The Rise Of Linux

We aren't just talking simple Apache Web servers and Dell boxes running Red Hat, but an entire next generation of applications that takes Java, Web services and Internet infrastructure as a given and builds new and exciting businesses on top of all of that. Almost without having been noticed, Linux has become essential for building these applications. It is found more often as the core technology from the smallest and newest start-ups to the more established solution providers. What all of these folks have in common is the need to be agile to find and fill particular niches quickly.

There is no denying Linux's popularity: In VARBusiness' own surveys, we found it is being used by roughly 20 percent of all corporations--twice that of the respective shares of NetWare and Unix. In addition, Gartner reports that Linux can cost less to deploy on desktops and can deliver fewer than three-year paybacks. Also, 43 percent of midmarket companies Gartner surveyed said they plan to increase their use of Linux in the coming year.

But the rise of Linux is much more than mere servers. Web-site operators and designers of particularly complex e-commerce and Web/database applications need to be able to understand the bottlenecks of their applications and how their sites will operate as they handle more visitors and transactions. A variety of tools have been sold over the years to do so from more established vendors, such as NetIQ, Mercury Interactive and KeyLabs (a VARBusiness lab partner). However, those products are complex, expensive and built on custom code that isn't easily modified. Enter OpenDemand Systems, a Newark, N.J.-based ISV that sells a Web-testing tool called OpenLoad, which stress-tests Web sites and predicts how they will hold up under various usage scenarios. OpenLoad can be modified at will by the customer and scaled accordingly.

"Our customers need products that can scale up to more users as their sites become more popular. They need to be able to test their sites with up to tens of thousands of users," says Donald Doane, president and CEO of OpenDemand Systems. "And Linux is all about scalability and keeping your customers' costs down."

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The Logic of Linux
OpenDemand turned to Linux for several reasons. First, the application builder is using Linux as the focal point for building its solutions, but is OS-agnostic when it comes to supporting the rest of the universe. Because applications are built on the Web and Internet infrastructure, they can be used in a wide variety of environments and operating conditions, as long as there is a TCP/IP network connection. For example, OpenLoad runs on Red Hat Linux 7.3, but also supports a wide variety of other platforms, including Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows XP Professional and Sun Solaris 8.

In fact, that mirrors what IBM is seeing in the marketplace. "We are seeing our customers and ISVs take all their application assets, transform them into Web services and automate the flow among the various pieces," says Scott Hebner, IBM's vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM developer relations.

A second reason OpenDemand is using Linux is to be able to leverage J2EE and other open-systems standards to construct its applications and make them scalable and extensible by its customers. "We also have an appliance bundle, which is an IBM eServer solution, which we still sell delivered on Red Hat," according to Doane.

Interestingly, OpenDemand started out selling Solaris and Sun-based solutions, but quickly moved to embrace more environments. "We started with Solaris, but found it wasn't such a good fit for our midmarket customers," Doane says. "They didn't have Unix systems administrators or the expertise to run our product, so we switched to IBM and WebSphere."

Third, OpenDemand's application user interface is entirely Web-based, so users don't need to install client software to use its capabilities. That gives OpenDemand the ultimate in flexibility to sell its wares. When it was established in 2000, OpenDemand primarily was a services vendor. Through the years, it evolved its portfolio into a hosted solution, then sold an appliance and finally this year began selling packaged software. And that is another example of how deeply the Linux culture has grown: The concept of embracing multiple paths and being flexible is a far cry from the old ways of locking in customers to a single platform or particular OS.

"We are trying to make things flexible for our customers to match their current needs. Some of our customers also only need our product for a couple of weeks, and we can rent them a license, as well, for a short period of time," Doane says. "A lot of this evolution was just out of necessity. When we were selling our hosted solution, we found we were losing a lot of opportunities and customers who needed to test their sites inside their firewalls."

Beyond IBM
Matching OpenDemand's move toward open systems is IBM, which has seen its own philosophy evolve. In fact, Big Blue has had a fundamental change in its "corporate DNA to embrace open systems," says Buell Duncan, IBM's general manager of IBM Developer Relations.

Microsoft, of course, is making efforts to fight open systems, contending that "small businesses are more geared toward running Windows applications," according to Allison Watson, vice president of worldwide partner marketing and sales at Microsoft. Watson says that "people are partnering across a wide range of technologies to provide their solutions," but refutes the notion that Linux is cheaper and easier to deploy applications. She adds that Microsoft's advantage over Linux is the tight integration of its software and the total cost of ownership over time.

"Competing against Linux is all about having the whole technology stack," says Watson, who noted the company's forthcoming Office System bundle of products that includes Small Business Server 2003, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003. "We can't compete against 'free,' but we will compete on value," she says. "That's where our platform has a lot to offer."

Naturally, IBM isn't the only open-systems game in town. Even IBM partners like OpenDemand rely heavily on non-IBM tools, such as Ant, JBoss and CVS. "We use tools like Ant, an open-source make utility for Java apps. And CVS is an open-source code repository--a big help in keeping track of our builds. They fit in seamlessly with WebSphere Studio," Doane says. "Because most of our product is written in Java, it didn't make a whole lot of sense to use any Microsoft tools, [though] we do use their tools for writing some C code."

Therein lies the beauty of open systems--you can pick and change partners when they don't deliver the goods, which makes it harder for tools vendors to keep a captive customer base. But as discussed in our July 7 cover story about choosing between Java or .Net ("How To Pick a Platform," page 26), today the choice is clear: Go the Microsoft route--and go whole hog with all of its various nooks and crannies, including Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, .Net Framework and Windows services and servers--or go open systems.

