodstock? Linux is about that!"

          dave

    • Re:marketing (Score:2, Insightful)

      by IpalindromeI ( 515070 )
      I think one of the best parts of Linux's "PR" is that it really comes from its users. Other than IBM and, to some small extent RedHat, there isn't anyone really doing PR. Except the users. They are the ones going out to their bosses and saying, "Hey, I've used this for a long time and I know it can meet the needs." You can't get that kind of assurance from a commercial. Sure you might have PR reps from companies like Microsoft or HP coming around and giving you their salesman pitch, but who would trust more: a guy that shows up at your door and gets paid on commission, or the guy in your systems department that's been keeping everything going for five years? The Linux user base is really growing, and it's the kind of growth that feeds off itself, expanding more into new places. I think in time we'll see more people moving to Linux for enterprise partly because of this.

  • MS Word (Score:3, Insightful)

    by magi ( 91730 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @04:52AM (#2629852) Homepage Journal
    I think MS Word interoperability is perhaps the single most important barrier limiting companies from changing to Linux. Other Office products such as MS Excel and MS Powerpoint are also important.

    You should remember that it's not just necessary to have some semi-lousy import filters to Linux word-processors, but also have 100% compatible export filters. It's practically impossible to make a transition in any company that has to communicate with an existing MS Word user base. And that is the case for almost any companies and public administration.

    And 99% doesn't do, it must be 100.000%. If there are even small incompatibilities, you have to use genuine MS Word -> MS Windows.

    StarOffice 6.0 beta (same as OpenOffice build 638c) has some compatibility in basic formatting. The older StarOffice 5.2 has, in my experience, much better MS Word compatibility, but it also breaks up quite quickly. However, its Excel compatibility is worse than with SO6.0b/OO638c.

    KOffice (1.1) is not even worth mentioning with regard to MS Office compatibility. Its Word import filter simply strips all formatting, and it doesn't have an export filter.

    I work in an IT company, doing purely Linux work, but have to do all documentation, communication, and administrative tasks with MS Office. I was able to use StarOffice 5.2 for a while in some tasks, but can't rely on it completely. The situation really sucks.

    • Re:MS Word (Score:2, Insightful)

      by staeci ( 85394 )
      in other words no office suite will ever be good enough because it is not word.

      As far as sending windows people documents I print from kword to PDF. When people send me .docs I usually reply that I can't read it and give a couple of tips on save as etc.

      For a small business you probably want to keep a windows PC around for file-conversion. Big businesses, government organisations - use the clout that you have.

      I'm sure that if marketing@ibm.com tells joe@smallbiz.com to not send a word.doc Joe might learn how to save as.

      Are there any PDF export methods for word not including adobes expensive suite.

      • in other words no office suite will ever be good enough because it is not word.


        That's it, in a nutshell. The world has standardized on Microsoft Word for the exchange of enriched textual information. In a business environment, "I can't read this" is often invalid. You MUST be able to read and write .doc files in order to communicate.

        Until business realizes the value in open standard formats like PDF or hell, even ASCII text, Microsoft Word will be king on the desktop.
        • You realize by saying this you are saying that it will be impossible for anyone but Microsoft to own the corporate desktop? I would think, just as companies changed from Wordperfect and Wordstar before that, moving from Word to something more open, like OpenOffice and its XML file formats would be a very wise move. There are ways around compatibility issues during the migration process. I refuse to believe we are stuck on Microsoft Word for all eternity just because it is the most prevalent format right now!
    • or maybe companies should just be putting pressure on MS to port it. I mean they have done Office for OSX.

    • Re:MS Word (Score:3, Interesting)

      by joeytsai ( 49613 )
      This is true, but unfortunately, this is very, very, very hard. Speaking as someone who's worked in the filters area of a major company's word processor (think what used to be Word's competition back in the day) filters are horribly complex and making a quality filter is just grueling... and we're not even talking about a "100%" one.

      In fact, even Microsoft's filters aren't very good. Naturally, most people don't even notice it because .doc has become the de facto standard.

      And this is where the situation is bad: if filters aren't that great in commercial word processors, with full time paid programmers, they will be long coming in Linux. Let's be honest, people working on projects for fun will probably have the itch to do something much more interesting and noticable.

