IT firms brace for growth in Linux use
As increasing numbers of companies adopt the Linux operating system to run pieces of their back-end computer mainframes, more IT firms are beefing up the Linux arms of their businesses.
"Having an operating system that gives you flexibility is really important, and it’s something other operating systems haven’t always been the best at," says Rick Friedman, vice president of marketing for Scali Inc. in Marlboro.Sales at Scali, which moved its headquarters from Norway last year, grew by more than 300 percent in 2004, although Friedman declined to give details of the privately held company’s financials. Founded in 1997, Scali makes products to manage clusters of Linux machines in company data centers.
Clustering, or running a single program on multiple machines to increase computing power, has become a popular option for some companies due to the lower costs associated with Linux and its ability to run on less expensive hardware, Friedman says.
In the past, companies were tethered to their machines, operating systems and software by incompatibility. Certain software would run only on certain hardware, which limited options for switching systems.
The open source Linux itself is distributed freely. Distributors, such as Novell or Red Hat, charge for support to install and run the product, which is less expensive than licensing fees for Windows or Sun’s Solaris, a Unix product.
Roots in Finland
It is called an open source operating system because the source code used to make Linux is publicly available. A Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds, who was trying to make a Unix-like operating system for his home computer, developed it in the early 1990s. By opening up the code, he enlisted the help of programmers worldwide to develop, test and add applications to Linux.
Vern Brownell, founder and chief technology officer of Marlboro-based Egenera, saw the data center potential for Linux six years ago. Brownell, who oversaw data center operations for Goldman Sachs, thought Linux could reduce costs and simplify the complicated systems.
The privately-held Egenera specializes in what it calls BladeFrame technology, small servers that can be automatically reconfigured to handle different types of operating systems, programs and applications on the fly. That allows data centers to better tailor computing demands to different tasks over the day, says Vice President of Marketing Susan Davis. Although Bladeframes can run Windows, Unix and Linux, they were first designed to run Linux, Davis says.
"What companies are trying to achieve is not just saving on operating systems licenses but gaining the ability to run on cheaper commodity servers as part of that move," Davis says. "It’s driven by a desire to get away from being locked into systems that were proprietary, and that move is definitely happening out in the world."
And service firms are bracing for the change. Akibia, Inc. in Westboro, has already begun to emphasize its Unix-to-Linux migration service, says President Tom Tucker. He sees the eventual migration coming slowly but steadily over the next several years and expects that Linux will eventually replace Unix in company data centers, although when that will happen is anyone’s guess, he says.
But firms like Akibia must start preparing now to be ahead of the curve when it comes time to help clients adopt the system, he says.
"It’s not a huge part of our business right now, maybe $1-2 million of our $100 million revenue," he says. "But it’s the fastest growing part of our business, and it’s where the future is going over the long term."
Kenneth J. St. Onge can be reached at kstonge@wbjournal.com
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