Ubuntu fans debunk Windows win of power test

Our recent power story reporting that Windows Server 2008 eked out a narrow two-watt power savings over Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support has emitted some sparks of protest from Ubuntu fans. The latest is from Fred Marsico, the chief technology officer of Quantum Mechanics R&D in Corvallis, Ore., and a Ubuntu desktop user.

Like another reader who responded to the story but preferred to remain anonymous, Marsico said the test would have been more meaningful if it had compared energy use while the servers were active rather than in idle mode and if the test had been done on multiple hardware platforms instead of just one. We agree in principle with Marsico, but once you open the door to testing on different applications, the task would be endless. (This doesn’t mean Marsico is wrong, of course.)

Michael Larabel, the editor of the Phoronix website that tests Linux hardware, was kind enough to add a test of the respective servers in time for our story. No one claims the test is definitive. But its results were surprising, given Windows’ reputation for bloatware and Linux’s for minimalist agility.

Thanks for writing, readers. Keep the comments coming.

This blog post was written by Pam Derringer, news writer for SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.

Last week, lots of IT guys from New York’s biggest banks and stock brokerages took a day off to attend the sixth annual Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in the heart of Manhattan.

All ears they were, but suddenly attendees turned shy when the lectures ended and they were asked to share their own views on Linux. Surely, the firms’ PR police or legal watchdogs would find them out and ruin their prospects for career advancement. Promised a mask of anonymity, however, a few attendees opined on the show, and here are their thoughts.

Lack of management tools cited. “I’m a strong Linux advocate,” said one enthusiastic IT manager. “It’s free, open and secure. And if we find issues, we’re able to fix them.”

Five or six years ago, his firm was one of the first in financial services to introduce Linux servers to data centers. Now about 30% or 40% of its machines run on Linux, with most of the remainder running Windows. The firm’s direction, he said, is definitely off Unix and Solaris and onto Linux.

And he couldn’t be more pleased that Red Hat Inc., in turn, incorporated his team’s enhancements, such as changing storage allocations without a reboot into future versions of the operating system. This way, all Red Hat customers benefit and his staff doesn’t have to maintain the improvement separately with every future fix or upgrade.

He is also concerned about improving data center energy efficiency and has explored various options, to reduce energy consumption, including CPUs, memory and lower wattage.

He has also researched the stateless, single-image data center that can be booted up all at once. “Management would be much better,” he said. “We’d only have one operating system image to manage.”

What is Linux’ most telling shortcoming? “Enterprise-class management tools,” he answered, not unpredictably. “But the good news is: Linux is getting there.”

Rising support costs lamented. Another anonymous big-gun attendee said that for about six years his firm has used Linux — mainly Red Hat — on everything from mainframes to blades and servers.

“Linux is getting a faster, better infrastructure,” he said. “But if these vendors want to remain a viable solution, they need to remain competitive with other data center providers. They’re getting like everyone else, adding more middleware and getting more expensive. It’s getting so that the support and maintenance are costing more than the servers themselves. We need to drive competitiveness back.”

More third-party software urged. A third attendee said the main problem with Linux is the lack of third-party software and inadequate vendor support. For five or six years, he has used Linux to run Web applications and noted that the third-party software shortage is less severe for Web apps than for migrations off AIX or Solaris, for example, simply because of higher volume.

The good news is, he said, that vendor support is on the upswing, citing the presence of Oracle and IBM at the trade show.

“The demand for Linux is there but the growth of third-party software products is slower,” he said. “But we will start to see this [third-party software] materialize more and more.”

This blog was contributed by SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Sander van Vugt.

At Novell Inc.’s annual BrainShare user conference in Salt Lake City, I talked to Guy Lunardi, one of the most important guys behind Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). I had one pressing question for him. I showed him my new Dell XPS laptop, which has a lot of fancy stuff and runs out of factory Windows Vista (since that is the only OS that will allow me to use all the fancy stuff). So I asked him, “When will I install SUSE Linux on that?”

He responded, “Sander, if you go to a shop, buy a Vista DVD and install it on your laptop, do you think it will all work?” The answer was of course not.

When you introduce new hardware, one of the major issues is driver support. “Currently we are talking a lot with the people that develop the devices that are in these new computers to make sure that Linux drivers will be available,” Lunardi explained. “We help them wherever we can and it’s only getting better. It helps that we have some major customers like the Peugeot car manufacturer in France that demand specific functionality. They ask [for] a feature, we’ll make sure they get it and the result of all the effort will be in our new software.”

So there have been lots of developments recently. As a result, when it comes out later this year, openSUSE 11 will be as good as Windows Vista in supporting devices. “But,” Lunardi assured me, “you’ll always have to complete the installation of your operating system by downloading and installing additional drivers. That’s the case for Linux, [just] as it is the case for Windows.”

Fair enough. I’ll give it a try when openSUSE 11 comes out.

