WHITE PAPER Leveraging SUSE Linux Enterprise and HP Platforms

WHITE PAPER

Leveraging SUSE Linux Enterprise and HP Platforms for Business-Critical Workload Deployments Sponsored by: HP and Novell

Al Gillen Jean S. Bozman July 2009

IDC OPINION

Linux has come a long way in the past decade. Considered to be little more than a curious phenomenon by enterprise customers 10 years ago, Linux is increasingly becoming a platform of choice for business-critical application deployment today. This growing confidence in Linux comes from a well-earned reputation for stability and reliability, broad hardware support, and a growing application portfolio.

Adoption by real customers gives color to this trend. IDC finds that customer stories of business-critical deployments have become relatively easy to find. Customers are placing considerable business reliance on Linux, and the operating system, when deployed on enterprise-grade hardware options, performs well in this role.

Research presented in this IDC White Paper highlights the growth of business- oriented workloads that are seeing deployment in Linux environments. But there is more to the story than application types being deployed. It's the larger story of how the Linux ecosystem is evolving and maturing, which is accelerated through partnerships between Linux distribution vendors and hardware OEMs. IDC is seeing more instances of business-critical workloads moving over to the Linux platforms.

Business processing, decision support, database, and collaborative workloads are continuing not only to ramp in share but also to grow as the overall volume of Linux shipments increases. The downturn the industry is currently experiencing is expected to be a short-term phenomenon, which will give way to growth of Linux deployments aboard physical machines and, increasingly from this point forward, aboard virtual machines.

The story of deploying Linux in business-critical deployments is brought to life in this IDC White Paper by two end customers — the Brazilian Navy and Infonet Nederland. The experiences of these innovative organizations color the story around the trends that we have long been watching.

IN THIS WHITE PAPER

This IDC White Paper takes an in-depth look at the use of Linux as a commercial

Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA P.508.872.8200 F.508.935.4015 www.idc.com F.508.935.4015 P.508.872.8200 01701 GlobalUSA Framingham, Street Headquarters:MA 5 Speen solution in business-critical environments. It offers a deeper review of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and HP's portfolio of standards-based server solutions and how the collaboration between these two major industry players lowers the barriers for adoption among existing customers and among potential new customers. Included in this paper are two customer case studies that illustrate the deployment of business- critical solutions aboard Linux.

SITUATION OVERVIEW

New operating systems emerge infrequently, and when they do, establishing credibility for business-critical tasks is a challenge that typically takes years — often a decade or longer — to address. In the interim, new entrants tackle opportunities they can address and begin to establish a beachhead from which an expanded market presence can be developed.

The emergence and adoption of Linux fit this model. After being introduced to a community of developers in the early 1990s, Linux spent a decade growing into an enterprise-capable role. By the early 2000s, numerous commercial support providers were backing the product and Linux had begun to expand its application portfolio. The emergence of enterprise-oriented distributions in 2003, which had enterprise-grade support services and the long life-cycles that large customers expected, brought the technology to a new level.

Finally, Linux has been successfully ported to what is today the broadest portfolio of hardware architectures ever seen by any commercial server operating system. Linux is available not only on the pervasive x86 platform but also on HP's Itanium-based Integrity product line, IBM's System z mainframes and Power Systems (formerly called Systems p and i), as well as the SPARC architecture as sold by Sun and Fujitsu Ltd.

As indicated in Figure 1, Linux's growth trajectory first captured momentum on the software side of the market, but by 2002, the hardware market had begun to accelerate to deliver a growth profile similar to that of the overall Linux server operating environment market. As we move toward the end of the current decade, the market has reached an equilibrium point where server hardware shipment growth and Linux software shipment growth have converged at a similar rate.

However, the growth in the use of enterprise virtualization software is once again creating a disconnect between Linux software growth and hardware growth rates.

Worldwide Linux Server Operating Environment Shipments, 1998–2008

3,500

3,000

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500

0 Subscriptions/deployments (000) 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

Paid Linux Server OS (Enterprise) Paid Linux Server OS (Other) Non-paid Linux Server OS Linux x86 Servers, units (000)

Source: IDC, 2009

The Benefits Customers See in Linux

The benefits associated with a Linux deployment have not gone unnoticed by customers. Take the Brazilian Navy as an example. The Brazilian Navy has been deploying Linux for business-oriented enterprise applications for some time and recently began to move one of its most critical business-class workloads over to the HP Integrity servers from HP's Business Critical Systems business unit.

