Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (637)	11/22/1998 10:53:00 PM
From: JRH	Respond to of 2615

Linux: Back door to the front office zdnet.com Industry pundits say Linux is about to take off in the enterprise. IT administrators will tell you it already has. IT staffers have been quietly deploying Linux -- either discreetly because upper management hasn't approved it or as an emergency fix to a problem. In either case, the open-source operating system is now peppered throughout many major enterprise networks -- and is picking up steam against commercial Unix variants and Windows NT -- because of its performance and flexibility. Announcements slated for Comdex in Las Vegas will only bolster Linux backers' position. Red Hat Software Inc. will announce new around-the-clock enterprise support for its Linux users. The service, due next year, will include various levels of support and pricing models, according to sources close to Red Hat, in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Meanwhile, Linux developer Pacific HiTech Inc. will detail a support service, also due next year, that will combine its own call centers with third-party systems integrators to offer 24-by-7 support on the company's TurboLinux products, said officials at PHT's Oakland, Calif., office. PHT will also preview at the show TurboLinux 3.0. "More support means more deployment," said Tony Pinto, IS manager at Minolta Canada Inc. in Mississauga, Ontario. Pinto's small network of 150 users has one Linux server now, but he plans a broad expansion next year with such core services as electronic commerce and electronic data interchange running on Linux. "Support has been my major concern with Linux," he said. "If the support is there, it's the best OS." Other companies in a range of industries have adopted Linux for a variety of tasks. Some examples: Nortel Information Network guarantees 99.5 percent uptime to the 27,000 clients of its Linux-based Internet services. Next year, NIN will add 60 more Linux servers and migrate its Oracle Corp. database to the operating system, said officials in Research Triangle Park. A major aerospace manufacturer has deployed more than 300 telecommuting Linux clients and, because of a budget freeze, refurbished dozens of 166MHz Pentium PCs as Linux-based Web and e-mail servers. Seattle-based retailer Jay Jacobs Inc. is deploying its mission-critical retail management system on point-of-sale Linux terminals in each of the company's 130 stores, which will connect back to Linux servers at corporate headquarters. Canadian National Railways, in Montreal, saves an estimated $250,000 on software licenses alone by running core services such as routing on Linux. The railway, which will double its Linux installation to 120 servers in the next year, deployed the upstart operating system in a method that appears increasingly common. "I did it behind management's back," said Don Lafontaine, CNR's senior systems programmer. "[Management has] come around. They can't complain because none of our Linux servers have gone down." In spite of the hitherto spotty support, a confluence of factors has elevated Linux and the open source code model in general. Support from vendors including Intel Corp. and Oracle has contributed to management's increasing awareness and acceptance of Linux. In addition, because corporations control the source code, they can more quickly develop in-house bug fixes -- especially security problems -- and more easily adapt given applications to specific needs. "It's like a software erector set, it's very flexible," said a software engineer at a major networking vendor. "I needed to add a feature to a Linux chat application I was using. Having the source code made it easy." Another feature propelling Linux acceptance is performance. One IT manager for a 3,500-employee telecommunications company switched his intranet server from Windows NT to Linux. "It vastly outperforms the previous site," said the IT manager, who requested anonymity. "We expect to save at least $3 million over the next couple of years by just this switch." The bottom line is that acceptance of the open source code model is moving from the IT manager to the corporate level at many companies. "One of the reasons we selected Linux was the open concept," said Bill Lawrence, chief financial officer at Jay Jacobs. "I don't want to be locked in to an environment. We don't believe there's a lot of risk in this. We're not afraid of doing it."

To: E. Charters who wrote (637)	11/22/1998 10:54:00 PM
From: JRH	Respond to of 2615

Red Hat turns Linux toward corporations zdnet.com Tech Analysis: Linux faces long road By Henry Baltazar, PC Week Labs November 16, 1998 9:00 AM ET The newest version of Red Hat Software Inc.'s Red Hat Linux has decidedly corporate leanings, dovetailing nicely with the recent groundswell of support for the formerly underground operating system. One of the biggest barriers to widespread corporate use of Linux is the lack of formal technical support. PC Week Labs' initial evaluation of Red Hat Linux 5.2, released earlier this month, shows that this gap is being closed somewhat. Intel Corp.'s recent investment in Red Hat Software has given the Linux purveyor the resources to offer technical support services for mission-critical enterprise applications. Red Hat 5.2 also features a vastly improved hardware autodetection system that had no problems finding and configuring SCSI adapters and video cards on PC Week Labs' test systems. Red Hat won't win any artistic achievement awards with its blue and red installation menus, but installation in tests was blazingly quick and reasonably easy, even when compared with Windows NT 4.0 and recently released NetWare 5. However, like NetWare and NT, Linux needs to prove its scalability in enterprise environments. The SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) kernel for Linux has been available for some time, but Red Hat Linux 5.2 doesn't support SMP on Intel-based machines. One area in which Linux is far ahead of the pack is clustering. The performance-enhancing capabilities in Red Hat's Extreme Linux are significantly more exciting and powerful than the failover provided in Microsoft Corp.'s and Novell Inc.'s clustering applications. (See review.) However, the technology will be meaningless to IT managers if applications aren't developed to harness its power.