When Google launched Android earlier this month, many people assumed that because it was an open, Linux-based mobile operating system, the target was Microsoft. Throughout the relatively brief history of Linux, the first competition was with legacy Unix systems and Microsoft Windows. Closed versus open, proprietary versus open source. It’s David versus Goliath in a Tron-like world (ok, maybe not that cheesey). Add to that the fact that today many mobiles run a Microsoft operating system, and the table appeared set for another Linux vs. Windows rumble in the data center jungle.

And while we don’t typically cover mobile Linux on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com or even here on the quirky Enterprise Linux Log, I couldn’t resist a quick link to a Slate article that discussed Google’s plan to take over the world. Here’s a free Pro Tip: Microsoft is but a small rival in the overall big picture. This isn’t so much a battle between technologies as it is a battle between ideologies.

Google’s truest and most formidable foes are much older and more powerful. Today we call them Verizon and AT&T, but their real name is the Bell system. Their ideology, which today governs the cell phone world, is called “Vailism,” and it can be traced back to 1907 and the origins of AT&T’s domination of American telephony. The Bells’ philosophy, as promulgated by AT&T’s greatest president, Theodore Vail, is based on closed systems, centralized power, and as much control as possible over every part of the network. Vailism is the antithesis, in short, of everything Google stands for. It is this—conquering the business culture of the telephone, as opposed to the computer—that is Google’s great challenge.

Do no evil? You tell me. I, for one, welcome openness not only in my software, but in my Internet and my wireless as well. But that iPhone sure is tempting…

I had the interesting opportunity to be a third party to a battle of analysts today, and I thought I would share some of the things I learned from that conversation.

First, a little background information:

On Monday, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com posted a story on Active Directory and Linux authentication. The story gave a general overview, attempting to lay out some of the more mainstream ways IT pros are using AD to manage identity, authentication and security on their Linux servers. These include LDAP and Kerberos protocols, Samba 3, and proprietary third party cross platform management applications. While there was room to expand on the points made and some areas that could have been articulated better, the article was not intended to be in-depth from a technical point of view. But, as the reporter who filed that story, I can appreciate when an expert in the field takes the time to email me and explain, politely, that there were a few things that needed clarification. Read more »

Call out the chaperons — they’re practically touching! Apache and Microsoft IIS market share! They’ve almost met in the middle at 50%! Six inch space and no kissing, please!

Well, close, but not quite. Apache continued its “winning streak” in September over Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, but by a smaller margin than the month before (when Netcraft, which watches these kinds of things like a hawk, said that IIS was poised to challenge Apache’s market share lead sometime soon).

Part of this — as we’ve reported before — is due to Tomcat and to Google’s big server switch in 2006. Both of these phenomenons had a profound affect on Apache’s numbers, but were not in and of themselves an indicator of any slippage.

However, all that said, IIS is growing thanks to a rise in social networking sites like MySpace and Windows Live Spaces, both of which use ISS.

Says Netcraft:

The high growth so far this year has been largely driven by the increasing number of online blogging and social networking communities. This month sees strong growth in the number of sites at Windows Live Spaces, MySpace, and Blogger appearing in the survey. The increased popularity of these blog hosting services continues to have a dramatic effect on the web server market shares: Apache suffered a sudden decline in share when sites at Blogger switched to Google’s GFE.

Apache gains over 3 million hostnames, and around 0.9 million active sites this month. But this is not enough to prevent its market share declining closer to the 50% mark, as Microsoft also gained over 3 million hostnames (a large part of which come from MySpace and Live Spaces, both of which use its Internet Information Server).

So the battle continues.

Oracle announced today the general availability of 11g for the Linux platform only. You Windows and Unix guys will just have to wait your turn! Don’t worry though, because if historical trends are any indication, you’ll be rolling in 11g love a mere month or so from now.

Much was said of why Oracle chose to release on Linux first and decline comment on the other OS’s, with most of it focusing on the fact that Linux was “here to stay” or “mission critical” or whatever. That very well may be be the case, but I decided to dig a bit deeper thanks to an inside tip from one of my many infamous blog spies.

After the tip, I called over to Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhanna, who follows Oracle, to discuss 11g, Linux, and the fact that Windows SQL Server is pretty hot right now. Hot enough for Oracle to take notice anyway, and make a huge push behind Linux. Was it Oracle making bank off of Linux, or Oracle positioning itself against Microsoft? Both?
We agreed that Linux is a huge moneymaker for Oracle, and has been for some time. Another analyst firm, Gartner, compiled some numbers recently that bare this out: Gartner’s recent report showed that Oracle on Linux grew 72% in 2006, which was faster than overall relational database management system market growth and faster than “general RDBMS growth” on Linux (67%).

