Perhaps the most important driver for Linux deployment in the data center is the availability of a growing number of tools that provide heterogeneous availability, performance, and automation for production Linux workloads -- seamlessly across both physical and the emerging virtualized deployments.

Just as the adoption of UNIX accelerated with the arrival of commercially available solutions that enabled more sophisticated backup and data management, the use of Linux is being aided by new technologies for data center automation and business continuity.

When the first journaling file system for UNIX was developed and made available by a third party, it marked the beginning of the operating system's acceptance in the enterprise data center. This innovation was followed by the release of a vendor-independent storage management system built around a volume manager, which gave organizations more flexibility in selecting storage devices. Then came powerful backup server solutions that provided enterprises the high level of data protection they required -- without having to bring down applications.

Today, new technologies for the Linux enterprise help simplify and lower the cost of storage management and enhance the performance and availability of data and applications -- even as data volumes grow and IT budgets and system administrators do not. And there are new technologies in virtualization and data center automation that effectively let Linux architects leapfrog the traditional boundaries of proprietary UNIX solutions.

Enterprise tools

One of the most significant roadblocks to the widespread adoption of Linux in the enterprise has been a lack of tools to facilitate operating system conversion or migration. Now, however, organizations can seamlessly migrate data across operating systems to Linux and back again -- not in a matter of weeks or months, but in just minutes. Innovative online storage management tools provide a streamlined process for quickly migrating data to Linux: the file system is converted, the snapshot volume is extracted and exported to a new disk group, and then the new disk group is imported to the Linux environment.

Advanced clustering tools are also available that enable concurrent file access from multiple servers in a storage area network (SAN) or other environment. These tools offer enterprises the ability to manage more capacity with fewer resources, a scalable platform that expands with the organization, and a solution for eliminating expensive downtime.

In addition, with hundreds of thousands of Linux servers and virtual machines (VMs) now operating in enterprises across the globe, the challenges of server provisioning become apparent. These issues are now being addressed with automated solutions that discover server hardware, install operating systems and VMs, configure applications, and modify network settings on multiple servers at the same time. Images of server configurations can be quickly saved to a central location and redeployed to available server resources as needed -- all from a simple Web browser.

Industrial strength data protection is also available now for Linux environments. These solutions provide protection from desktop to data center to vault in a single management tool that consolidates all backup and recovery operations. A growing number of these solutions also provide management, alerting, reporting, and troubleshooting and support both tape and disk storage as well as data encryption. The most recent innovations include server recovery capabilities that enable bare metal restores for Linux.

In the event of a disaster, site failure, or planned site migration, organizations can leverage volume replication solutions that reliably and consistently replicate data to remote locations over any IP network when data loss and prolonged downtime must be avoided. These solutions maintain data consistency within and among volumes to deliver uncompromised data integrity at secondary locations and can replicate between any storage hardware platform to eliminate vendor-specific storage limitations. The latest solutions work seamlessly across physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual environments.

Finally, to help them meet high application service levels, Linux enterprises can utilize a growing number of tools that analyze and improve the efficiency of key business applications by identifying application performance problems, finding their causes, and recommending solutions. By eliminating bottlenecks and fine-tuning applications, Linux enterprises help ensure that their applications are running at peak performance levels at all times.

As new advances in technology come first and faster to Linux platforms, this open source operating system will gain greater acceptance as the preferred option for enterprise computing. With heterogeneous availability, performance, virtualization, and automation software already available for Linux, organizations can fully leverage Linux to control IT costs while maintaining the high performance, interoperability, flexibility, and reliability demands of production workloads in the data center.

The ideas expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of ITworld.com.

» posted by abennett

Symantec Corp.

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