Are you certifiable?

• Article 9 of 16
• LinuxUser & Developer, January 2006
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 196K

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In the great battle for distribution supremacy, there have been only two Linuxes that have had a chance of dominating the enterprise. Forget the purity of Debian. Forget the also-rans like Sun Linux. Red Hat and SuSE have been the only ones with a hope in Hell of convincing IT managers to standardise on them.

Each has had its own strongholds. Red Hat has always been in the lead worldwide, but has done particularly well in the US, while SuSE has a firmer hold on continental Europe. Both have maintained their leadership and are fighting for marketshare by appealing to the one thing all IT managers want to avoid: management problems.

From the point of view of the IT manager, both Red Hat and SuSE (now owned by Novell, of course) claim to provide an operating system that is reliable, high performance and easy to use. But nothing short of a mainframe can claim 100% reliability, and even then there are occasions when the mainframe may have a hiccup. Plus there’s always the possibility of crashes from which the organisation’s IT activities will need to recover. Then there’s tuning, planning policies, low-level configuration and a dozen other things that are needed to ensure servers run reliably and at optimum performance levels. If anything goes wrong and nothing can be done about it quickly, the company loses money and the IT manager almost certainly loses his or her job.

In short, before an IT manager is willing to use a piece of software for mainstream operations, he or she needs to know that when things go wrong, it can and will be supported.

So, with the benefits of Linux and open source software in general becoming clear, the need for support with enterprise Linux deployments is becoming stronger every day, if Linux is to continue its growth in the enterprise.

Support of course comes from two possible locations: inside and outside the enterprise. Either service providers can offer support or the organisation can develop in-house skills for maintaining its servers. In both cases, can you simply take it on trust that a potential employee or contractor has the skills necessary to do the job? Some ask for references, but certification of skills can often be seen as better proof, particularly if it’s an industry-recognised certification.

Certification has a number of benefits. Vendors, including Microsoft, Sun and IBM, have spent millions of pounds convincing managers that there is value in certification. To a certain extent, this is still true, even though Microsoft’s MCSE has devalued the certificate currency somewhat: the emergence of ‘boot camps’ that train up everyone in a week to an almost-certain pass, even if they have little actual experience, has led to the concept of the ‘paper MCSE’ – someone who has skills on paper but cannot actually do the job.

In addition, certification can recruit new Linux users, create new Linux advocates and, when offered in universities and schools, which might not have the time or money to create their own course or course material, turn the next generation of IT staff away from Windows.

There are a number of skills certification schemes available for Linux. The first Linux certification to appear came from SAIR/GNU, quickly followed by the Linux Professional Institute’s (LPI) Level 1 and Level 2 accreditations and CompTIA. These were all vendor neutral, covering Linux in general. Red Hat, however, developed certifications that focused on its particular distribution: the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), soon followed by the Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) and very recently the Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA).

Novell, too, has joined in with certification. A year ago, it developed the Certified Linux Professional (CLP) exam and it launched its Certified Linux Engineer 9 (CLE9) at its Brainshare conference in September.

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