The Brazilian Navy's Financial Management Sector has a 40-year history of driving its IT solutions forward to leverage modern technologies, starting with mainframes and traditional host servers. The Brazilian Navy's Financial Management Sector is responsible for business-oriented coverage, including personnel payments, material and logistics support, payroll, and internal financial management.

According to Brazilian Navy Commandant Marisa de Oliveira Santos Amaro, CIO of the Brazilian Navy Finance Directorship, about six years ago, the organization developed a migration plan that would take the Navy's Financial Management systems from a mainframe-based solution to a Linux solution supporting an Oracle 10G database. The plan was to implement the Oracle 10G database across 7 HP servers configured into two clusters.

©2009 IDC #218897 3 The organization, which today has a collection of about 60 servers, including the IBM mainframe and x86 and Itanium-based systems from IBM, HP, and other vendors, processes about 500,000 batch payroll transactions per month and has experienced a peak of 10,000 access requests in a single month's time to the hosted systems.

The Brazilian Navy had been using SUSE Linux Enterprise for years, and the acquisition of SUSE by Novell only strengthened that commitment. Even its IBM mainframe, which the organization plans to phase out over the next few years, runs its applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise.

In fact, according to the CIO, about 80% of the distributed infrastructure in the Brazilian Navy's Financial Management Sector is running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) from Novell. VMware is used as a virtualization solution on the x86 servers to increase utilization rates and the overall efficiency of the Brazilian Navy's operations.

The decision was made to deploy HP's Integrity product line because of the scale and performance of its Itanium-based servers and because of the enterprise orientation of that product line and the scalability those products could offer in conjunction with Oracle Database 10g to support its business applications. This move was part of the Brazilian Navy's broader commitment to deploying solutions from HP.

Linux as an Enterprise Solution

The example of the Brazilian Navy illustrates the confidence customers have in Linux- based solutions today. No longer is Linux considered a solution mainly for low-risk infrastructure deployments and low-scale applications. Much of the credibility associated with Linux performing at enterprise-level expectations has come in the past five years through improvements and new features designed to improve reliability, availability, and scalability.

As shown in Figure 1, the acceleration of enterprise distributions of Linux, which started in 2003, was accompanied by an acceleration of customer purchases of enterprise-quality server hardware to support Linux, as indicated by the black line in Figure 1.

Bringing high-end commercial applications to an operating system generally requires the following supporting factors:

A strong history. Customers want to be confident that the operating system, in conjunction with the underlying hardware architecture, has an adequate history of delivering performance and reliability at the caliber required for enterprise deployments. Having Linux distribution ISVs and hardware OEMs working closely together helps to optimize this integration.

Enterprise-grade support services. When Linux initially emerged as a commercially supported product, it did not offer the type of support services that enterprise applications require. That is, it typically did not offer 24 x 7 x 365 support, and often the support was limited to the operating system itself, with no process in place to resolve issues that bridged the operating system and the

4 #218897 ©2009 IDC application layers. Linux has matured significantly, and numerous commercial Linux distribution providers now offer enterprise-oriented support programs that deliver round-the-clock assistance along with a problem-resolution escalation process that will resolve issues that bridge the operating system and the application portfolios. Support services are increasingly available from a single point of contact for the application and the operating system and, in other cases, for the operating system and the hardware.

Long life cycles. Closely related to support services (and making enterprise- grade support more practical in the first place) is the extended life cycle that enterprise Linux distributions offer today. When customers deploy an enterprise Linux distribution, they enjoy a long life cycle for that distribution, with at least 5 to 7 years of mainstream support — and up to 10 years of total life-cycle support. Through this life cycle, customers can expect to see compatibility maintained for the Linux application programming interfaces (API) set so that application compatibility will be consistent throughout the patching life cycle of Linux. Further, in some cases, customers can expect that new technologies (such as support for new hardware features) will be back-ported to the existing distribution to maintain the viability of the distribution in the longer term.

