|
UNIX
An OS for the people
Implementation of no-frills, low-end Unix servers is fueled by growth of
the Internet and intranets
By Peggy King and Dick Shippee
S managers face the ongoing challenge of staying within budget while
providing dependable services to their organization and its users. In
doing so, they sometimes have to scramble for solutions. Now some
managers are turning to a seemingly unlikely source for help: low-end
Unix systems only slightly removed from their origins as free software.
Although it is difficult to track the popularity of OSes that are
distributed freely or cheaply, there is anecdotal evidence that the
no-frills versions of Unix known as Linux and Berkeley System Design
(BSD), once used mainly in academia and research labs, have found their
way into corporate computing.
"During the 1980s there were many source versions of Unix, but the
source-code market dried up when the [University of California] Berkeley
[System Design] project ended," says Philip Johnson, a market-research
analyst at PAJ Consulting in Fremont, Calif. "Sun [Microsystems Inc.]
Solaris, [IBM] AIX, [Hewlett-Packard Co.] HP-UX, and other Unix variants
are sold only in binary versions, but now there is a new interest in the
source market."
Commercially packaged versions of BSD are available from vendors such as
Berkeley System Design Inc. and Walnut Creek CDROM, and Linux is
available from Caldera Inc., Red Hat Software Inc., and others.
WorkGroup Solutions Inc. sells its own LinuxPro and distributes versions
of Linux and BSD from other vendors.
"Linux and BSD are in effect the same OS with different kernels. The
main difference is how the source code is made available," says Mark
Bolzern, president of Work Group Solutions in Aurora, Colo.
Finnish software developer Linus Tovalds wrote the Linux kernel when he
was a graduate student in 1991, and the BSD kernel was developed by
computer scientists in the BSD project at the University of California
in the seventies and early eighties. Linux source code is freely
available, along with the OS itself. Access to BSD source code is
licensed for a nominal fee.
OS of all trades
Jean Bozman, a software analyst at International Data Corp. in Mountain
View, Calif., attributes the new acceptance of these low-end OSes in
business settings to improvements in distribution and support by
software authors. "This year we began to see commercial support for
Linux," she says. "What businesses are paying for is the packaging, the
documentation, and the CD-ROM distribution."
When proponents of Linux or BSD tout their systems, they usually point
to its performance as an OS for World Wide Web hosting. Yet a growing
number of business users have found that free or inexpensive OSes can be
robust and secure alternatives not only to other Unix OSes but also to
Microsoft Windows NT or Novell Inc. NetWare.
Linux has been the OS that Dave Parker, senior software engineer at
Frontier Communications, a telecommunications company in Rochester,
N.Y., uses when other solutions would be too expensive or take too long
to implement. Parker, who works at Frontier's information technology
site in Green Bay, Wis., has two Intel Corp. Pentium servers running
Caldera Network Desktop to handle various tasks such as resolving
incompatible data formats and sharing information in heterogeneous
environments.
Cost savings was the key factor for Parker in arriving at his decision.
He chose 75MHz Pentium servers and installed Linux on them to serve as a
tape-management system that handles data that Frontier receives in
various incompatible formats from local telephone carriers. "We would
have spent many times as much for a proprietary solution capable of
handling all the formats we get," says Parker.
On the larger of the two servers, Parker set up an intranet workgroup
for about a dozen software developers. He also created a phone list
page, which can be edited through Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts
and which gets several hundred hits a day. When a workgroup in Detroit
needed World Wide Web space in a hurry, he created a quick solution by
mounting a portion of a Novell file server as Web content running over
Linux.
Parker has also used this server as a training server for developers
learning Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language). "No matter
what I've done in Linux, nothing breaks. I've found Linux to be
versatile and stable," he says.
Frontier is also in the process of implementing an Internet-based mail
backbone. "The Applixware that I got from Red Hat Software running on
Linux [already] reads and writes [Microsoft] Word and Excel files and
lets me save them as HTML [HyperText Markup Language]," Parker says. "As
soon as we have standard mail protocols, I'll be able to use Linux for
all of my work."
