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Teradata and Linux meet in the middle
The marriage of open source and data warehousing
creates a win-win situation for all.
by Stephen Poole
When University of Helsinki student Linus Torvalds announced in an August 1991
Usenet posting that he was working on
a free operating system (it "won't be
big and professional," he said), chances
are no one noted the date as one of
historic importance. But just a decade
later, Linux—short for "Linus'
minix"—was firmly entrenched as
the leading operating system for Web
servers. Torvalds himself wound up on
Time magazine's Person of the
Century Poll in 2001, and he was named
one of the 20 greatest scientists and
thinkers in the world by the same publication
this year.
With a command-line interface and an installation process that only a UNIX
fanatic could love, the earliest iterations of Linux were embraced by a
small group of hardcore computer enthusiasts, many eager for a viable alternative
to proprietary operating systems.
Things are considerably different today: The Linux OS is now distributed with intuitive GUI desktop environments. In many distributions, users receive copious amounts of software, including programming languages, Web servers, office suites and e-mail clients and servers, to name a few. And the user base? It's extremely broad, encompassing everyone from IT professionals to senior business executives.
Just how widespread has Linux become
as an operating system? Consider this:
An estimated 75% of Fortune 500 companies
have already deployed Linux or are planning
to do so in the near future. A survey
conducted by Information Week
showed that 70% of business technology
professionals currently use Linux (up
from 56% last year), and a recent Forrester
Research report says enterprises will
increasingly favor Intel-based platforms
coupled with Microsoft or Linux operating
systems.
This comes as no surprise to Carol Walter, Teradata product manager, who says that Linux is primed to become a dominant force in the OS landscape. "The market predicts that Linux will replace all UNIX systems in the future," she says. "In the enterprise space, that will happen between 2006 and 2008."
Linux's meteoric rise can be partially attributed to its low acquisition cost, but that certainly isn't the most important factor businesses consider when choosing the OS. The old saw "How much does it cost if it's free?" applies to Linux. If it didn't deliver the level of functionality of other operating systems, IT executives would shun it even though it can be had for the cost of a download's bandwidth.
Where Linux does grab attention is in the areas that matter most to CTOs and CEOs: performance, reliability, security and total cost of ownership (TCO). More and more companies are moving from RISC-based platforms to considerably cheaper Intel-based servers—a platform on which Linux outperforms both Windows and proprietary UNIX OSs based on a variety of benchmarks (in some instances Linux outpaced UNIX even though it was running on fewer servers). Linux proponents also argue the reduced TCO extends to the desktop; however, this is influenced by administrative costs and support factors that make precise comparisons nearly impossible.
Whether you're pro- or anti-Linux, there's no question that the OS is at least as reliable (if not considerably more so) than Windows, and its open-source heritage and network-oriented design have actually yielded a more secure environment.
While the Linux kernel has suffered several security breaches during the past year, none have resulted in any notable loss of productivity because the open-source community spotted the flaws quickly and patches soon followed. Compare that to the damage caused by the numerous worms and viruses targeting holes in the Windows OS—one digital risk firm estimated the "MyDoom" worm alone cost businesses more than $22 billion worldwide—and Linux's security glitches seem relatively minor.
But even as Linux seemingly steamrolls the opposition, it has yet to attain a prominent role in mission-critical areas of the enterprise, particularly data centers. "Certainly Linux has achieved wide acceptance in the Web server space and in the applications space, but it's only recently that people are actually looking at the data center for data warehousing," notes Walter.
The numbers from the Information
Week survey confirm her observation:
A whopping 83% of companies who use
Linux use it primarily to run Web or
intranet servers—but only 20% turn
to it for storage software or packaged
enterprise applications. Indeed, even
companies who've begun to deploy Linux
have held back from entrusting it with
vital data.
A well-known travel company has migrated its online shopping applications to Linux running on clustered Intel servers, but it still keeps its crucial financial transactions stored on a proprietary database. And a Fortune 500 shipping firm plans to migrate its production databases, Web servers and other systems currently running in a RISC environment to clustered Intel servers running Linux—but it will keep its nearly 8TB data warehouse on a proprietary UNIX platform.
Why the hesitancy to migrate key enterprise applications to Linux? The problem can be summed up in one phrase: software compatibility. Twenty-three percent of the respondents in the Information Week survey said they had no plans to deploy Linux in the next 12 months; when asked why they weren't considering using Linux, nearly 70% said it was because their key enterprise applications don't run on Linux.
In February 2004, Harte-Hanks released the results of its survey of 1,970 participants from the CI Technology Database, which tracks IT infrastructure implementations. Twenty-five percent cited software compatibility as the biggest challenge to adopting Linux or expanding its use to mission-critical applications—and that figure jumped to nearly a third for respondents from a company's headquarters. Another 16% said that migration issues—which can also be viewed as a compatibility issue—presented the biggest challenge.
That attitude most likely won't change until decision-makers see major players in the enterprise application space who fully support Linux—and that's precisely what Teradata plans to do with the Teradata Database (beta testing will commence in the first half of 2005).
Walter is unabashed in saying that Teradata isn't the first data warehouse offering for Linux, but that doesn't mean that the company is late to the game.
"Linux is only now starting to be accepted in the enterprise space, which is where the Teradata data warehouse resides and performs. You simply don't see major enterprises running their data warehouse on Linux and trusting it to run their entire business."
What's more, none of the data warehouses currently running on Linux can match Teradata's performance. "Our competitors' databases that have been available for Linux for a while don't do data warehousing loads very well," Walter says. "Like we've done with Microsoft Windows, our Teradata architecture will take the core functionality of the Linux operating system and deliver industry-leading scalability, availability and, most importantly, performance for the data warehouse environment."
For businesses currently using Linux for everything but their data center, the release of the Teradata Database for Linux gives them the opportunity to enjoy the potential cost savings of an open-source OS as well as open-source applications, while benefiting from the streamlined IT efforts an enterprise-wide OS can provide. Walter notes, "Many companies wish to standardize on a particular operating system and want to leverage that across all applications, including the data warehouse."
Current Teradata users not running Linux might wonder if this release is a signal for them to switch operating systems, but they should instead see it as providing them with greater options in the development and deployment of data warehouse strategies. "The selection of an operating system should be the customer's decision, and the Teradata Database for Linux will give them much more flexibility in making that call," explains Walter.
She also says that one thing they won't have to worry about is training Teradata DBAs to use the Linux version of Teradata Database and its enterprise applications. The database will continue to provide users with the same performance advantages, reliability, availability and scalability that Teradata customers have grown accustomed to. The Teradata Database remains the same regardless of the operating system, so from an application perspective there should not be any difference; all the Teradata Database interfaces will stay exactly the same.
When it's all said and done, Teradata Database for Linux will create a unique win-win-win situation for businesses, software developers and the Linux community alike. It confirms that "the little operating system that could" is here to stay in the corporate world—provided Linux developers can find fertile ground for creating enterprise-class business applications that use the capabilities of the most powerful data warehouse platform on the market.
T
Stephen Poole has written about computers and technology for a variety of U.S.-based magazines since 1988.
© Teradata Magazine—September
2004
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