Portability. Customers have learned that portability is an important attribute for software, which gives them better flexibility and negotiating leverage. Linux has established itself as the premier platform from a portability perspective because it is available today on nearly every enterprise-grade hardware solution on the market, including x86, RISC, EPIC (Itanium-based platforms), and CISC-based mainframes.

Application support. Linux has become a tier 1 platform for many application ISVs, particularly for ISVs that had previously offered Unix solutions. While these ISVs have typically continued their support for traditional Unix solutions (including IBM AIX, HP's HP-UX, and Sun Solaris), their next-generation focus has increasingly shifted to supporting Linux distributions to achieve a broader base and faster growth.

Scalable hardware. The Linux story is not complete without a fully scalable hardware story to accompany the software story. This part of the story is well covered, from both the scale-up perspective and the scale-down perspective. There is a lengthy list of server OEMs that support Linux server operating systems as a tier 1 solution that is available preinstalled and includes OEM support services in addition to the Linux distribution ISV services. HP, for example, supports Linux as a key solution aboard its HP ProLiant (x86 server) product line and aboard its Integrity (Itanium) product portfolio.

Availability. Although last on this list, availability — along with scalability — is one of the most critical attributes of a business-critical solution. Availability is measured in multiple dimensions, including the capability of the system to remain up for extended periods of time, leading to a 99.9x% rating of uptime, where the number of decimal places defines the relative reliability. Availability can be increased through availability extensions that provide system-cluster configurations.

Business-Critical Applications

The Brazilian Navy's decision to use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on HP Integrity platforms for its next-generation database environment illustrates what is happening on a broader basis in the industry: Organizations are finding that Linux has proven its ability to support business-critical applications, and accordingly, commercial deployments for these high-end applications are increasing.

Figure 2 shows results from IDC's ongoing Server Workload studies, which are modeled against Linux server hardware shipments. This view shows the primary workloads deployed on Linux servers between 2002 and 2012, with projections shown in two-year increments.

We can see that well-established workloads such as Web and IT infrastructure remain a relatively static portion of Linux deployments — capturing just over 50% of Linux server deployments, with a slight decline through the period depicted.

By comparison, business and commercially oriented workloads, including business processing and decision support (which include ERP, CRM, and other common business management solutions), grew through the period, from 13% to 18.6%, an increase of more than 5 percentage points. This growth is the result of slight shifts of workload share from established workloads, including IT infrastructure and Web infrastructure (the workloads that were the first ones where Linux was deployed, starting in the 1990s), and a reduction in the "other" category.

The growth of Linux as a platform for business-oriented workloads appears to be due largely to the migration of existing Unix deployments in combination with organic growth of Linux deployments in these same workload areas. It is worth noting that, from an application development perspective and a system administration perspective, Linux environments are similar to Unix environments.

Database workloads are not explicitly broken out from the decision support and business intelligence categories shown in Figure 2 because database workloads are an integral part of many other workload types. That is, virtually all business-oriented workloads have a database component, as do many Web infrastructure workloads and collaborative workloads.

It is important to note that a flat share of a given workload does not indicate a decreasing opportunity. As the overall size of the Linux opportunity increases, each segment grows in terms of the number of units placed into that workload as well. The segments where shares are growing are simply expanding at a faster rate than the segments where shares are stagnant or are in decline.

Workload Distribution on Linux Servers, 2002–2012

100 90 80 70 60 50 (%) 40 30 20 10 0 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012

Other Collaborative Application development IT infrastructure Web infrastructure Decision support Business processing

Source: IDC, 2009

Oracle and SAP Support

IDC notes that there have been some significant commitments to Linux by key ISVs, including two of the industry's largest — Oracle and SAP.

Oracle has made clear that it sees Linux as a critically important platform moving forward. Oracle made a commitment to Linux, including bringing its own Linux distribution to market in 2007, so that its customers could have one-stop shopping for full-stack support. While this has been a successful strategy that has been embraced by Oracle-centric organizations, much of the industry has continued to take a best-of- breed approach, and as such, deployments of Oracle database and application solutions continue to be successful aboard competitive Linux distributions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise.

