This Week's Enterprise Linux News

The Linux Foundation was in the Enterprise Linux news cycle this week. We released the results of our recent Enterprise End User survey in a report titled “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.” Thanks to everyone who filled it out. It’s a major contribution to the advancement of Linux to share your experiences with the OS.

We wanted to better understand the details on how the world’s largest and most technically advanced companies are using the platform. This helps inform us and our members on where to focus to help advance the platform. By filtering the nearly 2,000 responses by annual revenue and number of employees, we were able to analyze the trends among the world’s largest companies. The key findings have been widely reported and while some reinforced what we already knew, here are a couple data points I found particularly interesting:

* Migrations from Windows to Linux (36.6% of respondents) are surpassing migrations from Unix to Linux (31.4% of respondents). Not only is Linux starting to eat Microsoft’s lunch in servers, it became glaringly obvious as we went through the data that once IT managers and staff deploy Linux, they keep it and add more. It’s like my favorite travel tagline: Jamaica – once you go, you know. Yes, you certainly do.

* While seeing migrations to Linux increasingly come from Windows is good news, even more compelling is that 66% of Linux users surveyed are deploying the OS for brand new services. This indicates a very real shift away from legacy platforms and more confidence than ever in Linux.

We’re planning to share additional data based on the overall survey responses in the weeks and months ahead, so stay tuned.

Also worth noting this week was Microsoft’s ad acknowledging the threat of OpenOffice. If you didn’t think OpenOffice was relevant before today, think again. Too bad they also used the ad as an opportunity to repeat old and tired messages that have all been proven untrue. PC World reports.

Late this week Red Hat announced expanded features for its Red Hat Enterprise Messaging, Realtime and Grid Linux platform. Customers are using this platform to manage their private clouds and the new enhancements focus on performance, scalability and new management features. eWeek reports.

Lastly, the Data Computing Appliance (DCA) market is heating up with EMC openly challenging Oracle and IBM this week. With its Greenplum DCA, EMC says that its massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture delivers data loading performance of 10 terabytes (TB) an hour, 2X and 5X the rate of the competition. International Business Times has the details.
 

In an effort to capture notable enterprise Linux news and trends, The Linux Foundation will be highlighting some of the important milestones and announcements for enterprise Linux each week. We hope this is useful to our members and to the Linux.com community and we welcome your feedback and additions to these highlights in the comments section.