Supply side
- Article 1 of 1
- Enterprise Linux, September 2003
Customer demand is forcing the IT industry to embrace Linux, whether it likes it or not.
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There are, however, limits to what Linux can do today, and all the large systems vendors say that their own proprietary Unix flavours are still best at the high end. “For big operations, AIX is still better than Linux,” says IBM's Jollans. “In the next few years, Linux will be able to do eight-way processing; AIX can do 32-way at the moment.”
Craig Churchill, Sun's 'Edge' volume and solution manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, also argues that while the company has “always been very positive towards Linux” - an attitude he agrees the market may not always have picked up on - “we've always felt able to beat it with Solaris.” Linux's main area of appeal is in its low cost of acquisition, he believes, which is why the company is focusing on low-end, low-cost Linux systems.
Far from damaging Solaris, Churchill says that the decision to offer Linux-based systems, has helped the company increase its Solaris customer base, as companies use Linux systems in conjunction with higher-end Solaris machines. However, Russell Coombes, HP's Linux director, says Sun's Linux message is not enough. He claims that 90% of the interest in HP's Linux-based servers comes from Solaris users, rather than people wanting to migrate either from Windows or an HP-UX environment.
HP pitches Linux as a good choice for machines with two or four processors, with HP-UX a better option for more involved work. “We have to be careful,” admits Coombes. “We could really promote Linux and it could be seen as cannibalising our HP-UX installed base or it could be seen as attacking Microsoft. Linux is very strategic to HP now; we are evangelising it, we have many customers and ISVs moving to Linux, so we have to make sure we are part of that whole movement.”
With all the major systems vendors now adopting Linux-friendly strategies, they all agree that the best way to garner loyalty among their customers is to differentiate themselves through their hardware, services and support.
“What we offer on Intel are enterprise features, such as systems management tools for heterogeneous environments,” says Fujitsu Siemens' Reger. “There will be a part of the Intel server market - the low-end, price-sensitive portion - where differentiation will not be possible, not asked for and not required by customers. But for those parts where it really makes a difference, it's important that we differentiate.”
Linux distributors
Just as Linux was beginning to be taken seriously by corporate IT decision-makers, fear of a repeat of the Unix fragmentation of the 1980s drove many potential customers away from Linux and encouraged many would-be resellers, such as IBM and Oracle, to look for a de facto standard distribution.
“We went to all the Linux distributors and asked which of them was serious about the enterprise,” says Wim Coaekaerts, principal member of Oracle's Linux kernel group. “Red Hat was the first to come forward.”
The Linux distributors have since clubbed together to develop the Linux Standards Base, a way of ensuring that distributions and software remain compatible by placing constraints on what may be altered in a Linux distribution. The result now, according to SuSE Linux's strategic alliance director, Malcolm Yates, is that enterprise users generally do not mind which Linux distribution they use. “Fragmentation concerns disappeared about two years ago,” says Yates. “People don¹t ask that question any more.”
Linux distributors have little chance to differentiate themselves technically. But many have found ways to stand out. TurboLinux, for instance, does well in parts of the Far East because of its enhanced text-handling capabilities for East Asian languages.
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