May Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Linux

A Case Study: Helping a Software Vendor Rollout Linux as a Strategic Initiative

Taos Professional Services Team

Overview

The debate of Linux as a viable platform has now expanded beyond discussions in engineering and IT groups – it is being debated in managerial circles as well. All groups are asking “Is Linux appropriate in MY organization and why or why not?” Since there are no definitive answers to these questions, it only means more and more people will ask. And as more people ponder those questions, an interesting phenomenon is occurring: Many companies are hedging their bets and are asking their vendors to support Linux in their product offerings, even though these same companies may not have a clear Linux strategy for themselves.

The following is an account of how Taos helped a software vendor implement a strategic initiative to address their customers’ concerns about Linux support in their products.

The Challenge

While none of the vendor’s clients demanded outright that they develop Linux support in their products, they would often be asked whether they supported it. It was becoming an obvious concern and was growing with time. Rather than wait, this vendor decided to adopt a proactive, forward-looking strategy – one that would not only show Linux support in their own products, but also demonstrate they have a good understanding of Linux by running it in their own environment.

But where to start? A number of issues had to be addressed:

• The lack of a definitive track record for Linux in the corporate enterprise gave the vendor minimal insight into the challenges that lay ahead.
  
• The choice of Linux distributions needed to be thoroughly investigated in order to most accurately reflect the corporate environment.

• There was also the issue of how to deploy Linux across all their organizational tiers (Development, Production, QA, internal and external environments, etc.). Although the deployment would have to touch all of the tiers, it had to be contained within the same physical environment for testing purposes.

An interesting side note is that, unlike many Linux deployments today, cost savings was not a factor. The deployment of Linux was viewed solely as an initiative to position the vendor more strategically in the minds of its customers.

The Taos Solution

Through their prior experience with Taos, the vendor knew of our Linux expertise and called upon Taos to help.

The IT operations team had the bulk of their experience in supporting UNIX environments, so the Taos consultant was brought onto the project to help guide them through both the evaluation and implementation phases of the rollout and to avoid potential quirks and unknowns that could have interrupted the project. In addition to providing general Linux guidance, the Taos consultant also provided much of the “hands-on” implementation, and provided procedural documentation and patch management development in support of the project.

The vendor had previously built much of their infrastructure on Sparc servers running Solaris. With guidance from the Taos consultant, they decided to install six IBM Blade Center chassis, which have a capacity of 14 servers in each chassis. All of the chassis were approximately 2/3 filled. In addition to the IBM Blade Centers, they deployed approximately 30 new IBM x345 servers for the project.

As for the choice of Linux itself, they decided upon Red Hat. Again, with the help of the Taos consultant, they chose Red Hat for two key reasons. The first was because of the authorized support they would receive from IBM. The second reason was Red Hat’s prevalence in North American corporate installations. (It should be noted, however, that they will also be looking at and testing Suse Linux in the future.) For the initial rollout, the IBM WebSphere Application Server is the primary application chosen to run on the Linux platform.

The major Linux related tool used was xCAT. xCAT provided automated installation (similar to Jumpstart), monitoring and management of the blade servers, remote power capabilities, and remote console capabilities for the Linux clusters.

Results and Benefits

The initial deployment has been successful and the client is currently considering a wider deployment of Linux throughout their enterprise environment with continued help from Taos. There is the possibility that the current Linux infrastructure will be expanded to 80 IBM Blade Centers over the next two years.

In working with the vendor, the Taos consultant drew an interesting conclusion: The largest hurdle encountered was not the technical merits of Linux in the enterprise, but rather the cultural aspect inherit in its open source nature.

Previously, the client would purchase any needed software tools instead of developing the necessary packages. However, due to the infancy of Linux enterprise deployments, there is often no commercially available software that fits many corporations’ needs. The culture of writing one’s own code (which is often discouraged with several commercial Unix variants) instead of just buying what is needed is one that will take some adjustment.

As part of an on-going engagement, the consultant is also developing a patch management system for the current Linux clusters. The sparseness of the actual code (fewer than 20 lines) has been impressive compared to any equivalent commercial product. Therefore, the consultant is making inroads in convincing the IT operations staff that developing their own Linux code is viable and does not have to be time consuming. In addition, the open source spirit of Linux can be kept intact.