Linux To Take Over Microsoft In Enterprises

shougyin writes "For years, Linux has enjoyed much of its success as a replacement for Unix. Companies turned to Linux to replace Unix servers, or for new deployments within a Unix-heavy environment. Linux is still king there, but it's starting to encroach on Microsoft as well. Big companies are planning overwhelmingly (76.4%) to add more Linux servers in the next year, and less than half (41.2%) of the companies are planning to add Windows servers in the next year. Even more interesting, nearly half (43.6%) are actively planning to decrease use of Windows servers in the next year."

ActiveDirectory - the last missing piece

[Cyberax]

I know quite a few companies who run 3-4 Windows servers for ActiveDirectory domain controllers and a lot of Linux servers as AD clients.

Once Samba4 is released, these Windows servers could be replaced as well.

Selfcongratulatory survey

[arivanov]

This survey is not statistically representative by all means. It is done amidst users that already use Linux and done by a Linux advocacy. I am no MSFT fan. I have not had a Windows machine in my house since 1997 (and even that was Win 3.x running under OS2 Warp). However, the reality is not as rosy as this survey would like us to see.

First of all, the majority of Windows users are SMEs and they are Windows _ONLY_. They _WILL_ buy more of the same and that is a definite. A lot of the rest is desktop estate and its essential dependencies - Exchange and their friends. 95% of these will be buying more of the same. There are very few successful desktop migrations to account for anything more than that. Even that will be an underestimate. 99% buying more of the same is more likely.

That leaves "enterprise" backend use which is pretty much what this survey is about. There is a lively migration racket going on there nowdays as most of this runs in the form of Java and friends on top of middleware stacks. Every 1-2 years the latest and greatest backend idea comes along with its migration programme. As a result servers and stacks get chucked out and replaced by others.

There Linux is gaining and the numbers are about right. However that is a very small portion of the market and misrepresenting it for the whole market is to the very best disingenuous. Additionally, it also completely ignores the "Elephant In The Corner of The Room". The merger of Sun and Oracle has created a vertical stack which will once again effectively compete for their place under the sun (pun intended) in the server room. Any stats regarding enterprise migration that assign (Sn)Oracle a negative year on year growth are frankly wishful thinking.

Re:News for Nerds:

[Pieroxy]

Well, I just switched my home server from Windows to Linux this very week-end. That cannot be a coincidence, right?

Re:News for Nerds:

[koiransuklaa]

Don Marti tears the methodology and the point of the whole survey to pieces: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/hands-up-who-likes-me/ [zgp.org]

This sort of surveys may have value but used like this they're just embarrassing.

Re:News for Nerds:

[shougyin]

This is directly from the report. "This survey was conducted with members of The Linux Foundation’s End User Council, as well as other end users identified by The Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technologies. This report is being published at The Linux Foundation End User Summit, where many respondents will be in attendance. These companies include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Bristol- Myers Squibb, NTT, Deutsche Bank, Dreamworks, ADP, McKinsey and Company, Bank of New York, Barclays Capital, AIG, the US Department of Defense, MetLife, CME Group, NASDAQ QMX, the New York Stock Exchange, Goodrich, and many more."

survey not statistically representative

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's the word from the Linux Foundation's report on adoption trends. The report was conducted by the Yeoman Technology Group, and surveyed nearly 2,000 users picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council. The results released yesterday were culled from 387 respondents that are from the largest organizations -- companies with more than 500 employees and/or more than $500 million a year in revenue" link [linux.com]

"The Linux Foundation, in partnership with Yeoman Technology Group, recently conducted a survey of 1,948 Linux users. This invitation-only survey pool was comprised of the Linux Foundation End User Council as well as other companies, organizations and government agencies selected by The Linux Foundation and Yeoman" link [linuxfoundation.org]

Re:what about proper ACL in Linux?

[ratboy666]

Linux supports rwx/ugo file permissions, as well as ACLs. It really isn't a problem.

The REASON that ACLs really aren't used much is that they are too difficult to audit. The specific problem in your referenced article can be solved with links.

Re:ActiveDirectory - the last missing piece

[Lumpy]

He is ignoring the cost of CAL's. I'm betting his entire shop is out of compliance on CAL's

Re:Single sign on?

[Stumbles]

LOl, so true. The sad thing is Microsoft took Kerberos, bastardized it and changed the name to AD so most people are ignorant that "Single Signon" technology was not developed by Uncle Bill. But then most technologies gives Microsoft fits when they try to develop their own code. Anyone remember trumpet winsock from the early days of Win95? What a horrible POS that was and Microsoft finally threw in the towel and used the BSD TCP/IP stack.

Re:Single sign on?

[ledow]

Apart from the fact that AD was derived from a Unix technology that does exactly what you ask:

Install Likewise Open. That's your client problem solved. My school has trolleys full of Ubuntu netbooks that log onto the wireless network and allow any AD login on any domain they are joined too. It took three commands I think (install the package, name the machine, join the domain). Kids don't even need to know that the netbooks are Linux whereas the rest of the school is almost all Windows. And, yes, I can use the Windows Administrators to do privileged operations by just sticking them in the right groups.

Server is a bit more tricky but if you're keeping homogenous systems (Linux server, Linux clients), single-sign-on on Linux has been around for donkey's years. Server probably needs Samba4 if you want modern-Windows-clients on a Linux-only server.

Next, please describe how to use MS-supplied tools to achieve the same (i.e. log MS clients onto Linux servers, or even Linux clients onto MS servers). It's hardly surprising that nobody really supports joining the competition, so homogenous systems are infinitely easier to support. But your claim as a unit is bollocks. Wanna come see a Linux netbook join an unprepared, untampered-with Windows-only domain run by a Windows-only machine with no Linux help server-side, and support SSO for all its operations (including initial login, printer access, fileshare access, even desktop icons etc.)? A group of 8 year old's here do it every day.

Re:Samba4 for Linux networks

[Cyberax]

"Would you care to comment on whether Samba4 is useful only for replicating MS technologies in the network, or also for use in a pure Linux/POSIX environment (UNIX, Linux, Mac)?"

It's certainly useful. I'm using it in almost Linux-only environment.

"Can you use pure Kerberos (not the MS version), or is that recommended?"

Yes. It's possible to use Samba4 as a pure Kerberos server, and it works just fine. In fact, I've first installed OpenLDAP+Kerberos and then migrated everything on this test site to Samba4.

A piece of trivia: it's actually possible to join WinXP into a pure Kerberos domain.

"And can Linux Terminal Server Project tie into this in some way (serve an appropriate terminal image based on a Samba profile)?"

No idea. Though I imagine that it should work.

Re:News for Nerds:

[netsavior]

weird, I work for one of the companies on the list... our web servers for customer front-end (not business front-end) run Linux and a very small amount of our analytics run Linux... Most of our Windows servers are virtualized, so maybe that is where the numbers are going askew... My department alone added something like 2000 Windows servers this year, and about 5 new Linux -- I would estimate about 50 of those windows servers were non-virtual. Now our existing Linux servers are upgraded significantly beyond what our windows servers run (more processors, more RAM), and in general we upgrade and patch Linux servers, but we never reconfigure hardware on windows servers -- we always replace/rebuild them (company standard policy), which really adds to the "new windows machines" numbers and makes TFA's statistic seem more and more made-up. I do not have exact stats for company-wide, but I can say the support team, the internal user base, the server footprint, the development staff, the administration staff are all orders of magnitude bigger for Wintel vs Linux/Unix/iSeries(which is one team)... In other words, I do not believe this survey, based on inside information about one of the companies listed.