From August 24th to 26th, the 4th LinuxWorld China 2004 hosted by IDG was successfully held in Beijing Kerry Center, once again attracted people's attention to Linux. Since the first LinuxWorld CHINA in 2000, the annual LinuxWorld CHINA conference has become a barometer that reflects the development of China Linux development. At the first two conferences, participants are mostly in T-shirts, full of vigorous Linux enthusiasts, and they pay more attention to Linux's latest progress, and most of the manufacturers are also new Linux small manufacturers; and this year At the conference, the participants are more from the company's technical supervisor. They want to know not only the new development of Linux, but more importantly, what is the LINUX solution to be suitable for their respective companies? IBM, Oracle, CA, and BEA, etc. Full support for Linux commercial software providers have become the protagonist of the exhibition.
Nevertheless, business users are cautious when deciding whether to choose Linux, because the mistakes of a decision may bring huge losses to the company.
Are Linux ready?
"Is Linux ready? Is it really possible to meet the needs of enterprise applications? Is there enough application software to support Linux?" This is the first question that users should ask when considering the choice of Linux platform. In this regard, Mr. Liu Tian, director of LINUX, Director, Xinyi, China, gave a very affirmative answer: "Linux has been competent for the enterprise application platform for two years ago!"
In 2000, only a few users in the world use Linux, mainly to carry out some prospective application plan research, lack sufficient Linux technology talents, and the successful cases of implementation are rare; but in 2002, Linux users rapidly increase, and appeared More and more successful cases, Linux x86 combination has been widely recognized by corporate users; It also regards Linux as the preferred operation platform. This makes Microsoft who have disdainted for Linux, said that "Linux will exist forever, we must understand it." According to IDC reports, Linux will reach 20% in 2004, while in the next three years, it will also increase the rate of about 5% per year, and its growth rate will reach 31%. , Gradually embarrassed some of Windows and UNIX sites. Let's take a look at the selection of developers. According to Evans Data Consulting, in 2004, 54.3% of developers chose to develop applications on the Linux platform, and seeing Linux is already a general trend.
On the other hand, all kinds of commercial software based on Linux are ready. In the middle of the field, there is IBM's WebSphere, Oracle 10g, BEA's WebLogic, Sun N1, etc .; in the database field, IBM DB2, Oracle Database 10g, Sybase's ASE, can say except MS SQLServer, almost all The mainstream database provides good support for Linux; there are CA, HP, BMC, etc. In the IT management field; in the field of application, this list is a long string, countless, SAP, Oracle, people, people, PeopleSoft The application software provider is incorporated into its product development route to provide users with a full-line solution. In order to ensure the high performance of your own products, Oracle has transferred the company's internal application system to the Linux platform, tells users using instances of their own application: "Linux is already ready!" Linux gives a company?
"Select Linux, what is the benefit? Is it really possible to save cost savings?
For this issue, the consistent answer is: "Linux can save costs, but the saving paths are reflected in different aspects." The cost of enterprise application systems is reflected in several aspects: the initial purchase cost, the maintenance cost of the system, and the future expansion cost.
In terms of initial purchase cost, Mr. Steven Vandor, CA Company, STEVEN VANDOR, believes that the cost savings brought by Linux, in addition to the bundled sales of Linux vendors and hardware platform manufacturers, users can get certain offers, Purchasing Linux-based commercial software is not necessarily cheaper than similar products on other platforms. However, Liu Tiandong believes that under the topics of the same performance requirements, Linux / X86 combination can achieve higher cost performance. The cost savings that it brought is probably an amazing, and a simple example he gives: If you use performance The same UNIX SMP is compared with the Linux / Intel cluster, the latter cost is only 1/8 of the former. "However, in terms of subsequent maintenance and future expansion costs, the cost savings from Linux will be huge," said Vandor. This is reflected in several aspects. First, because each mainstream hardware and software vendor provides support for Linux, users can freely select manufacturers, do not have to bundlers in a manufacturer, which means that users can choose the best product. Secondly, Linux running platforms are small to embedded chips, large-to-large hosts, spans the full-line hardware platform, so it has very excellent scalability based on its application, and uses grid technology, the system extension will be very easy. Things, and will not waste existing resources, the capacity of the system, the capacity, etc. can be fully utilized. In addition, the Linux-based standardized hardware and software can greatly reduce the maintenance cost of the system, and now there are now more business companies to provide "one-stop" support service, for example, Oracle has promised to "indestruct Linux" "The products involved in the plan provide" one-stop "service, whether it is a problem with the application software or the Linux operating system, only one phone, Oracle will help users solve all the problems. In addition, many technical experts from open source communities will also help users solve the problems encountered.
