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| DATE | 2004-05-24 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] UPS and Free Software - When it absolutely, positively - well you know the routine....
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Linux Going Mainstream
Linux leads open-source move into running key business processes and systems
By Larry Greenemeier, InformationWeek
May 24, 2004
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=20900300
When United Parcel Service Inc. first tried Linux three years ago, the delivery company ran the open-source operating system for four months on a virtual machine within its mainframe. The test pitted CPU- and input/output-intensive applications on Linux against similar ones on a Unix server. Linux came up short on performance and added a layer of complexity that was discouraging. UPS decided the operating system wasn't ready for the demands of its data-center environment, and IBM, which had prodded UPS into doing the test, agreed.
Fast forward to early last year, and Linux again auditions at UPS. The company, which recorded $33.5 billion in sales last year, ran a 60-day test of Sendmail Inc.'s open-source E-mail-routing software on an Intel-based server running Linux. This time, the operating system performed well, processing inbound and outbound messages for more than 80,000 users with fewer servers than the Unix system. That was the turning point for Linux at UPS, which is now looking to move all its RISC-based applications to the operating system. "It gives us the functionality that we wanted and allowed us to get off a RISC-based platform," says Nick Gray, applications manager for architecture services.
Linux "gives us the functionality that we wanted," UPS's Gray says
Photo by Ken Schles
UPS's experience is typical of what's happening at many businesses: Linux and Apache now run key systems, and a new generation of open-source applications competes with commercial and proprietary offerings that handle strategic business processes (see "Open Source, Part 2," March 29, 2004).
In a recent InformationWeek Research survey, 41% of 281 business-technology professionals at companies using open-source software say they're doing so across their organizations, 42% say they use production databases written with open-source software, and another 33% are considering using it for their databases.
Linux is now the dominant manifestation of open source. Nearly 70% of 420 business-technology professionals surveyed already use the operating system, up from 56% a year ago. Eighty-three percent of 287 companies running Linux use it primarily to run Web or intranet servers. Application development, database management, and E-mail and message hosting also are top uses cited by survey respondents. Three-quarters of those using Linux on some of their companies' servers chose it for its performance capabilities and reliability.
A key driver behind business use of Linux is support from high-profile vendors. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are all several years into strategies to use Linux to increase sales of Intel-based servers. Applications vendors such as Oracle and SAP push Linux as an option for companies transitioning portions of their data centers from proprietary to open-source software.
Companies with a lot riding on the reliability of their IT systems aren't going to use free software downloaded from the Internet to run important operations. They're more likely to go with established enterprise-class software from companies they know. And many of the big vendors now support their products running on Linux, says Evan Leibovitch, president of the Linux Professional Institute, a Canadian nonprofit business that offers Linux skills-certification programs for IT professionals.
IBM wasn't directly involved with UPS's second Linux trial, but the vendor's influence was apparent. "IBM's role was significant. ... As one of our strategic business partners, they're investing in [Linux] as a strategic play," Gray says. In addition, IBM has delivered the management and support tools to make Linux a feasible enterprise operating system. "If the majority of the tools we used in the Unix environment weren't available in Linux, we wouldn't pursue it," he says.
Oracle was the driver for Trimble Mobile Solutions, a division of Trimble Navigation Ltd. that provides location information to global positioning systems via radio, cellular phone, and the Internet. When the company wanted to move its Oracle database to a clustered environment, Oracle pushed to run 9i Real Application Clusters on Linux rather than Windows. This set the stage for Trimble to deploy a Linux-based three-node Dell PowerEdge cluster in three months.
"It comes down to vendor support and our desire to grow the clustered environment," says Tony Johnson, Trimble Mobile Solutions' database administrator. "We knew we wanted to go to RAC, and RAC on Windows is not where Oracle's attention is."
