By Erin
Joyce
atNewYork.com
The chief technology officer of the largest distributor of the
Linux open source operating system urged developers to curb their
enthusiasm about Linux’s surge in popularity in enterprise
systems.
“Instead of getting serious about Linux, get serious about
architecture,” said Michael Tiemann, the CTO of Red Hat during a
keynote address at the LinuxWorld Expo conference here.
“It’s not about the component technology and not about the
processor or the operating system. It’s about the architecture that
delivers the benefits and the technology that enables the
architecture,” he said, wearing the company’s logo, a red fedora
hat.
Tiemann’s remarks were in response to research data from IDC
that said the installed base of Linux servers will grow by 24.7
percent annually between 2001 and 2006, outpacing its proprietary
rivals such as various Unix operating systems and Windows NT, for
example.
In his own way, Tiemann was urging the open source faithful
gathered here that more work awaits the movement to develop an
architecture in which one application can reside anywhere on a
system’s network.
To help illustrate some of the programming difficulties porting
major applications from proprietary operating systems to a Linux
based operating system, Tiemann was joined in the keynote by
Jeffrey Birnbaum, managing director and global head of enterprise
computing with investment bank Morgan Stanley. Red Hat was involved
in an 18-month project that entailed moving Morgan Stanley’s
enterprise from a proprietary Unix operating system to an open
source Linux-based platform.
The job entailed 6,000 servers, 35,000 desktops, thousands of
applications, all supported by about 22,000 employees, Birnbaum
said, and involving four major hubs around the globe.
“In some sense, we are in an arms race in terms of technology,
and that means we need to deploy more. We also needed our systems
to be highly available, and able to run any application on any box
at any time,” Birnbaum said.
Some of the software vendors involved were smarting from prior
negative eperiences on the Linux platform, added Tiemann. In
addition, the project needed the involvement of Morgan’s software
vendors such as Oracle, Veritas and others, “just so we could run
one application” on a Linux system, Tiemann said.
The developers had to step up the quality of their debugging
platform as they ported applications over to Linux, Birnbaum said,
because of strict debugging procedures in place with Morgan’s
trading applications.
“We needed to understand: What is this application doing to this
kernel (and) with these sets of data, and be able to tell with a
high degree of precision, what are performance issues, memory
issues.”
The project meant building in new diagnostic tools to the
architecture similar to the traditional tools found in Unix
platforms, Tiemann added.
These were some examples of why he urged the open source
community think not so much about Linux in and of itself, but of
architecture issues.
“There’s a large ecosystem we need to continue to build,”
Tiemann said. “We’ve brought new ISVs (independent software
vendors) to the table. They are finding the platform to be not only
reliable and scalable but also profitable.”