Butterfly effect

Let’s imagine I wanted to build a basic IT infrastructure for a small, medium or large sized company.  I would at least need to put in:

• A network
• Storage
• A virtualization solution
• Some application servers and desktops

I will stay away from free products based on Linux and some commodity servers, I will focus only on commercially supported products with proven reliability.

The network

While the big gorilla in the room is obviously Cisco they surely don’t have the most relevant operating system and this is visible in the fact that the company is no longer sticking to a single OS and is embracing Linux more and more. A company with a better defined operating system strategy is Juniper. Juniper is relevant because they managed to impose their OS all across their product line and maintain a steady release cycle while adapting to the changing market. Probably the key point is that Juniper’s OS in based on FreeBSD.

Storage

The storage market is a bit more fragmented with EMC, NetApp, HP,  IBM… EMC has a big portfolio of acquired products and most of them run a different OS so it’s difficult to make a judgment on them and I really don’t have enough information on HP and IBM products. However NetApp has a unified OS, the Data ONTAP OS which is based on Berkley Net/2  which is a form of Unix.

Virtualization

Virtualization can be achieved in multiple ways now (including HyperV from Microsoft) however for the purpose of this discussion I will choose Xen, an ex-free solution now embraced by Citrix (becoming free again). Xen is a Linux based solution that is used by big companies around the world (the most relevant example being Amazon’s Cloud)

Application servers and Desktops

The application servers and desktops are really business specific; while the first three can support pretty much any type of operation this one the call is more difficult to make. Big names such as Oracle, SAP and others are adopting Linux as the de-facto standard for their applications but I agree that it might take a bit of search to find a non-Windows solution for all business needs.

On a desktop level most people will frown at adopting Linux as a viable desktop operating system but that will happen more and more in the future. Looking over the neighbor’s fence we see Apple with it’s Mac OS X which is based on FreeBSD.  Since the admins should be pretty well trained by now on FreeBSD/linux and Unix (from supporting the previous three layers)  maybe it would just make sense to switch the whole company to Macs.

Microsoft, can you see this?