At the HP World Conference, Bob Panos, Director of Products for Sysix Companies, a national provider of IT business solutions spanning infrastructure, consulting and financing, advised companies evaluating the increasingly popular Linux operating system to consider infrastructure support issues and up-front performance testing of non-mission critical applications to ensure their companies are positioned to realize maximum value from a Linux investment.

"Over the past few years, we've seen Linux grow up from a 'new-age, share-ware' type of open source code into a more mature and legitimate operating system that can offer the reliability, scalability and stability of the trusted Unix environment at an excellent value," explained Panos.

"One of the main attractions to Linux is its ease of administration - it can offer a measurable labor and efficiency cost savings to many firms. A single person can administer Linux across multiple types of hardware. This is an attractive feature to a growing number of organizations who operate more than one brand of hardware within their computing environments." Panos added, "Today, with leading infrastructure providers such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun and Dell all introducing products pre-loaded with Linux, many technology managers are finding themselves at a cross-roads in determining whether Linux might be a value-add for their firms."

"To ensure Linux is a viable choice for the enterprise, the evaluation process should take a hard look at the level of infrastructure support they will receive from Linux-based systems," said Panos. "Support - not only for the Linux operating system, but also the applications that run on it, the associated hardware, storage devices, etc. - is a key issue. Compatibility within systems is critical to the computer systems which run all the operations of the business. As Linux is relatively new to mainstream computing, companies should make sure support is available from their technology providers. Handling this task internally would require sometimes significant additional resources and time, which adds hidden costs to the project."

End-users evaluating Linux should also test how the operating system can support key business applications, according to Panos. "An initial step in the evaluation process should be to test how Linux supports non-mission critical applications, such as a Web server, or the Q/A development function of the business," added Panos.

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