All over the world, thousands of developers and end users of standards based systems choose Linux because of the open collaboration that occurs. The goverance model for Linux is unlike Solaris 10×86 or OpenSolaris – extremely transparent and open making vendor independence a reality. There are well defined organizaitonal and legal support structures in place to protect the long term viability of the open source operating system. By making all vendor neutral, the industry is the beneficiary of low price, better performance and service delivery as the basis for competitive differentiation. Linux distribution vendors like Red Hat maintain a demanding quality assurance (QA) process to ensure that the open source package integrates & perform properly.
Here are a few benifits of RedHat Linux
Reliability – Linux environments are extremely stable in many cases more so than many propriertary environments. Many enterprises experience 100% uptime for their Linux environments and most experience greater then 99.99% availability. When problems occur, Linux administrators repair them quickly, in most cases quicker then industry averages.
Provisioning – Deployment & provisioning of Linux systems and applications can happen very quickly. Over half of surveyed enterprises can provision a Linux system in less then 1 hour. The process is even more efficient with sophisticated managment tools.
Management – Most users spend less then 5 min per server per week managing Linux systems – including patch management, system migration and repurposing, security managment and virus/spywear protection. Most manage their Linux centrally using sophisticated management tools and across the board, these tools make Linux system managment easier & faster.
Storage Management – Storage technologies such as SAN & NAS have made storage management and utilization a platform independent discipline. In these mature environments Linux admins spend very little time managing storage, yet have high utilization rates.
Support – Customization & support of multiple versions does not have any discernible impact on the management effort of Linux systems. In many cases, admins use the same management tools across many versions of multiple heterogeneous systems including Linux, UNIX, Microsoft, Windows & x/OS.
System Availability – Older research claimed Linux has lower reliability and availability specifically citing longer repair times caused by less skilled resources and difficulties with problem diagnosis, documentation, and repair. However Linux is extremely stable with high availability and short problem resolution times.
Here is a link to where these results were documented and more of this analysis….
http://www.computerworld.com/pdfs/Redhat_AnalysisofLinuxforEnterpriseApplicationsanDatabase.pdf
