Server Operating System Growth
Strategic Planning Assumption: Only three growth server operating systems (Windows, Linux and AIX) will exist through 2008 (0.8 probability).
Gartner expects several key market share trends through 2008:
– Only three growth server operating systems (Windows, Linux and AIX) will exist through 2008 (0.8 probability).
– Only three growth server microprocessor architectures — IA-32, Itanium Processor Family (IPF) and Power — will exist through 2008 (0.8 probability).
The Linux Road Map
Strategic Planning Assumption: Improved scheduler, memory management and threading will add a 20 percent to 30 percent performance boost in the new version of Linux 2.6 (0.8 probability).
The Linux road map is not locked to specific milestones. It depends on collaboration from OSS projects, hardware and software vendors, the Linux distributors and Linus Torvalds' kernel organisation. A rough estimate of some of the upcoming enhancements shows increased performance improvements through kernel efficiencies, such as queue scheduling, thread handling, asynchronous I/O and clustering with failover.
These enhancements should result in scaling with demonstrated production performance to eight-way symmetric multiprocessing configurations in 2004, as well as eight- to 16-way systems in 2004/2005.
These improvements could open the way to wider Linux adoption, but scaling won't be enough. The operating system must have the proven reliability characteristics of current Unix, mainframe and other proprietary operating system environments before many data centre managers will feel comfortable.
For example, the operating system must provide error detection and diagnostics, work reliably supporting multiple and mixed applications, and have good recoverability and error handling from logical hardware problems.
The Linux operating system must have longer release cycles with stable version levels for ISVs to minimise their maintenance and upgrade costs. Therefore, it is more likely that Linux will continue to have predominant adoption in multinode and replicated deployments, with a longer adoption cycle in back-end, mission-critical applications.
Action Item: Consider Linux for its strength in horizontal clusters, but avoid replacing robust back-end systems until further progress is made on its evolution in the 2005 to 2007 time frame.