      But you're right, .doc is the standard on the vast majority of computers today, so have great import filters is needed. However, I think it would be a better idea for the focus of the different Office suites to be a common file format. All the groups - Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, should really decide on a XML based format and work together on the .doc import.

      How are we going to compete with the Windows world, which has one common file format (albeit terrible) when our own different office suites each have their own file format (which will naturally mean even more filters)?

    • Office Apps != "The Corporate Enterprise" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by brassrat77 ( 9533 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @10:16AM (#2630786)
      I think MS Word interoperability is perhaps the single most important barrier limiting companies from changing to Linux. Other Office products such as MS Excel and MS Powerpoint are also important.

      Desktop office applications are a noticable but small part of "the Enterprise" and NOT the main point of the original article.

      "Enterprise" usually refers to the core applications running in the corporate data center. Inventory, payroll, order processing. Applications where downtime costs $$/minute. Applications where "No application"=="No business".

      Linux is making gains in these areas. The adoption rate appears slow because

      1. It is slow. "Bet the company" decisions are always slow. Implementation is slow. Anyone remember how long it took Windows NT to break into corporate data centers? (Many would argue it still isn't ready)
      2. Companies don't always consider what is a "mission critical" application. Areas where Linux excels - web, mail, dns, and many other RFC-based services, for example - may not be viewed as "critical". At least until the boss wants to know why the corporate web site is down (nmida) or the email system is hosed (badtrans). Then we get something like the Giga Group recommendation to use anything but IIS.
      3. Companies see this as a competitive advantage and do not want to discuss it. The big NYC financial firms are a good example.
      4. Consulting firms need more linux experience. Many enterprise customers rely on the IT consulting arms of the big system integrators and consulting firms. If these outfits push something other than Linux, something other than Linux gets proposed. Do they get incentives from MS, Sun, IBM, HP, CPQ...? Maybe. Anyone pushing Linux like that? Not yet.
      5. CIOs don't always know what's running. I've come across repeated examples where the top managers swear "Linux isn't allowed" but there are stealth, pilot, and production deployments all over the shop. The file sharing and print system runs Samba on Linux and "just works" (and isn't considered "enterprise" until a key document is needed).

      Penetration of Linux could still be better, of course. We need better support from enterprise management and backup systems. We need more "mind share". This article helps.

      Desktops remain a problem. Out of sight, out of mind. Windows is in everyone's face every day.

    • If you want 100% compatability, you have not only to emulate all features of Word, you have to emulate all bugs of Word, too. And it doesn't stop there. You have to emulate the whole Win32, OLE, DDE, and so on APIs because Word uses that stuff to do embedding objects in another.

      In short, once you have done all this, you have Word. It is identical in behaviour and file formats in every way - so it is the original. And where are you then? Being sued by Microsoft under the DMCA for sure. (You cracked the 'encryption' of the MS Word format and used a 'circumvention device' (Staroffice for example) to get at the copyrighted data.)

      Solution: Don't use those formats. It's that simple. Default to something else - XML, RTF, HTML, whatever.

      You will never be the first by imitation.

    • Your point is generally good, taht even OpenOffice/StarOffice isn't 100%. However, I'd have to debate with you that 99% (or whatever value slightly below 100%) is not sufficient. After all, is Microsoft Word itself 100% compatible? Certainly not in my experience. Try importing a Windows .doc file into Word for the Mac. Or the other way around. Or go from one version of Word-for-Windows to another. It is good but not perfect (actually, Word-for-Mac, last time I tried, wasn't even good).

      I use both MS Word and OpenOffice here at my work. Both are good enough for almost everything that I do (OpenOffice is better for some, MS Word for others). At home, I just use OpenOffice because MS Word does _not_ fulfill my needs there.
    • And 99% doesn't do, it must be 100.000%. If there are even small incompatibilities, you have to use genuine MS Word -> MS Windows.

      But luckily it's not 100% of all Word features, it's just 100% of the features the customers actually use. And even there 99% might be enough if the last 1% degrades gracefully.

      P.S. The current economic climate is actually helping the competition to Word. When companies feel rich, they just throw money at Microsoft until they have enough copies of Word for all their employees; right now, a few companies are giving Star Office to people with minimal Word needs, and only giving Word to the people who need the full feature set. Belt-tightening in IT means the IT guys are more willing to settle for less than 100.00% Word compatibility.

      steveha

    • And 99% doesn't do, it must be 100.000%. If there are even small incompatibilities, you have to use genuine MS Word -> MS Windows.


