Being an open source enthusiast for several years now, the most often question I get asked from many business owners is why make the move??? There is certainly a plethora of information out there regarding Migrations from UNIX to Linux however I feel that CXXs need to get the crux of why this is a critical shift that needs to be made sooner than later. In this era, IT has tremendously modernized and there is a huge demand for Cloud like applications web 2.0 and off course, making that transition to the cloud. In saying this, I have have put together some keys points here that the business stakeholders should be aware of when thinking of Cloud, new projects, hardware refreshes, extension of maintenance contracts on their legacy systems.
Introduction
The Red Hat Enterprise
Linux product family provides enterprise-class features that enable Linux-based
solutions to be deployed across the widest range of Enterprise IT environments.
With a potent combination of technical features, certified ISV applications,
and portfolio of services, Red Hat Enterprise Linux products are the world’s
leading Linux-based enterprise operating system solutions.
As enterprise customers have become frustrated with the
price and performance of proprietary UNIX solutions, they have
sought a way to take advantage of the multivendor, low cost ,
high performance environment provided by Intel® and AMD® commodity
priced hardware. Historically, the lack of a stable,
secure, scalable, and high performance operating environment relative to
UNIX has kept many customers from being able to justify
a move to commodity chipsets. UNIX variants have been released
for commodity platforms, but none of them have
been able to provide adequate hardware support, software support,
or scalability to make Intel or AMD an effective alternative
to RISC based platforms. Now, as a product of the continual
improvement of commodity platforms and the rapid development of the
Linux operating system, there is finally a viable alternative to
UNIX for running enterprise and mission critical applications.
Red Hat Linux is now the fastest growing operating system in the
world, according to IDC, and it is most often
replacing proprietary UNIX
in enterprise IT infrastructure.
Application
Availability
Independent software Vendors (ISV`s) have been quick to appreciate the
benefits of Red hat Enterprise Linux Solutions. Providing support on these
products offers numerous advantages:
·
The
extended release cycle simplifies application delivery, sales and support
·
The
extended release cycle means that applications from multiple vendors will all
be supported on the same platform at the same time( a situation that rarely occurred
with the traditional consumer products)
·
Technical
features deliver performance and scaling to match or exceed proprietary Unix.
Since the initial availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux products, Red
Hat has been working with a wide range of ISV`s to ensure that customers can
choose from a rich application portfolio. Because all the products in the
family are based on a common core, ISV application certification on one family
member automatically accrues to other family members. The number of ISVs who
are providing their applications on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family is
growing rapidly.
Application
Migration Challenges
In general, Linux strives to make migrations from proprietary Unix systems
as easy as possible. It does this by providing similar tools and capabilities
as those found Unix systems such as Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX. An
advantage of Linux is that most developer tools are included in the base system
rather than in a separate layered product. As a result most Linux systems
provide more software than proprietary UNIX systems. Linux compilers and related tools have been
designed as replacements for UNIX vendor tools and provide very similar
capabilities, although usage options may be different. Perhaps the most
important feature for application migration is that Red Hat Linux is POSIX
compliant, greatly improving the portability of applications from proprietary
UNIX.
Multi-threaded Applications
A feature of many UNIX applications is that they are multi-threaded. Red
Hat Enterprise Linux fully supports multi-threading. The multi- threading
sub-system is highly optimized for high performance, agility and flexibility
for applications. In addition being that this subsystem is POSIX compliant, heavily multi-threaded applications can now
readily be ported from UNIX environments.
Java Applications
Java virtual machines and Just-in-Time compilers are available to Red Hat
Enterprise Linux in the same way as proprietary systems. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux provides Java implementations from BEA, IBM and Sun, as well as native
open source Java compilers. The implementation that a specific deployment would
use will vary based on the hardware architecture or application requirements.
The “write once, run anywhere” capability of Java applications makes migrating
Java applications from Proprietary Unix relatively easy. In many cases
applications can be migrated with no additional development or modification –
although a period of testing would be recommended for any application size.
Migration Strategy
Given that most open source developer tools (gcc, etc) can be used on proprietary
UNIX systems, the first step is to port applications so that they successfully
build using these tools running in the original UNIX environment. This allows
development engineers to resolve problems related to the build environment
without having to worry about other problems. Once the application works on the
original UNIX platform, having been built using open source tools, it can then
be moved to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Environment. Development engineers are then able to focus
on operating system and processor/architecture issues exclusively – because any
tools issues have already been resolved. Experience has shown that this
strategy generally results in a more predictable, faster, and low risk migration.
Conclusion
While migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from UNIX provides obvious initial cost advantages, enterprises need to look beyond software acquisition alone togain a complete understanding of their overall investment and potential for cost savings. Customers initiating a broad migration strategy that combines
technology maintenance, technical support, staff training, infrastructure management, and application porting can often realize even more value, and a greater, faster return on their overall IT investment.
Reference Documentation and
Case Studies
