Concerns regarding enterprise-level support for Linux-based servers are not entirely unfounded. Two years back when Paul Young, CIO of online hotel booking service Wotif.com, began the shift from Windows- to Linux-based servers he found he had a lot of explaining to do. While it was reasonably common to find Linux in the education sector, vendors still had precious little experience implementing it in the enterprise, and poor understanding of corporate requirements.
"The vendors didn't realise what they were getting into when applying Linux at the corporate level," Young says. "It took me about six months to find people who understood where I was going and what I was talking about when it came to a corporate environment."
Unperturbed, Young forged ahead with the changeover, wanting to make the shift to an open-source and open-standards environment sooner rather than later.
"Really Wotif.com is a perfect fit for open source because it's a small company growing into a medium-sized company, so scalability and performance are our key challenges when it comes to running the servers," Young says. "In the small business and midsize sectors open-source software is a compelling story."
Unlike TransACT and De Bortoli, Young wanted to shift from a Windows environment so he was not able to leverage experience on Unix systems directly into a Linux environment. However, a quick show of hands in the IT department put his mind at rest regarding the internal skills base.
"When I came into the company most of the shop were already Linux users, only about five percent came from a strictly Windows background," Young says. "You'd be amazed how many developers have learnt to use Linux, or at least some version of Unix through university."
While Young says he has not has not been all that reliant on vendor support, he is relying on the big name buy-in to keep Linux offerings competitive and up-to-date with developments in the hardware arena.
"It is important for us to be able to adopt new hardware as soon as possible to maintain the quality of our service," Young says. "What makes it work for us is that there are vendors out there making sure the Linux operating system is ready for IT improvements at the hardware level."
But Young is cautious when it comes Linux servers in large enterprises.
| "Implementing Linux servers is no different than any other company-wide IT overhaul." Tony Yortis, Coates Hire |
"As a CIO you face different challenges at different stages of growth," Young says. "Scalability and performance issues are entirely different when you start operating at the big end of town. You can't overestimate or miss the mark the way you can in the mid level because it will cost you way too much."
Nonetheless there are some companies looking to use Linux to leverage them into the big end of town.
Coates cashes in on Linux
ASX-listed equipment hire and engineering contractors Coates Hire is planning to do just that.
As chief information and innovation officer Tony Yortis is planning to play a central role in doubling the company's annual $450 million turnover in the next five years. Yortis took the position two years ago following a changing of the guards that saw corporate veteran CEO Jim Brown retire after 35 years in the job. His replacement Malcom Jackman took the helm and set about a significant restructure to set the company on a path into Australia's top 100 companies list.
Yortis was brought in three months later as part of the game plan.
"When I came on board Coates was a real diamond in the rough," Yortis says. "There were seven different businesses using a single mainframe system. There was still a lot of manual processing."
In order to consolidate and automate the cash and asset management, process management, payroll, and a range of other functions on a single platform, Yortis knew he needed to retire the mainframe system. After speaking with a number of technology vendors, Yortis opted for Oracle Real Application Clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on racked Dell servers.
"Technology is going to be an integral part of our success over the next five years, we needed to know that whatever operating system we adopted would support this growth," Yortis says. "We looked at the technologies the big names were relying on, and realised that when IBM and Novell are all spending big in the open-source space there's gotta be something in it."
With the company already dealing with extensive change management issues, and a lot of suspicion surrounding open source, Yortis needed to make a water-tight case. He set about compiling a full risk analysis and looked for a series of vendors willing to lock themselves into Linux service contracts. "I needed to ensure that if a bug came up there would be one point of contact, whether it was to do with the firmware or the Red Hat software," Yortis says.
Even so, he faced significant opposition. Already having to contend with a new generation of management, the IT team wasn't entirely comfortable having to retrain on software rumored to be both unstable and poorly supported.
Realising the major hurdles were psychological rather than technical, Yortis met the challenge by creating individual development plans for staff, so they could see a role for themselves within the new structure.
"We were telling these guys that the mainframe at the heart of that they had built and made successful for so many years had to change," Yortis says. "We were pushing them out of their comfort zone so we had to show them at the same time that there was a bigger picture which they were part of. "
Coates Hire also went to the market to source people with Linux skills, and were fairly successful at finding what they were after.
"Implementing Linux servers is no different than any other company-wide IT overhaul. You need to have rigorous project management methodology, have a back-up plan for your back-up plan, and you have to look after the people because they are the ones who make the project successful," Yortis says.
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