Linux
ALIVE AND THRIVING
Martin Percival of Red Hat looks back at 25 years of Linux in the data centre.
W
hen Linus Torvalds
introduced Linux to
the world on 25th
August 1991, he
received a mixed
response. In fact, a majority were
sceptical as to his operating system’s
chances of survival. Twenty-five
years later, Linux is alive and thriving,
embedded in our daily lives in ways
we could hardly imagine in 1991
– powering smartphones, TVs, video
consoles, network routers, on-demand
services, social media, VoIP and more.
Over the years Linux has upturned
traditional processes, norms and
technologies, creating previously
unimagined opportunities to transform
entire industries. Arguably one of
its greatest legacies is the rise of
professional open source, thanks to
the acceptance and uptake of Linux
in the enterprise. This effort has been
spearheaded by organisations that
work in communities to adapt Linux to
make it smoother, more secure and fit
for business needs.
Linux and the data centre
Today Linux can be considered the
‘bedrock’ of enterprise computing
and is at the core of most data
centre innovations. Before the
creation of Linux, enterprises had
to rely on specialised hardware,
unique to specific flavours of UNIX,
for the foundation of their data
centre’s infrastructure, but this was
an expensive solution. In contrast,
Linux grew in tandem with the
rise of commodity x86 hardware,
bringing processing power to the
user without the drawback of a
locked-in proprietary model. This
has enabled enterprises to install
greater numbers of machines at lower
cost, and facilitate cloud computing,
where a multitude of servers, rather
than a single dedicated host, provide
services to end users on-demand.
To truly see the impact of Linux
on enterprise computing, one need
look no further than Amazon and
Google, two common names in the
data centre today, but two companies
that would look completely different
without Linux. Amazon Web Services,
now nearly synonymous with public
cloud computing, has more than one
million customers using its vast arsenal
of on-demand services, with Linux
providing the flexible, scalable base
of its service mix. While an AWS-like