5 Factors Making Ubuntu Server Business Ready
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is getting serious about the server. The company is working hard to partner with 3rd party server application providers, and to develop the required core OS services for Ubuntu to make it a highly successful business server platform. There are many factors that make Ubuntu a strong server platform, but the top 5 are:
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is getting serious about the server. The company is working hard to partner with 3rd party server application providers, and to develop the required core OS services for Ubuntu to make it a highly successful business server platform. There are many factors that make Ubuntu a strong server platform, but the top 5 are:
- High Availability and Fault Tolerance Sys-Admins won’t sleep well at night without having deployed a reliable,well tested array of high availability and fault tolerance technologies and methodologies. Nightly and daily backups, OS Clustering, OS-level disk replication, data integrity solutions, RAID# solutions are vital for a server running critical business applications.
- Central Administration Tools – Server farms these days are huge. Thousands, even tens of thousands of servers, spread across the globe, needs to be managed by system administrators, preferably from a single administrative console. Stopping and starting instances,Deploying patches, early warnings about low disk space or stray processes are some of the services required from administrative tools.
- Experts Community – many of the older Unix flavors have a core group of followers who have fought the enterprise IT battle with their favorite server platform. These group knows every bit and byte of the OS, tweaking it, taking it to the limit. Ubuntu, with its ever-evolving community of IT professionals, together with excellent documentation, is starting to build a group of experts around Ubuntu’s server platform.
- Green Is Cool – one of the hottest trends (along with Cloud Computing and Virtualization) in information technologies is environmentally-friendly computing. That means servers that use up less energy by doing things more efficiently.Running a server without a GUI, for example, in large server farms, can be a huge energy saver.
- Applications, Applications, Applications – the most important factor of all, applications are what makes an OS shine. Be it business applications for SME’s, applications running in the cloud or middleware for the enterprise, Ubuntu server is quickly becoming application friendly – simple installation and one-click upgrades, detailed documentation, reliable, expert support and strong performance benchmark results.
This is the first in an ongoing series I’ll be writing for Works With U.
The Open Source ERP Guru blogs regularly about Ubuntu applications for Works With U, but you can also check out his personal blog here: http://opensourceerpguru.com/
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Good list, I agree. They’ve plugged some things themselves where needed also (ie, #2 – Landscape? http://www.canonical.com/projects/landscape)
[…] 5 Factors Making Ubuntu Server Business Ready […]
Vadim: I’ve heard mixed things about Landscape, and also a few concerns that it’s limited to managing Ubuntu systems. Wondering if Landscape is gaining traction. Any thoughts out there, folks?
[…] Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is getting serious about the server. The company is working hard to partner with 3rd party server application providers, and to develop the required core OS services for Ubuntu to make it a highly successful business server platform. There are many factors that make Ubuntu a strong server platform, but the top 5 are: Read more at Works With U […]
What about certification for enterprise applications like Oracle? I don’t want to have to run different distributions to get the appropriate support.
Texanbrit: You’ve spotted one of Ubuntu’s key weaknesses. We pointed out a few days ago that lack of SAP and Oracle support is a potential issue for some customers.
We suspect most Ubuntu users want LAMP and open source applications. But for those who want Oracle and SAP, among others, that’s certainly a limitation at the current time and it’s clear that neither Oracle nor SAP have any near-term plans for Ubuntu.
It’s a matter of fulfilling customer demand. Most traditional “enterprises” may not be aware of Ubuntu Server Edition yet. But we are seeing Ubuntu pop up on more and more business servers. Check out our Works With U 1000 list for a look at a few companies running Ubuntu servers.
I’m not suggesting Ubuntu is perfect, but it’s momentum is growing.
texanbrit hit the nail on the head. Users ask for money for a project to do something, not for infrastructure. For example, I went to a monthly meeting of the technology agency that provides IT services to my city. The city where I live is one of the 10 largest in the USA and has over 1.2M people. In the past six meetings, not one Ubuntu or open source advocate has attended the meetings to express sentiment.
When you go to the meeting, there is a recommendation to the board to spend money. The recommendation is always for the end product, not the underlying platform. No one cares about the underlying platform, only the users’ need. In this case Weblogic is being adopted for a new city wide project. Weblogic does not support Ubuntu. It would be fiscal and managerial insanity to buy Weblogic, and pay for Weblogic implementation professionals at $350 per hour to save $2,500 on licensing of Red Hat over Ubuntu. The board and the technology professionals use Red Hat, because it is used for other projects, Red Hat is Linux, Red Hat is supported, and because it is the right business decision.
The platform has to start with end users running the applications on the platform. Until Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft, Websphere, Weblogic and Veritas are supported, your talking like the guy with the aluminum hat standing on the street corner. This is business, not advocacy.
If you disagree with me, go to your city council or IT open meeting and stand up and tell them how you feel. I’ll look for you at my meetings.