“You’ve probably been following the buzz surrounding Linux, the
free (or nearly free) network operating system that has expanded
into the business world. According to its advocates, Linux can
bring both savings and increased reliability to your server room
and take over a range of tasks from more costly OSs, such as
Microsoft Windows NT, Novell’s NetWare, and the popular Unix
variants, such as AIX, SCO, and Solaris.”
“But does Linux actually deliver enough to make it worth the
potential investment in retraining? To find out, PC Magazine Labs
set up a host of services from scratch using Linux and its
associated utilities. We also examined the latest Intel-based
hardware solutions from leading vendors to determine what kind of
service and support you can expect to find.”
“Our conclusion: Linux is a good solution for a range of
server needs. It should certainly be on the radar screens of most
medium- and large-business IS professionals-should probably be on
their road maps as well. Linux works especially well as a
platform for Internet-standard services, such as DNS, HTTP, FTP,
and e-mail, where its low cost, open-source utilities, and relative
ease of deployment are big draws. It also works well as a
development platform for those who want to deploy a customized
vertical application. You might want to think twice, however, with
applications that demand the best performance or the best
reliability; Linux offers no clustering support and has immature
SMP support and limited file-system support and RAID
functionality.”