      This is silly. Even MS Word does not open up its own documents with 100% consistency. The simpler ones, yes, but when you start getting into large documents with complex layouts, I have found it not uncommon that when I reopen such documents they often have badly corrupted formatting.

      Of course, the answer is I no longer do such documents in Word.
  • It has been, and will continue to be right for us:

    I am one of two people who run the MIS office at a small technical college. We support everything that plugs into the wall for ~500 staff, faculty, and students. We're not huge, but we keep busy :) We run a Windows 2000 Adv. Server domain that seems to run well for the most part but acts... haunted, as if it's just scared to run stable all the time.

    Recently we decided to replace an old outdated MS-Proxy server (don't yell, I know) with a Squid server. Not because squid is more stable, but it was damn near impossible to monitor MS-Proxy cheaply and effectively. We farmed around for sollutions but they were all over $1,500 for anything decent. Any of you familiar with Squid can finish this story yourself. For the others, now we can monitor at any depth all we want for $free (and of course it's more stable).

    Last night I sat that same server up with MRTG to monitor all of our switches and the network interfaces on all the servers in our farm. Oh, and it's also a syslog server, watching over the the network printers and the server farm itself ( we have Event Viewer in Win2k setup to dump to a CSV file and then push it to syslog). It's also a planned backup www/ftp server and what-ever-else-is-needed server.

    Proxy, MRTG, better monitoring then Event Viewer, syslog, www/ftp: all on one box, at zero software cost. Since it's Linux I know I can trust it to keep up. And I'm not saying that because I'm wearing my shebang(#!) hat and my tux hoodie, I'm talking from experience. You can't beat it.

    That's why Linux is here for us now, and it's because of those qualities that Linux will continue to grow with us in the future.
  • Somebody please define it, in the context of software. What makes linux any less "Enterprise-ready" than NT, AIX, Solaris, etc?

    Does it even have a real definition, or is it just nonsense like the term "supercomputer"?
    • Somebody please define it, in the context of software. What makes linux any less "Enterprise-ready" than NT, AIX, Solaris, etc?


      Answer: Kernel 2.4.15.

      Yes yes, I know about testing and not deploying new software in mission critical apps, but look at the truth. This was a "STABLE" release of the Kernel that went out with "Junior Woodstock" type bugs. Not Enterprise worthy at all.

    • Re:The definition of 'Enterprise' (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smoon ( 16873 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @06:43AM (#2630049) Homepage
      "Enterprise" has two components, first is the relatively straightforward "Core Application" of a company, which might be some sort of ERP system like PeopleSoft, or some other commercial produce. For many companies, this will be an amalgamation of custom programs written over many years. These applications are typically based on some form of transaction processing system (e.g. CICS on the Mainframe, Tuxedo on Unix, or even database-driven transactions ala Oracle, DB2, etc.)

      The second, and more critical part of 'Enterprise' is the nature of the computing service. Generally any outage is measured in dollars per minute or hour. It's not unusual for a large company to face severe monetary losses for even slight outages. Think millions of dollars an hour (or even per minute). This measure tends to be a little slippery, but with some analysis a pretty solid figure can usually be determined.

      For some enterprises, Linux might make complete sense (e.g. Google). For others, the potential of saving a few thousand or hundred thousand in licensing costs pales in comparison to the probable re-training, new hardware, and "potential" instability of moving to Linux. If you've got something that works, why fix it?

      Given the above, even if all of the big 'Enterprise' vendors port their software to Linux, you're not done. Linux clustering in a business context such as Solaris, AIX, and (in the good old days) VMS provide would be one stumbling block. The lack of high-end hardware is another -- and yes I know that Linux runs on anything from a PC to a SPARC server to a S/390 mainframe. In reality, you're unlikely to drop $2million on a big Sun box then load Linux -- you'll want to take advantage of Solaris's dynamic partitioning and other proprietary hooks.

      Loading Linux on diverse old hardware makes business sense -- turn that old Sun box into something useful. It doesn't make nearly as much business sense when buying a new non-intel server, since the license fee of the OS (if any) is negligable compared to the overall value of the system in the 'Enterprise'.

