Business 2.0: Buying Industrial-Strength Tech on the Cheap

[ Thanks to Anonymous for this link.
]

“Five years ago, if you had proposed running some of your
company’s most critical applications on an operating system
originally developed by a longhaired Finnish teenager and given
away for free, your IT manager would have laughed you out of his
office. That has changed, though, as Linux has become more
versatile and powerful (though it’s still cheap). In fact, a new
version of Linux is suitable for just about anything your company
wants to throw at it.

“For the past few years, Linux has been used mostly in Web
servers, where it became popular because it’s inexpensive, stable,
and easily customized. Most companies have multiple Web servers —
sometimes dozens, sometimes even hundreds — linked up in server
farms, and that has made the low cost of Linux even more
attractive. If one of those servers goes down, you still have
dozens of replacements standing by. That kind of redundancy is a
lot harder to achieve with expensive Sun Solaris servers or IBM
RS/6000 minicomputers…”

Complete
Story