Linux scales more easily in a clustered environment, Johnson says, and that's a significant factor for the fast-growing Trimble division, which provides vehicle-mounted hardware with GPS receivers and location-management software as a hosted service to fleet owners for dispatching, tracking, and monitoring their vehicles. First-quarter revenue for the division increased about 66% over the same quarter a year earlier. Trimble Mobile attributes the improvement to increased sales of its CrossCheck vehicle-mounted GPS hardware and an increase in fleet-management services customers--the number of subscribers at the end of the first quarter was up 50% from the end of 2003. The division hopes to grow even faster with its March acquisition of TracerNet Corp., which provides wireless fleet-management hardware and software.
Expanding the capability of the Windows server on which Trimble had been running its GPS application meant moving from Windows 2003 Advanced Server to Windows 2003 Data Center to be able to scale up to four nodes, Johnson says. Even then, Windows 2003 Data Center couldn't promise the scalability that Linux could. Besides vendor enthusiasm, another factor that has contributed to Linux's corporate success is economic uncertainty. "The economic downturn has ended up being very good for Linux," says Dirk Elmendorf, founder and chief technology evangelist of Rackspace Managed Hosting, a provider of IT-hosting services. "It shook people up. They had to start thinking about how they were going to change their business to survive in a new environment. Companies don't want to change anything when things are good."
The recession jarred many companies into looking at moving to less-expensive IT alternatives. Nearly 80% of respondents to our survey who use Linux say they do so because of its low cost and negligible licensing fees. However, cost wasn't a factor in Trimble Mobile Solutions' decision to adopt a Linux clustered environment. "I've never believed the 'Linux is free' story," Johnson says. "The numbers aren't that much different between Windows and Linux."
Most of the cost savings for companies running Linux across their enterprises comes from being able to stretch their servers and other hardware further, says Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research, an advisory firm. "Companies can deploy Oracle and other enterprise apps on cheaper servers when they use Linux."
UPS will be able to buy Intel-based servers at 60% of the cost of comparable RISC-based servers. "The cost of the operating system is a wash," UPS's Gray says. "We're not going after Linux because it's a free download. It's more the cost of maintaining the box."
For Boeing Co., which last year had $50.5 billion in sales, Linux provides a cost-effective option to proprietary supercomputers. Getting the aerospace company's Delta IV rocket--built to launch telecommunication satellites into orbit--from factory floor to outer space required years of design and computational fluid-dynamics testing to understand the impact of flight on the rocket's structure and control system. To be certain that Boeing could do enough simulations to ensure the rocket's success without breaking the bank, the Expendable Launch Systems division used a 96-node cluster of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. 850-MHz Athlon processor-based PCs running Red Hat Linux.
Boeing tapped Linux Networx Inc., a Linux cluster-management specialist, to develop a clustered environment that would be cheaper and more efficient than investing $500,000 in another Silicon Graphics Inc. Origin supercomputer. Boeing declined to say how much it paid for the Linux Networx cluster, though Suresh Shukla, service manager for high-performance computing, writes in an E-mail that he looks at the total life-cycle cost for hardware, software, support, and application usage when assessing the cost of adding capacity and capability to a high-performance-computing environment. "Cost of the operating system is only one component that contributes to the overall cost," he says. "Linux is generally less expensive to purchase than proprietary Unix."
Its success in the Delta IV program has helped Linux catch on in other parts of Boeing, such as the Commercial Airline Division, which recently sold 50 of its newest 7E7 Dreamliner airplanes to Japan's All Nippon Airways. The Commercial Airline Division uses three 128-node Linux Networx clusters run by Boeing's Shared Services Group to do computational fluid-dynamics applications.
UPS expects that, by the end of the year, less-expensive Intel-based servers running Linux will replace RISC-based intranet, Web-analytics, Oracle-development, and domain-name servers, Gray says. The company is testing each application, in turn, as its Unix server leases come up for renewal.
For 2005, UPS is looking at its systems-management infrastructure, Oracle production, and other Web-based servers as candidates for Linux. "Until proven otherwise, we're targeting anything in the RISC environment," Gray says. In addition to lower server costs, potential savings come from reducing the number of CPUs, which will affect CPU-based software pricing.