      Over time this is likely to change, since Linux represents a constantly improving and freely available system, vendors will start adopting it as 'their' OS. IBM is an early starter here, but the process will take time. And like a battle of attrition Linux has the advantage over time, since it is constantly improving (for free), while commercial vendors have to dump $millions into R&D to bring out each new version of their OS.
    • Excellent post! Please mod it up so others can read it as well.
  • largo
  • but not mine. Not on the desktop, at least.

    NONE of the publishers of the CAD tools that we use (Cadence, Mentor) are porting to Linux. Mentor ported one of their product lines (not the one we use) and stopped, Cadence never tried, both cite a 'lack of customer demand'.

    When I pointed out to the AE that it's hard to have a demand for a product that doesn't exist, and that WE'D jump to it if offered, he just shrugged. Must be nice to publish a product that you just can't get anywhere else....
    • NONE of the publishers of the CAD tools that we use (Cadence, Mentor) are porting to Linux. Mentor ported one of their product lines (not the one we use) and stopped, Cadence never tried, both cite a 'lack of customer demand'.

      Ditto for professional graphics tools such as Photoshop and Freehand. Please don't mention The Gimp. There was a beta of Corel Draw for a while, but no more.
    • How about Synopsis? I interviewed there last year, and they seemed pretty enthused about Linux.

  • Those that can (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pj7 ( 469369 )
    I work for a rather nice sized ISP in Michigan, and no it's not AOL. Every_single_server we have runs linux. We have one, count 'em one, NT server in the entire place that belongs to us and that is here only to give the owners son a job as an NT Admin, sad huh?
    For the last 3 or maybe longer years we have run Debian exclusively. Is Linux ready for the enterprise? Yes. Is Linux ready for every enterprise? No. But those of us who can, do.
    • Pfft, by that criterion, neither is Msft IIS (given the 'code red' fiasco). From what I read there are no exploits (yet). But yes, I verified you can ftp to a RH Linux 6.2 (and up to all the latest according to Security Focus), type "ls ~{" and lose connection due to a sig-11 segfault at the ftp server. That doesn't stop anyone else from using anonymous ftp tho, and I don't know how to exploit it. I'm looking for a patch right now since I have a public ftp running.
      • Pfft, by that criterion, neither is Msft IIS (given the 'code red' fiasco)

        Exactly. That seems to be the general consensus from numbskulls like the Gartner group. IIS has a hole in it (with a patch that's been out for, what, a year?), so don't use W2K. My post was tounge-in-cheek.
        • My post was tounge-in-cheek.

          Ok ;)

          FWIW, I got the wu-ftp update patch from RedHat, had to upgrade my RH62 pam, db3 & rpm, then update wu-ftp and it all went flawlessly, no more security vulnerability ("ls ~{" now gets "Missing }" instead of disconnecting). Only took me about an hour; would be even faster with a subscription to the RH net autoupdate service.

          Re gartner, if someone can't keep up with IIS patches they would be buried by Apache, etc, and might be better off with an exciting new career in the food service industry, patty inversion specialist ;)
  • Of course I posted this days ago and was rejected. Oh well.

  • 64 bit (Score:2, Insightful)

    by olympus_coder ( 471587 )
    Linux will not truely be viable for the Enterprise until it is entirely 64 bit, not just the kernel. We (a major university that works with geophysical data sets that are large - like corperate datasets) have to kludge around the 2gb limit emposed by utilities like gzip. Without 64bit apps, a 64bit kernel is off little use.
    • Yes but this is typical Microsoft user mindset - having to wait for the vendor to release a new version with a feature you need. The beauty of Linux is - you want it badly enough? Write it! If not stick with what works or see if others out there have the same concern and are willing to help out
      • Yes, and this is a typical Linux user mindset - expecting everybody to write their own stuff. Hmmm... buying something off-the-shelf, or spending the next six months (tying up the resources that it entails), to write your own solution...

        I'm suprised you didn't ask the person to RTFM, while you were at it.
        • And thus you have your choices. Is it cheaper to purchase an MS platform with off the shelf products and wait for your vendor to release the version of an app you need (no telling how long you'll wait and waste $$$) vs using Linux and writing some stuff yourself if the apps you need aren't already there.

          There's nothing wrong with either - its whatever is best for you. I can't imagine porting gzip from 32-bits to 64-bits would take 6 months but who knows.

