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Novell is talking up the results of a market survey conducted on its behalf by IDC showing "a surge in the acquisition of Linux driven by the worldwide recession." More than half of the enterprises surveyed said they would accelerate Linux adoption this year.
In addition, more than 72 percent of respondents say they are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68 percent making the same claim for the desktop. The study surveyed more than 300 senior IT executives spanning manufacturing, financial services, and retail industries across the globe, as well as government agencies.
The survey revealed key drivers of the burgeoning interest in Linux. The number one motivation executives gave for migrating to Linux was economic and related to lowering ongoing support costs. As a consequence, more than 40 percent of survey participants said they plan to deploy additional workloads on Linux over the next 12-24 months and 49 percent indicated Linux will be their primary server platform within five years. (IT Organizations Turn to Linux in Economic Downturn; download IDC paper).
For years now, Novell has been migrating away from NetWare, its network operating system of years gone past, to SUSE Linux, having bought the company behind the SUSE distribution in 2003. Novell's Open Enterprise Server software provides a common set of network servers that can be run on top of either NetWare or Linux, and the company has clearly signaled that Linux will be the favored platform for the future.
One Novell customer I spoke with that's following this path is the Louisiana Department of Social Services, a longtime NetWare shop that is currently in the process of moving to Linux and at the same time consolidating servers that used to run in each of 135 branch offices into a smaller number of servers clustered at 5 regional data centers. Chad Israel is a technical account manager with the department, meaning that he supervises the server and application teams within I.T. "Obviously, in today's economy, everything is being cut, and we're always being asked to do more with less," Israel said.
As an off-the-cuff calculation, Israel told me the consolidation project will probably save about $100,000 in server hardware costs alone, compared with what it would have cost to upgrade the servers at each branch location. However, it's being enabled by a network upgrade that makes it practical for PCs to get basic file, print, directory, and email services over the wide-area network rather than from a server on their local network. Balanced against the cost of the network upgrade, the server consolidation will not deliver a net savings in the first year, Israel said, but more centralized administration should save the department money over the next few years. Besides, the equipment was getting old and needed to be replaced anyway. "And we knew it was going to be cost prohibitive to upgrade every single site," Israel said.
Jason Williams, a senior product manager from Novell, said the agency should also see some benefits from centralization of storage, which will drive higher, more efficient utilization versus having file servers at each location.
The project is about 30% done, Israel said. "So far, we've consolidated roughly 20 offices into one clustered server environment." More offices are being pulled into the consolidated network as they get access to higher speed WAN links. In addition to moving to Linux, Israel's department is making more use of Novell's ZENworks, a centralized administration tool for deploying applications and software patches to servers and desktops across the network. As the offices get new WAN links, they're also being upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP on the desktop as part of "a total site refresh," Israel said. But while those offices will also be losing their local server, users won't even notice the difference, he said - the basic network services being consolidated will keep working about the same.
This is not a Windows versus Linux story. The Department of Social Services does have Windows servers in its environment running specific business applications, but those were already centralized at a headquarters data center. But for the more basic network services, the Louisiana agency is finding Linux to be a good fit as it moves toward centralized services and away from NetWare.
On the other hand, those IDC survey results show that some enterprises, perhaps those that have accumulated more experience with Linux, are considering broader, more aggressive implementation. Respondents from the retail industry seemed particularly eager, with 63 percent planning an increase in Linux use on the desktop and 69 percent planning to expand their Linux server deployments.
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