At UUNET Technologies Inc., an ISP (Internet service provider) in
Fairfax, Va., BSDI is the core of its Unix-based Web-serving
environment, supporting more than 1,000 customers. According to Kurt
Lidl, manager of infrastructure development, UUNET has modified the BSDI
kernel to install a software rate limiter that regulates the level of
bandwidth it allots to customers' Web sites.
"We have some FDDI connections," says Lidl. "Without a kernel
modification that limits the amount of bandwidth, we would be allowing
customers who paid for a T-1 level of service access to FDDI levels of
bandwidth."
While that may sound great for customers, the company couldn't afford to
provide ultra-speed connections at mid-speed prices.
UUNET also has 190 BSDI-based ftp (File Transfer Protocol) sites and 19
news-feeding sites running BSDI. A kernel modification has boosted
BSDI's performance as a newsfeed server; the system supports a flag that
turns off an automatic update feature that otherwise would kick in
whenever data is written to disk. "This kernel modification saves disk
I/O and increases the performance of our news feeds," says Lidl.
Most of the Linux vendors give away versions of their OSes at no cost
through Internet download or charge nominal sums for boxed CD-ROM sets.
WorkGroup Solutions distributes several different versions of Linux. In
each case, the business model is to promote the use of these OSes and
then sell a myriad of applications that run on them, including various
types of server packages, office suites, and applications development
tools. Red Hat, for example, offers more than 450 software packages.
Robert Young, president of Red Hat in Research Triangle Park, N.C.,
admits he doesn't always have a clear idea of who is using his company's
version of Linux in what capacity. "We know, for example, that our
distributor in Austria sold Red Hat Linux to the Bank of Ukraine," says
Young. "We've since found out that they are using it to run a 1,000-node
network. I would seriously doubt if that bank's IT director knew his
organization was using Red Hat Linux. I do know that he has little or no
money to spend on operating systems and that support, if he needs it, is
on the Web."
Two of the most common complaints about OSes with a freeware or
shareware heritage is that they are not supported and do not scale.
Commercially packaged and distributed versions of Linux and BSD have
faced these objections. Some of the vendors who sell to corporations
have either begun to or plan to offer support contracts or ways to pay
for support on a per-incident basis.
Caldera is developing a coordinated Web-based support network for Linux
users. Red Hat agrees with the concept of connecting users with
third-party sources of support. "We can't offer more than 30-day
telephone installation support. After all, we give our Linux away for
free," says Young. "But support is readily available from a huge and
growing network of users on the Net and in other places."
BSDI does offer support to its growing commercial customer base,
according to Mark Trimue, vice president of marketing at BSDI in
Colorado Springs, Colo. "We have 7,000 customers who have more than
75,000 servers running BSDI," he says. "Our source code is controlled
and tested for backward compatibility to support earlier versions."
Scaling the system
Users have made versions of Linux and BSD scale both upward and
downward.
For instance, BSDI's kernel source code, which can be licensed
modularly, is being adopted as an OS for networking hardware. Ascend
Communications Inc. has licensed source code for the kernel and the
utilities (file systems and networking protocols) modules. After
modifications, BSDI has become the OS for Ascend's GigaRouter line of
routers. The kernel modifications let Ascend use its own protocols and
extensions to make distributed interfaces in the switch-based boxes
appear like normal local interfaces to the controlling BSD system.
On the low end, Linux has been ported to the Intel 8086 architecture,
and some IS shops are using it to create intranet clients from
Intel-based and other computers that were taken out of service. For
example, Linux on the SPARC RISC processor architecture has given a new
lease on life to Sun SPARCstations that predate Sun's current version of
Unix--Solaris--and are no longer supported on the predecessor SunOS.
Linux and BSD have also been scaled to handle compute-intensive research
and scientific tasks and to provide more cache and higher throughput in
commercial applications. According to Jon Hall, founder of Linux
International, a nonprofit organization in Amherst, N.H., and dedicated
to promoting Linux, the CERN (European Lab for Particle Physics)
research labs in Switzerland are replacing an IBM SP2 supercomputer with
a massive parallel-processing system made from 16 Intel PCs running
Linux and high-speed networking protocols. Hall says this is similar to
a system already in use at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, N.M.
While the enthusiasms and experiments of free software partisans may not
impress corporate network managers, some of their results are attracting
attention.
|
