Johannesburg, 25 Nov 2002
Linux is driving the commoditisation of the hardware market, says Richard Voaden, IBM sales manager for Linux.
"This is good for business because organisations can realise cost savings through more than just a lower purchase price. The fact that Linux can be run on a range of off-the-shelf hardware is driving down costs for business."
Voaden says IBM, which now employs 250 programmers to develop open source software, is seeing the benefits of consolidation of hardware on the one hand and clustering on the other. He says that because Linux is suited to run on a range of different hardware, including lower-end hardware, many companies are seeing significant benefits from consolidating their distributed environments onto a single mainframe running Linux.
He says other companies are benefiting through the ability to cluster affordable hardware to allow a range of machines to process high quantities of data. The clustering approach, he says, is giving many organisations a lead over their competitors because of the significant processing power that can be achieved by coupling machines together.
This is not to say, however, that the cost savings of using Linux over other proprietary systems is negligible. "With Linux the costs are stated upfront, unlike with other software that is charged on a usage basis."
Expanding companies are often caught out by the ballooning cost of software as their usage increases, says Voaden. This is not the case with Linux, for which the costs remain relatively stable.
While Linux is not ready to replace high-end Unix, it is filling many of the gaps in the growing server market, he notes. One area of particular interest to IBM is the banking sector. "Linux is a natural successor to the OS2 platform that many banks are still running." He says the company is working actively to prepare the road for banks to switch from OS2 to Linux.
Internally, IBM runs more than 1 200 Linux servers, and is realising the cost savings and reliability gains of the operating system. The company has also established a number of "porting centres" where software developers are encouraged and assisted to move their applications across to Linux. As a result of this and other efforts, there are more than 3 800 Linux applications listed in the IBM global solutions directory.
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