Not all of UPS's systems are candidates for Linux. Its data warehouse will continue to run on a Unix-based HP Superdome server with 7.5 terabytes of storage. Gray says he hasn't seen a comparable Intel-based platform.
Linux's following in the business world has grown because it has delivered in smaller environments, Rackspace's Elmendorf says. "When you have good experiences, you look around at where else you can apply it." United Cerebral Palsy Inc. of New York City uses Linux as the foundation for its Checkpoint Firewall-1, Apache Web servers, and Cold Fusion applications. It's considering Sun Microsystems' StarOffice as an alternative to Windows on the desktop. "Technical curiosity and hedging our bets in regards to security are more the motivation," CIO Jim Brown writes in an E-mail. "I also want my technical staff to understand an operating system other than Microsoft ... just in case."
Software in general has matured enough to meet most users' needs, Brown says, and the latest features, particularly in the case of Windows, offer little incentive to upgrade. Eventually, software will be so pervasive and interconnected that open source and proprietary distinc- tions won't matter, he says. "This underlying medium for the functional tools will be as overlooked as electricity."
Not everyone is convinced that Linux is the right way to go: 23% of survey respondents have no plans to use it in the next 12 months, citing incompatibility with enterprise apps, lack of internal expertise, and a preference for a homogenous operating-system environment.
The idea of an IT environment where Unix, Linux, and Windows coexist doesn't bother UPS. "Mixed environments are the norm for IT departments," Gray says. Linux as a replacement for Windows is less appealing for UPS, which has 6,000 Windows-based servers and 100,000 Windows-based desktops. "Windows works for us, and it's already on Intel," Gray says.
Still, Red Hat is targeting the desktop with a version of its Linux operating system introduced earlier this month. "We believe the market and technology is ready," says Mike Ferris, Red Hat's product marketing manager for Enterprise Linux. "The customers who adopt Red Hat Desktop are those who are looking for an alternative."
As Linux adoption in the enterprise grows, so does the scrutiny. This year, 32% of survey respondents that don't use Linux say open-source software isn't trustworthy, up from 19% a year ago. Some of the lack of trust may be in the technology. But it also can be attributed to the multiple lawsuits SCO Group Inc. has filed against Linux users, distributors, and licensors. The legal activity has raised questions of accountability, whether a user company is liable for copyright or intellectual-property infringements in open-source code.
UPS isn't ignoring the controversy, which includes lawsuits that SCO Group has filed against AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler, IBM, and Novell. But UPS isn't letting legal actions interfere with its business-technology plans. The company has policies that prohibit users from downloading freeware or shareware without IT's permission, Gray says, and it's "tweaking them to include open source, too."
Linux has done well penetrating high-performance computing and IT-infrastructure environments such as those at UPS, Trimble, and Boeing. One area where Linux Professional Institute's Leibovitch doesn't see it going soon is industry-specific environments. Open-source applications written for vertical industries are coming, but slowly. "It's not a matter of technology but rather business issues," he says. "End users have to wrap their heads around working collaboratively with the open-source community rather than reinventing the wheel each time they build a new application."
Vendor enthusiasm may be fueling some users open-source moves, but that can only go so far. Leibovitch believes that Linux is growing in the direction its users want it to. "Generally speaking, the suppliers of the technology have been attuned to the user base," he says.
Search the InformationWeek Media Network for more stories about this topic:
UPS's Gray agrees, noting that vendor responsiveness is one of several factors driving Linux forward. "The Intel boxes have been juiced up, the [software vendors] have gotten virtually all of the products we're looking for, and Linux itself has gained some stability," he says. "That triumvirate of activities has helped make us comfortable that introducing Linux is not putting UPS at risk."
With the likes of UPS and Boeing getting comfortable with the operating system running critical business systems, the momentum behind Linux will continue to build. That means Linux and open source are set to increase their impact on the business world.
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