  • Which enterprise? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Dionysus ( 12737 )
    There are different levels of enterprises. Are they talking about billion dollar companies, or are they talking about mom-and-pop companies?

    Where in the enterprise do they see Linux running?
    Is it as a printserver, database server, or the desktop?

    Personally, I don't think Windows will be replaced on the desktop in the foreseeable future. The average ubergeek/Linux user hates the normal user too much for that to happen (personally I think it's an inferiority complex...)

    On the server side, at my work, we still haven't seen any major request for Linux solutions (we write custom management solutions for midlevel enterprises, i.e. adding specific monitoring support into HP NNM, CA TNG, Tivoli etc). Here, Solaris reigns supreme (if you don't have Solaris support, you can forget it). We looked at Linux support about 6-12 months ago, and the thing is, from a network management point of view, Linux is terrible (right now). SNMP is not fully supported (the UCDavis agent that comes with RedHat doesn't have full SNMPv2 support), and it's harder to get to the underlying hardware than for WinNT and Solaris.

    It is getting there though. The Tivoli agent (no matter how you feel about Tivoli TME) has been ported to Linux (at least it was, last time I talked to a Tivoli rep at LinuxWorld '99). The new management standard, WBEM, seems to get full Linux attention from people like IBM, although it's still not there compared to what Sun and Microsoft has in place (basically, the frontend (cimom) seems to be there, the backend (providers) is missing).

    Quite frankly, I would be curious to see how people like Google is managing thousands of Linux servers (they're not going around pinging each server each day to see if it's up, are they?)

    Sorry about the rambling, it's early in the morning, and it's slashdot.

  • Still Does Not Answer My Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @10:29AM (#2630847) Homepage Journal

    This is all fine and good - using Linux for servers is a great business decision. No licensing hassles, stays up like a champ and keeps on performing. End of story. Let's move on.

    But what about:

    Doing system administration for large LANs of Linux desktops?

    Over the years we've been running RISC workstations that are becoming increasingly expensive from a hardware standpoint relative to what can be got in the x86 world.

    We'd like to take advantage of the price performance advantage in hardware as well as the increasing maturity of Linux desktop end user applications (which are getting real close now). It seems like a lot more applications are available for Linux desktop than many of the traditional commercial Unices.

    The problem is that everyone I know that runs Linux runs their workstation or laptop as their own cowboy system administrator. They typically don't worry about integrating dozens or hundreds of these things together in such a way that a small support staff can manage them effectively.

    You know the kinds of systems.

    • Haphazard applications installed whereever they felt like
    • distro installed out of the box without enough applications
    • no patches applied for necessary security updates
    • strange hardware hanging off moldy interfaces,
    • never thinking about whether it might be nice to use something like NIS (but I know that's not good enough) or automount,
    • never providing regular user file backup,
    • deciding whether to put apps on a central server or each desktop, (pros and cons either way)
    • how to handle upgrades,
    • etc.

    So what I want to know is:

    Has anyone done this?
    How did it work? What should we look out for? What is the advantages and disadvantages? Good tools? Web sites?

  • Almost There (Score:5, Interesting)

    by uslinux.net ( 152591 ) on Thursday November 29, 2001 @10:42AM (#2630912) Homepage
    There are still a few things lacking in Linux distributions to make it fully "enterprise-ready" (I hate that term). For anyone who has truly spent time with other Unices, the following is obvious - Better Package Management! The ability to test out packages without "commiting" them so, if something breaks, you can immediately roll back to the prior state. Yes, I know you can uninstall and reinstall old packages, but it's NOT the same. Use HP-UX for a while and you'll understand - you can install, remove, commit, rollback, and test packages. In a production environment, it is critical that a newly installed patch or program doesn't break existing systems!


    As far as the kernel goes, I think Linux is there. I DON'T think Linux is necessarily ready to compete with NT or 2000 (though I give it 18 more months), since it is still lacking quite a few easy to use admin tools (think of the NT print manager or DHCP admin and you'll understand what I mean), but it is coming along.

    • As far as the kernel goes, I think Linux is there.


      Is this true, though? If you have listened to the chorus lately, they seem to indicate that 2.4.x is not really ready yet (basically, if you're running 2.4.x on a production server, you are being blasted for not caring about stability).


      So, you are basically stuck with 2.2.x, and 2.2.x doesn't have the new enterprise features, like more memory support, and better SMP.