Wim Coekaerts, Oracle’s vice president of Linux engineering, told me during a call we had set up for LinuxWorld that the growth is expected to continue. More Unbreakable Linux customers were announced at LinuxWorld, including game company Activision, which will “gradually” switch over to Oracle Linux (based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and has purchased support from Oracle. There’s already more than a few dozen customers on record saying they went to Oracle for their Linux support, but Coekaerts said the list has grown much larger than that since Oracle Linux was announced in late 2006. FYI — More on that call and our Oracle 11g on Linux coverage will be live soon on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.
Michael Dolan, who works for IBM but blogs 100% independently from that company on his blog at MichaelDolan.com, put things into perspective with some thoughts on 11g, Linux and hardware a few weeks back.

Ok, I added the “[Oracle 11g] for Linux” b/c I’m sure they still support all the usual platforms. I actually saw this today and thought… hmmm… what will happen to all those 10g (or pre-10g) Solaris, HPUX and Windows systems when those customers go to upgrade? Solaris and SPARC are on their way out, Windows = Microsoft and Oracle hates that, and HPUX is on a rotting Itanium vine and many users wouldn’t dare go there… I suspect with Oracle going to Linux as its primary OS of choice (RHEL based) we’ll probably see yet another round of thousands of systems moving onto Linux.

Sure it’s skewed because he works for IBM, but does the message bear out where the messenger might be tainted by some bias?

IDC and Forrester don’t track specific numbers,  only market share, so comparisons between the number of Oracle databases on Linux and Windows are hard to come by. However, Yuhanna told me during our call that Windows customers are a “lost cause” to Oracle because by and by they are completely content with SQL Server and would be hard pressed to switch soon, if ever. But Linux is growing by leaps and bounds, and Unix is still there to be cannibalized. Oracle, Yuhanna said, might be using Linux not only as a moneymaker, but as a defense against losing more market share to SQL Server.

Oh, and they might acquire Red Hat. Maybe. Stay tuned to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com and sister site SearchOracle.com for more on this soon.

A survey of developers and IT managers in North America found that the number of developers targeting Linux for their server- and client-side applications increased by 34% over the past year.

The Evans Data Spring 2007 North American Development survey of more than 400 IT decision makers also found that the growth in Linux development came at the expense of Microsoft Windows, which decreased 12% from one year ago. Approximately 64.8% targeted the platform as opposed to 74% in 2006, the survey said.

John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data, said in a statement that Windows development is set to continue its decline into 2008 to the tune of roughly 2%. The decline will leave the still-dominant operating system with a majority 63% market share in 2008. Linux, on the other hand, will hold a 16% share in 2008, according to Evans Data estimates.

The survey featured developers at enterprises, VARs and system integrators, and covered both client and server application development. According to the survey, the decline in Windows targeting by developers started in 2005, and has increased year-over-year as Linux matured and gained in popularity as an enterprise level OS.

… and on that note, Happy Fourth of July to our readers in the States! We’ll be back in action later this week after some R&R.

It appears I’ve been had. I reported last week that Novell alleged it was “first to market” with drivers for Windows and Linux that plug into Xen’s fast paravirtualized I/O stack. Simon Crosby over at the Server Virtualization Blog says this is not true (SVB is our sister blog here at TechTarget — j.l.).

Here’s what Novell said:

Holger Dyroff, vice president of SUSE Linux Enterprise product management, said that with the release of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack, his company will become the first vendor to offer support for Windows and Red Hat guests running on Xen. In July, Novell will ship drivers for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. The virtualization consists of a bundle of paravirtualized network, bus and block device drivers that enable unmodified Windows and Linux guest operating systems to run as virtual machines on top of the Xen hypervisor. Drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 will be released later this summer at no additional charge.

Enter Simon Crosby, who I definitely have to put on my speed dial just in case this happens again. Crosby asks, “when last did your favorite OS vendor make a great public fanfare about delivering two new device drivers, and then charge more than the price of their OS to use them?” Long story short, Crosby breaks down the pricing in real world terms, and finds what Novell is basically saying with its latest virtualization announcement is that two Windows Drivers are worth more than SLES 10. Wow!

So, you pay $349 per year for SLES 10, and an additional $299 per year for up to four Windows VMs, totaling $648. But there’s still no mention of VM management, VHD/VMDK support, backups, P2V, snapshotting, cloning, suspend/resume or the storage management that you’d expect of a useful virtualization platform […] What’s amazing about the Novell announcement is that for a workload with more than 4 VMs, the total leaps to $1148, and the price of the Windows drivers is about double the price of SLES 10 itself! Now, I’m proud of our high performance Windows Drivers, the ACPI HAL optimizations and comprehensive Windows suspend/resume and live relocation support that we offer, but they are just a part of the product.

Bottom line is this: without the included management tools, Crosby has a hard time believing any IT manager in their right mind would want to pay double to use SLES for Windows virtualization. He concludes with a great question for vendors and IT managers alike: “Can any OS vendor properly understand and consciously optimize the user’s experience with a competitive product?”

They sure are trying, but for now it’s definitely a game of wait-and-see. Does anyone out there care to try and tackle that question?