©2009 IDC #218897 7 Likewise, SAP has embraced Linux in a big way. In fact, SAP has partnered with Novell to establish a priority support program, whereby there is a single support number that provides 24 x 7 support for both companies' products. SAP now recommends SUSE Linux Enterprise as its preferred Linux distribution.

HP Support for Linux, Open Source Software

Following some initial HP Labs activities in the Linux space in the late 1990s, HP recognized the growing importance of Linux as a new operating system platform, focusing on Web infrastructure and on HPC in the early years.

In the early 2000s, HP formed an organization specifically charged with accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux across its multiple hardware product lines, and that organization led to the deployment of Linux on HP ProLiant and HP Integrity servers. In 2003, HP launched an indemnification program designed to protect customers from possible litigation associated with intellectual property infringement, should any such litigation arise. In the five years since that indemnification program was announced, it has yet to be tapped by any HP customers.

In July 2008, the company released the HP Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) under the GPL 2 open source license. HP's intention was to help accelerate the work occurring in the community to build a new core file system used in Linux, called Btrfs. While the Linux community continues to develop a new file system for Linux, the release of AdvFS into GPL helped accelerate this development through its documentation and having code examples. In addition, HP drove the launch of the FOSSBazaar (free and open source software bazaar) in conjunction with partner organizations such as The Linux Foundation, Google, Novell, and others.

In addition, over the past 24 months, HP has organized a team to contribute to kernel development efforts focused on performance and scalability tuning, for the kernel as well as memory management and I/O. These developers collaborate with other Linux contributors, including Novell.

HP AND NOVELL

HP and Novell have shared a long-standing relationship around SUSE Linux Enterprise and, before that, for Novell NetWare. HP offers joint customer factory installations of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop customized to customer requirements.

As a company, HP has broad experience in business-critical server deployments through multiple product lines that address the requirements of enterprise customers. HP's platform portfolio includes the HP-UX and Tru64 Unix products, as well as the NonStop Integrity servers. In the market segments served by those platforms, availability and reliability attributes are table stakes that are mandatory to simply make it to a customer's short list of systems to consider.

Novell leverages a legacy of delivering enterprise support for NetWare customers with its Linux support programs today. In addition, the company has expanded its

Other benefits the companies bring to the table together include:

Testing. HP and Novell leverage HP's experience in shipping hardware intended for business-critical environments by using test suites developed by HP to ensure operating system reliability on HP hardware platforms.

Management. The companies bring a healthy suite of management products to the table, with HP's Insight software portfolio consisting of the Insight Control suite and the Insight Dynamics Virtual Server Environment (VSE) management software portfolio and with Novell's PlateSpin and ZENworks management solutions.

Multiplatform solutions. HP offers a range of platforms with Linux, including the HP ProLiant x86 servers and HP Integrity (Itanium-based) servers in blade and rack form factors. These systems are engineered to support business-critical applications, with the HP Integrity servers including advanced hardware-level RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features that provide data protection and reliability at the processor level. Novell correspondingly provides Linux code for each of those architectures. SLE is available on a total of five different processor architectures.

Collaborative solutions. Novell and HP have a history of collaborating on solutions for customers. One example is the expansion of Novell's Identity and Access Management (IAM) portfolio, which was aided by Novell's purchase of a subset of HP's IAM business. Another example is the recent collaboration around SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability, Novell's high-availability clustering extension for Linux servers.

Services. Novell's 500+ Linux engineers join HP's worldwide network of 6,500 trained Linux professionals and 16 response centers around the world to deliver technical services for joint HP/SLE production deployments. Services offered include IT support, consulting, technology services, managed services, outsourcing, and cloud.

Virtualization and interoperability. SLES includes an integrated Xen hypervisor, but in addition, SLES offers strong interoperability with hypervisors from Microsoft and VMware. Novell has invested in paravirtualized drivers for SLE 11, which results in performance improvements aboard Hyper-V and VMware ESX. This effort is directly related to Novell's interoperability work with Microsoft, which gives customers a more integrated set of management tools from both Novell and Microsoft for mixed Linux/Windows and mixed Xen/Hyper-V environments.