From a long-term perspective, it will be huge for the cost savings that chooses Linux.
"Open source" big trend came?
Linux is part of open source software, more commercial software to open source code will undoubtedly push Linux applications.
According to Mr. Vandor, CA, CA Company's survey conducted by more than 400 customers in North America and Europe not long ago, 50% of customers will open source as their main application development platform, and the open source software has been widely available. Business users' identity. In fact, from last year, the trend of commercial software to open source is already obvious. Continuous manufacturers have announced their own products to open source organizations. This year this year is more obvious, many "heavyweight" software vendors have joined this ranks. In May, at the Eworld Conference held in the United States, BEA announced the "Hive Plan" and contributed BEA WebLogic Workshop to the Apache Software Foundation, providing developers with an excellent Java integrated development environment. According to Mr. Yu Shicheng, China's China Technology Director, "Hive Plan" has been launched, and has been warmly welcomed by industry manufacturers and users, and has become one of the most widely used Java integrated development environments. At present, BEA's flagship product WebLogic has been optimized for Intel hardware platforms and Linux, which can provide the best cost performance for corporate users. CA also puts a huge support for Linux and open source, in addition to contributing its database product Ingns soon, in addition to the open source organization, it also provides huge support in Linux kernel, security module development, and uses CA companies. Some security technology developed KGEM modules have been provided to open source organizations, which allows Linux's security to greatly improve. In the face of open source, IBM is naturally in front. After Eclipse, IBM has new initiatives: announced in this Congress to donate more than 500,000 relational database code to the Apache Software Foundation. Of course, the relationship database is not IBM DB2 well known, but IBM originally acquired Cloudscape from Informix, which will be donated to ASF with the name of Derby. According to Ms. Zheng Miaoqin, General Manager of IBM China Software Development Center, the technology used by the database is current mainstream technology, its commercial value is $ 85 million. This is a Java-based embedded relational database, all management work can be controlled by the application itself, no data administrator interface, and small size, only 2 MB, can be implanted, becomes part. At the same time, Cloudscape can also run as a server. In fact, not all C / S applications or web applications require enterprise-level databases to support. In this case, Cloudscape will be a higher cost-effective option. In addition, the Eclipse plug-in that simplifies its application development is also being developed.
Obviously, the open source wave of commercial software brings Linux users not only more optional software, but also the transparency of this product also has better guaranteed security. Perhaps, Linux from the open source community will have a great promotion of open source motion.
How to get standardized roads?
The standardization of Linux is a problem that Chinese users are quite concerned. On a global scale, although there is no standard Linux release, there are some mainstream Linux distributions in different regions. In North America, Redhat is a well-deserved "boss"; in Europe, SUSE occupies a leading position; in the final rapid Asian form in Linux, it is not very clear, turbolinux, red flag Linux, Xteam, etc., is constantly expanding its site, now, Zhongke Red Flag, Japan Miracle, Oracle is jointly building Asianux, and hopes to make it a leader in Linux in the Asian market; of course, there are Linux support plans for the Chinese, Japan, and Han. However, who will lead the market and have to be considered by the user. For users, there are too many Linux versions in one market, although the kernel is consistent, but different Linux distributions are more or less different, so standardization has become one of the key points of users. After all, no one wants Linux to repeat the mistakes of UNIX.
From:
World
