Don’t confuse bad Linux support for bad Linux

David M Williams
Wednesday, 02 July 2008 12:52

Opinion and Analysis

Turning back to Microsoft’s offerings we see a modern case study on Glidepath, an international company offering airport handling and sorting systems integration. The IT Manager is quoted as saying, “Deeper than the issues of performance, synchronisation and authentication was that Linux was costing a fortune in support.” He continues, “With the deployment of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, performance issues disappeared overnight.”

Clicking the link we can read more; Glidepath has been doing what it does well for over thirty years. If you’ve flown anywhere in the world chances are your baggage has reached you at the end thanks to Glidepath. They develop large and complex engineering solutions worth between 10 and 20 million dollars – and with that, rely upon design and engineering software and their company infrastructure to achieve their goals and produce their products.

Yet, it seems, the existing infrastructure didn’t meet business needs, it wouldn’t scale and, in fact, it was unreliable. Additionally, the support costs were unacceptable. By contrast, when Glidepath replaced the system wholesale with a Windows server and storage system they have found the performance issues to all disappear.

On the face of it, this sounds like a definite black mark against Linux. Let’s read on. Click the next link for the case study document itself. The contents therein portray a depressing environment. The IT Manager rightly points out that the company’s engineers have high performance needs. They can’t afford “to have the file server crash when preparing large, in-depth proposals,” and that’s a reasonable expectation to have of any infrastructure. Yet, Glidepath say, “it was crashing.”

Not unexpectedly, with regular file server crashes, staff began saving data on individual computers. Consequently, important company data was not being backed up at night because it was not on the central server. Nor could up-to-date documents be easily found by others, because again, the data was distributed about the network.

Glidepath continue with their litany of complaints. The Samba and Active Directory synchronisation was problematic. This implies that somewhere in the mix there were Windows Servers, it was not a Linux only shop. And perhaps that compounded the problem. The IT Manager continues, giving the choice quote that Microsoft used as the sound bite for the study: “Deeper than the issues of performance, synchronisation and authentication was that Linux was costing a fortune in support.”

Now, to my mind, having your file server crash is pretty bad. So if the cost of the support was a bigger problem then I’d be guessing it was pretty exorbitant. We don’t find out, but a single tiny paragraph yields far more information than its size would suggest. Almost as a throwaway line the case study says, “Because the integrators had customised the Linux system that was deployed, [the IT Manager] had to depend on them to solve support issues.”

And herein lies the problem. Reading between the lines, Glidepath had a complex heterogeneous environment. Their main file server was a Linux platform but Windows servers clearly were in the mix, perhaps for e-mail and web hosting and terminal services. The entire environment had been put together by an integrator. This integrator were virtually holding Glidepath hostage to an exclusive support arrangement. Yet the integrator had made a mess. After all, crashing file servers is abysmal.

Did Linux deserve a bad rap? And what’s the lesson?

CONTINUED