Applications. Novell has been working to expand its application portfolio. Today the company cites over 3,500 applications that are available for SUSE Linux Enterprise, ranging from high-end solutions such as SAP and Oracle to smaller- scale solutions applicable for small and medium-sized businesses.

The Economic Impact

Economic downturns have a tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions, and punish solutions that are not cost competitive or that are out of synch with industry trends. IDC research finds that Linux users are clearly satisfied with their choice to deploy Linux, and during trying economic times, the potential for those same customers to ramp up their deployment of Linux is strong.

Given the severity of the current economic downturn, and the potential for a lengthy and gradual recovery that will likely be measured in terms of years rather than months, Linux is in a desirable competitive position to emerge from this downturn as a stronger solution with a key position in the industry.

A worldwide survey by IDC capturing data on current Linux users' usage plans for and satisfaction levels with their Linux server operating systems finds that customers are highly satisfied and are ready to deploy additional Linux instances as a direct action in response to budget concerns or budgetary reductions being imposed by corporate management. While budget concerns sweep across all geographies and business verticals, North American businesses are among the most pessimistic when it comes to increased IT spending or even spending at prior-year levels.

Infonet Nederland Looks to the Future

When Infonet Nederland needed to select a platform to manage its internal business operations, it chose from a short list. HP was the hardware OEM that already had secured preferred status for the company's internal purchases, so the decision was largely limited to choosing the Linux distribution that would complement the HP ProLiant servers the company planned to use. The business application being deployed was SAP, which led to a decision to use SUSE Linux Enterprise, not surprising given SAP's stated preference for SUSE Linux Enterprise and the joint support program offered by SAP and Novell.

Infonet Nederland provides multinational corporations with services in the domain of communications, networks, and datacenters. These services are based on smart tools, which model and optimize the complex relationship between applications and a converged global network. Headquartered in The Netherlands, Infonet Nederland, a subsidiary of Dutch telecom provider KPN and part of KPN International, has been providing integrated services to about 120 corporate customers for more than 35 years.

The organization offers two sets of services. First, the company offers a hosting service for customers' IT needs within Infonet Nederland's own datacenter, supporting the customers' hardware and software solutions on a contractual basis. The second business is specifically built around providing telecom and WAN services to its multinational customers. It provides this service with a surprisingly small staff of about 60 people.

10 #218897 ©2009 IDC The company made a deployment of SAP that supports the 2,000 sites around the world covered by its WAN service delivery. The requirement to support 2,000 multinational sites led to a substantial amount of customization of the SAP software during the installation and initial configuration.

The decision to use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was driven by two factors: Linux is the preferred operating system for the company, and SUSE Linux Enterprise is the preferred distribution. Factoring in the SAP/Novell Priority Support Program was an advantage as well, since the program offers customers such as Infonet Nederland a single point of contact for support on both products.

The Role of Virtualization

The economic downturn of 2009 will likely be viewed as an inflection point in the history of IT deployments. There will likely be an acceleration toward adoption of standardized architecture across the industry, allowing virtualized servers to host many workloads on the same IT infrastructure and to move workloads across that infrastructure, as needed, to support changing business processes. The standardization layers will include standardized blade chassis; x86 servers; a mix of operating environments, including Linux and Microsoft Windows; and virtualization software.

Infonet Nederland's operations illustrate this very type of activity, which is part of the company's next-generation IT infrastructure. Infonet Nederland recently embarked on a virtualization initiative built upon the VMware ESX hypervisor. Today, the internal infrastructure owned by Infonet Nederland consists of 11 physical machines, mainly HP ProLiant DL380 and DL580 class systems. These servers are hosting between 40 and 45 guest operating systems.

Most of the guest operating systems are hosted on three physical servers. The guest operating systems include Linux — mostly SUSE Linux Enterprise Server but with some Red Hat Enterprise Linux — with the balance being Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The virtualized systems are still only moderately loaded, with utilization rates currently hovering in the 30% range.

Defying conventional wisdom, Infonet Nederland virtualized all of its applications, including the largest, most transaction-intensive solutions. The company recently deployed the version 6.0 suite of SAP applications and virtualized it from day one.

CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES

Selecting Linux for supporting business-critical applications is a good solution for some customers, but it is not a universal solution. We see the following challenges and opportunities existing for SUSE Linux Enterprise and HP hardware:

Challenge: Application portfolio. Applications for Linux have been increasing quickly in recent years, with SUSE Linux Enterprise growing its application portfolio dramatically. However, the overall Linux application portfolio continues to lag the Windows application portfolio in terms of number of total solutions.

©2009 IDC #218897 11 Opportunity: Unix operating systems. The growth of the Linux ecosystem has evolved both by capturing net-new market revenue as the market grows and by siphoning off revenue previously spent on other operating systems. Given the natural synergy between Linux and Unix and the large installed base of Unix servers, IDC expects this platform to present a long-term source for future deployments of Linux to take on some of the workloads from retiring Unix installations that were based on aging server hardware, especially as next- generation high-performance and energy-efficient systems are embraced.

Challenge: Virtualization software. The increased availability of virtualization software is changing market dynamics for some products. In particular, virtualization delivers some inherent level of availability, and that reduces the necessity of traditional enterprise-quality hardware and software.

Opportunity: Nonpaid Linux. The Linux market is segmented into two nearly equal-sized opportunities, one for paid, commercially supported Linux and the other for nonpaid, noncommercially supported Linux. This large ecosystem creates a greater overall footprint, which is a positive for the greater Linux opportunity. In particular, it is easier to sell an enterprise-grade Linux solution to a customer using nonpaid Linux than it is to sell Linux to a Windows customer.

THE REST OF THE STORY

The Brazilian Navy's Experience

The Brazilian Navy ended up considering a number of factors, including the cost of acquisition for software and hardware products, the number of licenses that would be required, the overall scalability of the solution that was required, and the ability to have a flexible solution. That analysis led to Linux being the center point of the organization's strategy. Expectations are for a reduction in operational cost directly attributable to Linux. The ability to move to modern hardware and reduce the number of processor footprints also factors in to the cost expectations.

Commandant Marisa de Oliveira Santos Amaro offers this advice to others in the industry:

Study the compatibility matrix for hardware and applications as you relate all the elements in this set, and build a matrix of compatibilities.

Choose the right Linux flavor. During evaluation, use it in small projects to gain experience, and test it well before signing.

Develop a road map for your Linux team, build a team with different skills, and merge the systems operation and management knowledge with the database knowledge. Try to give the team a higher level of synergy to support Linux. Linux is a powerful operating system, but it requires management to run it well.

Infonet Nederland: Linux Has Proven Itself

Infonet Nederland's portfolio of business solutions includes not only selling WAN services but also hosting customers' equipment. This equipment is a potpourri of hardware, operating systems, and software.

The systems being hosted — roughly 200 servers in total — come with a service level-commitment. The company believes that it understands how to deliver on service-level commitments, and that is part of why it is so positive about Linux.

According to Jeroen van Hemel, operations manager at Infonet Nederland, Linux has proven itself. He says of deploying Linux, "It would be a no-brainer for me. And it is. That is why we have it. No negative aftereffects. [Linux] does a great job."

CONCLUSION

Customers are increasingly moving business-critical workloads to Linux platforms. Business processing, decision support, database, and collaborative workloads are continuing to ramp in share and grow in number as the overall volume of Linux shipments increases.

As the industry climbs out of the economic downturn, IDC sees potential for recovery that ramps through 2010. Often, IT organizations plan future deployments during recessions or downturns. Given its flexibility of deployment, its ability to run on multiple hardware platforms, and its support for business-critical and mission-critical workloads, Linux is expected to take on an increasing number of enterprise workloads in coming years. The current wave of virtualization/consolidation is making IT datacenters more efficient — the next wave of new deployments will need to host a broader array of workloads on that virtualized IT infrastructure.

Consider the customers highlighted in this IDC White Paper: the Brazilian Navy and Infonet Nederland. These are customers that are deploying SUSE Linux Enterprise aboard HP hardware for solutions that are, for them, business critical. These customers are representative of a larger trend taking place in the industry, as Linux takes its place among the enterprise solutions that customers use to solve their real- world business challenges.

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