Feature

Linux server sales move northwards

While Linux server sales continue to be strong in technical applications—HPC, oil & gas and EDA—the OS’s footprint has expanded into commercial applications. By Akhtar Pasha

Linux servers are moving deeper into the enterprise. No longer an edge-of-network play, Linux boxes now have a strong presence in high performance clusters, blade servers and a growing presence in Web application hosting as well as messaging. The OS is moving into the backend according to an analyst.

Linux server shipments totalled 6,200 units in Q3 2006 up from 4,000 in Q3 2005. The analyst who gave these numbers wasn’t in a position to validate this data citing ‘Linux server numbers are sensitive currently’.

Linux server sales are happening on both x86 and non x86 server platforms. “Linux servers are showing more traction on x86 servers especially in clustered applications such as HPC and EDA. That said, Linux server sales are not happening at Windows’ cost. Linux server maturity is still low because of the lack of trained manpower for Linux administration and support,” says a market analyst who refused to be named. The analyst credits Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the high level of penetration of Linux servers in India. Novell’s SuSE accounts for a small percentage of the Linux server base in India. IBM, HP and Sun are the leaders in the Linux server space—in that order.

From pilot to deployment

"Server consolidation, poor server utilisation, non-disruptive data migration and the need to reduce capital costs are driving the adoption of virtualisation" - KP Unnikrishnan Director, Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd

Hemanth K Kalikiri, deputy general manager, eServer pSeries-Enterprise Solutions, IBM Global Services India says, “Linux servers are pushing into the Windows Server space. Companies that were running their clusters on a Windows platform are now using Linux.” He adds that application servers are also running on Linux.” While many businesses had tested their applications on Linux in 2005 it was in 2006 that many deployed it. “Linux servers have entered production,” adds Kalikiri.

"The testing and trial phase is over and we are seeing actual commercial deployment. Application availability and portability have instilled confidence" - Jyothi Satyanathan Country Manager-eServer-pSeries, IBM Global Services India

KP Unnikrishnan, director, Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd., says, “While Linux servers are very active in HPC, R&D centres and academia, the volumes continue to come from its use for tertiary load application/edge of network applications such as e-mail, security or firewall servers, file and print, FTP and the like where it continues to dominate.”

For HPC clusters, however, there are some other requirements. First, interconnects need to move large amounts of data quickly. Second, they must have low latency (the time needed to setup communications). And finally, they need to offload the communication from the processor. These capabilities allow the fast processors used in clustered nodes to keep busy.

Jyothi Satyanathan, country manager-eServer-pSeries, IBM Global Services India, says, “The testing and trial phase is over and we are seeing actual commercial deployment—besides HPC Linux servers are being deployed in telecom, manufacturing, finance and oil & gas. Application availability and portability have instilled confidence in Linux.”

Faisal M Paul, country manager-HPC & Linux, Customer Solutions Group, HP India Sales Pvt Ltd., agrees, “Linux server deployment has moved to the production phase and is gaining momentum.” He expects this market to continue growing in 2007 as well.

The penetration of Linux servers is driven by a combination of servers vendors are working closely with the Open Source community and vendors such as Red Hat and Novell (SuSE) ensuring that their respective Linux distributions run on OEM server platforms.

Both Gartner and IDC expects x86 machines push further into supporting business applications in the enterprise, a market traditionally dominated by RISC-Unix servers. Going forward, Linux will see increased adoption in the enterprise thanks to advanced features such as scheduling, thread handling, multi-pathing I/O, clustering and hot plug capabilities. These could potentially pave the way for 16-way Linux machines from the current two or four-way machines provided there’s sufficient demand for these in 2007.

Blades, ERP and SLAs

"A blade server can be virtualised and partitioned to run Linux for some key applications in one partition while the other partition can run Unix" - Faisal M Paul Country Manager-HPC & Linux, Customer Solutions Group, HP India Sales Pvt Ltd

The large Linux deals in 2006 were for blade servers. Satyanathan explains that in clustered environments, space is a constraint and therefore blades are the first choice across verticals—HPC, oil & gas, telecom and manufacturing. For instance, ONGC uses blade servers running Linux to analyse huge chunks of oil and gas exploration data. If they can add more powerful CPUs that save power, air-conditioning and rack space, their discovery can be that much faster resulting in savings. Linux is a very lean server OS.”

Pre-package (ERP) implementation has helped the cause of Linux servers. Of 50 customers that IBM has for Linux servers, 18 use it to run a core application such as ERP. Kalikiri says, “New ERP deployments by SMB are high as it helps protect their hardware investment.”

Nanaiah M.C, general manager-Systems & Processes, Kemwell Pvt Ltd., says, “Prior to implementing mySAP on AIX we had evaluated it on Open Systems such as Linux. The only issue that stopped us from going ahead was the lack of trained professional administrators on Linux.” He however says, “The issue of scalability and reliability on Open Source is no issue today because most server vendors including IBM, HP and Sun all offer SLA-based support that gives a mid-sized business like ours the comfort of buying Linux servers as scaling, reliability and availability are neatly tied down with SLAs.” SLA-based support on Linux servers influences decision making but it should be marketed well so that businesses are aware of such offerings.

