Linux in the Enterprise

[Jonathan Hutchins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Herrmann [mailto:kclug at ItDepends.com]

> 1. Single signon across servers

Linux uses the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), which can use either
Samba/Windows authentication or *NIX' own cross-platform authentication
(based on the old "yellow pages" system, but I can't think of the acronym at
the moment).

> 2. tape back-up - automated I assume

What, you gotta be kidding.  Unix was a tape-based operating system back
when one megabyte disks were big.  There is everything from low-level system
commands that you can write scripts with to full-fledged open-source backup
systems with GUI interfaces.  Most of the major commercial Windows backup
programs have *NIX options that will work with Linux, and there are
commercial products just for Linux.  I believe it's even possible to mount a
tape as a standard file system for random access.

> 3. system monitoring - performance, capacity, security

SNMP is a *NIX based protocol.  Many operations use Linux/*NIX systems to
monitor networks and performance.  

You can find plenty of conflicting benchmarks that indicate that Linux is
faster or slower than Windows, which at least means it's comparable.  For an
absolute answer, you have to compare a specific function, ie SQL server
performance.

As far as capacity goes, Linux is highly "scalable", which means you can run
the same system on a discarded workstation or run it with slight
modifications on a cluster supercomputer.  Hollywood does most of it's
digital rendering on clusters of Linux computers these days, and a number of
Linux super-clusters have been announced in the past year.

IBM can be a good source of info on enterprise Linux.  They are serious
about marketing it as a tool for business, and offer it on stand-alone
Intel-based systems as well as their largest mainframes.