After conducting a functional evaluation of Linux as a commercial server operating environment, technology assessment firm DH Brown Associates Inc has found that Linux provides a credible alternative in four main areas. These are: file and print sharing or web server applications; appliance-class systems; internet service providers; and compute nodes in technical computing clusters. The main advantages DH Brown identified for Linux are avoiding vendor lock-in and minimizing cost.
On the other hand, the company says conventional Unix operating systems and Windows NT still retain the lead for meeting overall enterprise computing requirements such as scalability. For example, the two distributions examined – Red Hat Linux 5.2 and Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 – offered minimal support for ecommerce features, compared with those provided for conventional Unix systems and Windows NT.
The news is not all bad. Bill Moran, the author of the report, praised Red Hat especially for its Java Virtual Machine implementation and linuxconf system management tool. He also noted that both Red Hat Linux and Open Linux provide virtually transparent file-and-print sharing services to Windows PCs through Samba.