      • This is total BS. 2.4 is production-ready. These are probably the same people who always stay one version behind, thinking their machine will be more stable. 2.4 handles many things better, including higher loads.

      • Re:Almost There (Score:3, Informative)

        by uslinux.net ( 152591 )
        Yes, the kernel is ready, mostly depending on which kernel you use. There are a number of people (myself included) that think the kernels aren't necessarily getting enough testing before release, but if you stay a stable revision or two behind, you're probably in good shape. 2.4.10 is stable, and so far 2.4.16 has been (though I'm sure there will be revisions to it). If you REALLY want something stable, use an -ac kernel - Alan has done an excellent job of making sure these ARE production ready.
    • Definitely agree about the package management, but here's what I want to know:

      Why do people think that admin tools should be "easy to use" (I hate that term)?? Sure a nice GUI for priting or DHCP management would be cool, but that's trivial. Usually people are whining for "easy to use/user frienly, etc." tools for servers, system config and security - does it ever occur to anyone that if you know what you are doing you don't need pretty icons, and if you don't, you should stay the hell away from those configs? This just could be part of the reason why most MS installations can be hacked (and repeatedly are) by anyone with an IQ of at least 70 and enough fingers to type with.

      • Re:Almost There (Score:3, Insightful)

        by uslinux.net ( 152591 )
        Easy to use != less secure

        Hard to use != more secure (perhaps just the opposite)


        Easy to use does not necessarily mean there are flaws in security, or that you only need to point and click. It DOES, however, mean that someone like me who knows DHCP or DNS doesn't need to look up the man page every time I need to add an option, or forget to add an important security setting that isn't in a default configuration file. It also means that, by restricting _what_ can be modified, there is far less chance of an error. Ever use a # sign as a comment in a DNS zone file? It's terrible that Bind will keep on going without an error messages, but resolution (particularly of MX records) will fail miserably


        Commented config files are easier to use than non-commented ones which require you to read a man page. Similarly, GUI tools are easier to use than config files (generally) - especially when they include good help functions. GUI admin tools SHOULD NOT replace an admin or be a substitute for stupidity, but they SHOULD be there to make our lives easier.

      • Re:Almost There (Score:3, Insightful)

        by demaria ( 122790 )
        Administrators are busy people. Many IT departments are understaffed. Admins have better things to do than battle with the UI.
    • Use HP-UX for a while and you'll understand - you can install, remove, commit, rollback, and test packages.

      A good point, but then again, I've never had RPM get halfway through a package upgrade, decide it didn't like the file, and just crash leaving the system in an unusable and unbootable state. HP-UX did that to us last week. HP recommended recovering from backup. All we were doing was installing a security patch to a non-kernel service, but it managed to hose a system library.

  • One of the biggest things missing in Linux that I see is software mirroring of hard drives. Are there any projects out there aimed at bringing that to Linux?

    • (before I start - this isn't flamebait ;) ) Who actually uses software mirroring? Striping I can at least understand - your geekier home users might gain some performance that way.
      But the purprose of mirroring is data integrity, which (at least to me) means that

      a) you are doing this in a corporate environment and
      b) it's obviously important to you

      in which case I can't see why you wouldn't shell out the extra couple hundred $ (an imperceptable figure for a business, in the grand scheme of things) to do it properly (ie in hardware).

      I could of course, as always, be wrong.

  • I think Linux will see greater adoption in the enterprise. Why? Java and J2EE.

    J2EE is the current wiz-bang development platform for enterprise applications. Looking past the hype, it appears to actually provide some good tools and structure. We're going to be seeing a lot more enterprise applications written on top of WebSphere or WebLogic or some other J2EE server platform. It seems to be the way to go if you don't want to be beholden to M$ and .NET.

    The thing is, since this is most all pure Java, all you need is a stable OS that supports your database (Oracle, DB2, etc.) and, of course, has a Java VM. Enter Linux.

  • Quite often, when talking about "Linux in companies", people concentrate on big-scale employements, "global 500" companies and such.

    However, most people (90%?) work in small to medium enterprises with hunderts of "bizcases" online these days, and most of these are form small companies, schools, universities, NPOs... who simply can't afford the cost of commercial software, but can't afford the cost of a full-time linux/unix administrator either.

    Link: MandrakeBizcases [mandrakebizcases.com]

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