[luau] NEWS: Buying Industrial-Strength Tech on the Cheap

[Warren Togami]

Buying Industrial-Strength Tech on the Cheap
How do you run an IT department on a tight budget? Two words: Linux and
eBay.
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,39964,FF.html

Five years ago, if you had proposed running some of your company's most
critical applications on an operating system originally developed by a
longhaired Finnish teenager and given away for free, your IT manager would
have laughed you out of his office. That has changed, though, as Linux has
become more versatile and powerful (though it's still cheap). In fact, a new
version of Linux is suitable for just about anything your company wants to
throw at it.

...

Last month, Linux vendor Red Hat (which supplies the operating systems used
by the above companies) announced a version of Linux tailored for use in
high-end "enterprise" applications. "One of the problems we had in the past
was we sort of had a one-size-fits-all approach," says Paul Cormier,
executive vice president for engineering at Red Hat. "We had one
distribution aimed at everyone from the kid in the dorm all the way up to
the enterprise customer." Red Hat's new Linux Advanced Server adds a number
of features -- such as reliability, scalability, and management tools --
that corporations need to run big servers. For instance, the new operating
system supports "clustering" (joining together two or more servers so they
act as a single unit), which is essential for creating fail-safe systems. It
also has enhancements under the hood that help process heavy computing and
communications chores with greater ease.
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