Reading through this weeks edition of Computer

Weekly I

notice that there are frequent references to the use of Linux in the

enterprise. Kevin Hughes, a nautical equipment

manufacturer has moved over to 64-bit Linux running Oracle on HP

Itanium machines. I think Linux offers a considerable advantage

over Windows when it comes to running on a 64-bit base (the 64-bit

versions of Windows

that I have tried didn’t seem too stable). I’m not quite sure why the

article said that they are leading the way,

our company (of a similar size) has been running Oracle based

applications on a

64-bit hardware and software base for quite some time. I guess it just

fills some space in the

magazine! Other mentions included Stirling university who have improved performance

three-fold and lowered costs. How? Oh that’s interesting, by moving over to HP

Itanium based servers running Linux; I’m not making accusations here but it’s

interesting that both of these articles were written by the same author. I wonder if he also works for HP, no surely

not… Last but not least, I see that Dell are now offering a desktop system

with NO Windows pre-installation. This

saves money for enterprises using Linux on the desktop as they would usually

have to buy a PC pre-loaded with Windows and then wipe it out, which is a bit

of a waste of a llicence.

As our company runs all of our core services and systems on

a Linux base I find it very interesting to see how other companies are

approaching it’s use. It seems even to companies

who would traditionally run with Windows; Linux is offering a real

alternative

when it comes to high performance 64-bit processing. I’m rather

surprised that people are choosing

to go with the Itanium based systems, we have both Itanium and AMD

Opteron

64-bit systems. Both run SUSE Enterprise

server with Oracle 10g. The Opteron

systems have out performed the Itanium by such large margins that the

Itaniums

have actually been put on the shelf as it were. The Opteron based

systems were also much cheaper than the Itaniums (Truly a fraction of

the price). I guess the big three providers (IBM, HP,

SGI) are hoping that people don’t notice the reduced cost and increased

performance of the Opteron systems so that they can continue to sell

their

overpriced, underperforming Itanium based hardware!