D Sundhara Rajan, general manager-Finance, IT & HR, Natural Textiles Pvt Ltd., says, “SLA-based support on Linux servers gives confidence to businesses wanting to deploy it on production systems. It’s a good strategy.”

Satyanathan concurs, “SLA-based Linux server support will give a boost to Linux server shipments.”

Paul says that of the overall Linux server shipments in 2006, 20 percent were of blade servers. Linux blade shipments are expected to grow robustly as these dual core servers are well suited for number crunching applications.

Sing a song of support

IBM offers full support to businesses implementing their core applications on Linux boxes. The bug bear remains that although applications are available on Linux, database and OS migration is painful and complex. Kalikiri says, “IBM is offering full support to help customers overcome their pain areas—database and OS migration and consistency check. We have a migration factory (Proof of Concept centre) for companies wanting to evaluate Linux for running their core applications. They can do real-time database and OS migration which can help bring down the downtime during the migration before they buy the Linux servers and go ahead with the actual deployment. Our competency centres can help businesses port applications. These developments will cushion businesses opting for Linux as a server platform.”

Revathi Kasturi, managing director-West Asia, Novell says, “Red Hat had the early mover advantage in the Linux server space, but we are getting there.” The lack of trained professionals on Linux has plagued the Linux server space resulting in slow penetration but this is starting to change. Kasturi says, “This year we are making significant inroads in India starting with the announcement of special certificate training programs for Linux administrators every month from January 2007 onwards. We are conducting a nine day special training in four cities—Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. We are also offering Novell Certified Linux Professional (NCLP) Certification Exams for Linux administrators wanting to hone their skills in advanced Linux server administration. These offering will instil confidence in businesses wanting to buy Linux servers for running their core applications.”

Virtualisation and multiple cores

With virtualisation allowing a server to simultaneously run multiple OSs, applications, and processes on a single machine data centre consolidation is on the rise. Rather than running separate machines dedicated to Linux and Windows, companies can run both OSs on the same server in a virtualised environment. Despite the need for fewer servers (and thus a smaller footprint for equipment), data centre operators say that virtualisation actually stimulates demand for quality facility space by forcing companies to abandon older back-office data centres in favour of a state-of-the-art hosted environment.

Unnikrishnan says, “Virtualisation and multi-core will be the mega trends in 2007—be it in open source or even x86 and non-x86 environments. In fact it will be year of virtualisation.”

This year is expected to be when server virtualisation breaks out of the labs and QA (quality assurance) centres and into production environments. Unnikrishnan adds, “The value of virtualisation within the open systems world is becoming clearer as many end-users have turned to the technology–particularly for servers—as a remedy for problems with expanding distributed systems. Server consolidation, escalating capacity growth, poor server utilisation (15 to 20 percent in the case of x86 servers), non-disruptive data migration and the need to reduce capital costs are some of the drivers behind the adoption of virtualisation.”

Clustering and virtualisation technology on open source platforms working together can come in handy in scenarios where a company runs multiple applications with very different requirements. With cluster adoption and server consolidation becoming increasingly popular, environments are becoming dynamic. It’s no longer the norm that one runs a single application on a dedicated cluster. Today, many users run multiple applications on their clusters. In some instances, one application may require a SLES 9 [SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9] operating system and the others RHEL 4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4). Virtualisation is the only way out in such cases. Paul says, “A blade server can be virtualised and partitioned to run Linux for some key applications in one partition while the other partition can run HP-UX, AIX or Solaris 10 for applications that require rapid scaling and reliability while running core business applications—core banking or the like.”

The current market leader in virtualisation is VMware followed by Xen the open source hypervisor. The latter is making its presence felt, with Virtual Iron and XenSource releasing full virtualisation products using Xen as the core technology, and the base Xen offering better OS support, including the ability to run Windows-based VMs (virtual machines). In fact VeriSign and ICICI bank are already using VMware on Linux for server virtualisation.

On the hardware side, AMD and Intel are committed to moving as much hypervisor code into the CPU microcode as possible, providing a hardware assist to speed execution at the VM level and allows physical hosts to handle a greater number of VMs. Every new generation of chips will have more virtualisation hooks, pushing the focus of virtualisation software vendors into the management and security realm, while simultaneously improving VM performance creating a win-win situation for IT.

A Gartner analyst says that as companies embrace virtualisation technologies, they are buying fewer servers. This is visible if one looks at recent quarterly data from 2006. The quarter-over-quarter total revenue from server sales is slipping worldwide. According to Gartner server sales are still growing, but because of virtualisation, customers don’t have to buy as many servers. This could well affect Linux server shipments as well.