The Power of Linux (page 1 of 3)

When the Association of Moving Image Archivists needed a solution to the film preservation crisis—half of all film before 1950 is lost and the rest is fading fast—it gathered tech-savvy researchers from across the country to solve the problem.

A collaboration with the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation and three universities led to the Moving Images Collection http://mic.imtc.gatech.edu/index.php, a site that brings together thousands of groups that preserve, archive and consume moving images.

This required the most open and standard technologies available. A team of technologists from the University of Washington, Rutgers University and Georgia Institute of Technology chose Linux on POWER as the foundation for the project.

"I've always had good success with AIX* on POWER," says Jim DeRoest, assistant director of computing and communications at the University of Washington and coprincipal investigator for the NSF grant.

"Because of the NSF grant, cost was an issue, so we went with SUSE LINUX and a variety of open source and free tools, such as Postgre SQL and IBM* Directory Server, all running on IBM pSeries* machines." Once the pSeries servers at the University of Washington and Rutgers University were installed, the value of open standards began to shine through.

"We had no experience with Linux before this installation," says Grace Agnew, associate university librarian at Rutgers and the principle investigator for the NSF grant. "But we were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. We had the servers up and running within a week. It was trivial."

Linux on POWER collaborations like this are cropping up all over the world. The combination of cost, performance, ease of migration and open standards make Linux on POWER the choice for a growing number of developers. Brian Connors, vice president of Linux on POWER technologies for IBM, says since Linux on POWER was introduced in the third quarter of 2003, its growth has doubled every quarter.

Connors emphasizes that Linux is a relatively young platform compared with the elder statesman UNIX*. According to IDC, Linux held only 16 percent of the 2003 server market, compared with about 40 percent for UNIX. Connors points out that those numbers are misleading because many enterprises use UNIX on a primary partition with Linux on secondary partitions—a configuration that IDC counts as a UNIX server.

Still, IDC predicts that by 2008, Linux will close the gap (even as they currently count server operating systems, capturing 30 percent of the server market. Connors says IBM has several strategic initiatives to help close that gap, both in hardware and software. "Some of the enhancements in POWER5* make up for the immaturity of Linux versus UNIX," he says.

"And the IBM Linux Tehnology Center has been instrumental in contributing to the 2.6 kernel, which will allow Linux to scale up to 16 full processors. When you add POWER5's subprocessor partitioning capability, it brings Linux closer to UNIX."

Recent Linux on POWER announcements will accelerate the closing of the gap. "With the advent of the recently released IBM BladeCenter JS20 models, we expect Linux on POWER to be a strategic investment for a growing number of customers," Connors says.

"The combination of POWER processorsand the 2.6 Linux kernel will help Linux on POWER close the gap with enterprise-level hardware."

Operating system cost wars

The cost issues in Linux's favor are hard to quantify.