Selling Hardware, Too
Linux's open appeal goes beyond just software developers. The OS also helps hardware integrators move into new markets, as well. And while there are plenty of systems builders who are delivering a better white box, a new breed of integrator is moving into some very sophisticated applications that leverage the power, flexibility and cost savings of Linux. A good example of this is RackSaver, which manufacturers high-end multiprocessing blade-server clusters called BladeRack. The clusters are used by customers who need lots of processing cycles, such as the entertainment industry. Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), DreamWorks and others use these racks of CPUs to produce the latest in digital special effects, as seen in some of this summer's blockbuster movies, including Pirates of the Caribbean and Finding Nemo.

What makes RackSaver intriguing is that it sells the same gear supporting both Windows and Linux servers, and it's going up against the likes of IBM and HP, yet it is doing so by assembling commodity components that are cheaper, easier to assemble and more flexible than its competitors. Again, that takes another page from the Linux and open-systems playbook.

RackSaver designed its own blade servers using a combination of innovative, customized and off-the-shelf components, all with the goal of packing more punch and processing power into a smaller space, and being able to flexibly swap out components and upgrade blades when customers' demands for additional horsepower increase.

"For example, RackSaver customers have their choice of motherboards and can choose from Intel, Super Micro, Tyan or MSI, allowing us to support new features and to come to market months ahead of the competition," says Gene Kim, vice president of sales and marketing for the San Diego-based company. "RackSaver was the first to introduce both Xeon- and Opteron-based blade systems."

BladeRack can also support both Intel and AMD processors in the same rack, something competitors can't do.

"Some of our customers need thousands of processors to run their applications," says Paul Mecucci, RackSaver's sales and marketing manager. "To do this well, we have to understand power and cooling requirements."

RackSaver accomplished that by turning the rack on its side. "The BladeRack uses a patent-pending vertical cooling called VCS," Kim says. "The entire BladeRack is engineered to be the cooling mechanism, and the bottom-to-top vertical cooling enhances air flow and dramatically increases cooling efficiency. Since the BladeRack holds the fans and active-cooling system, the blade nodes themselves have no fans. They are cooled only with heat sinks, which dramatically increases the reliability of the system," he explains.

Multimedia Opportunities
RackSaver and OpenDemand demonstrate how Linux has become a competitive weapon for VARs and ISVs. And it is easy to see why: They can move faster, change their products move quickly and do it all more cheaply than using other methods or proprietary operating systems, including proprietary versions of Unix that have long dominated their markets.

For instance, look at how Linux has taken over the digital-effects business. Long ago, specialized servers from Sun and SGI, running their own versions of Unix, ruled the special-effects roost. They had the raw processing power, video throughput, marketing savvy and customer base.

During the past several years, however, customers have increasingly turned toward Linux--for several reasons. First, the drivers for various peripherals are now available and quite good for video and movie-production-quality work. In fact, the absence of solid video graphics drivers is what had held back digital-effects guys like Pixar. As it happened, Daryll Strauss, one of the primary video-driver developers, worked on the movie Titanic for effects house Digital Domain before moving on to work for VA Linux. Given his hands-on experience, Strauss created a common code base and was able to produce 10 different drivers for various high-performance video cards. That made it easier for Linux-based rendering "farms," as they are called, which handle the composition, rendering and creation of the effects and scenes in today's hit movies.

In addition, the price per CPU cycle for Linux has dropped, making extra CPU cycles available for creating more complex effects for the same cost as the high-end Sun and SGI boxes. Also driving costs per gigahertz of CPU cycles down is the fierce competition among IBM, HP and newcomers as Linux becomes more mainstream.

Finally, given that the movie industry was already familiar with other flavors of Unix, making the switch to Linux was less daunting. As a result, the various applications used by the digital movie-makers, with such appealing product names as Renderman, Maya, Shake and Houdini, are now all available in Linux versions.

And while no longer the topic of choice for those in the digital-effects business, both Sun and SGI have heard the clarion call and are now getting with the Linux program, though they're coming at it from different angles--SGI from the high end with the Altix 3000 family, which has up to 64 Itanium 2 processors running specialized 64-bit versions of Linux, and Sun from the low end with its SunFire V60x line.

"It is our belief that the multimedia world is ripe with opportunities for Linux growth," says Bill Cate, director of Sun's U.S. iForce Program. "These customers are embracing Linux; they know about it a lot more. I feel we have been pretty vocal with our Linux products. It is about choice. The beauty of our story is that as their needs grow, they can seamlessly move up to Solaris."

That same competitive spirit is alive and well in the software world, too, where cost and flexibility are of top concern for customers such as the Bank of Ireland's Foreign Exchange Currency Group, which runs a Web site that handles currency transactions. Its revenue is based on the number of transactions it completes, making the site design critical to the financial health of the company.

"We needed customized reports, and we are able to do so more easily with OpenLoad than with competitors' products," says Brian LeGros, Web applications manager of the Foreign Exchange Currency Group. "As a result, we were able to optimize our Web-site design and add caching, which improved our overall performance. Plus, the software was less expensive than Mercury Interactive's suite."

That's the three-pronged appeal of Linux: open, flexible and competitive. VARs and ISVs can learn a lot from the basic tenets, and companies like OpenDemand and RackSaver are well on their way toward profitability as a result.

Why Linux Rocks For ISVs