W H I T E P A P E R

I B M P o w e r L i n u x S e r v e r s : L e v e r a g i n g V i r t u a l i z a t i o n f o r

O p e r a t i o n a l E f f i c i e n c y

Sponsored by: IBM

Jean S. Bozman Randy Perry

Al Gillen

January 2013

E X E C U T I V E S UM M A R Y

As enterprises transform their datacenters for greater operational efficiency, they also

are working to make sure their systems provide the scalability and security needed to

adapt to changing business conditions. Business executives insist that these systems

ensure business continuity, guaranteeing that end users and end customers can

reliably address important applications and data.

Enterprises face formidable challenges in achieving their goals of controlling

operational costs (by acquiring systems that will work efficiently to keep those costs

in line with expectations) and meeting stringent service-level agreements (SLAs).

Linux, as an operating platform, has played an increasingly prominent role in the

solution. By explicitly focusing on optimizing Linux, IBM, with its Power Systems and

PowerVM technology, is enabling datacenters to use Linux to achieve both goals.

IDC's research, based on in-depth customer interviews, has shown how consolidating

Linux workloads on Power Systems actually reduces IT infrastructure and IT staff

costs even as it readies the environment for the higher levels of resilience that cloud

provisioning for business applications requires.

This paper examines the evolving role of Linux and its extended ecosystem in support

of production applications. It also highlights the financial experiences of some

customers who had deployed a variety of Linux workloads on Power Systems servers

rather than on x86 servers with a low initial cost of acquisition. IDC conducted

in-depth interviews with these customers to capture their costs of acquiring,

deploying, and operating those PowerLinux systems over a period of three to five

years. This document includes some of the results.

S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W

Datacenters are now adopting Linux more widely, expanding its range as a platform

beyond supporting the traditional Linux workloads of Web serving and application

development — and onto supporting a diverse portfolio of business applications

and databases. Today, Linux has become the foundation operating system for a wide

array of workloads running in organizations of many sizes — small, medium, and large.

Linux's expanded workload portfolio includes commercial applications and

high-performance/technical computing tasks. No longer confined to Web and

application development workloads (the primary uses in the late 1990s), Linux servers

are increasingly taking on all major categories of computing tasks, as covered by

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2 #239148 ©2013 IDC

IDC's annual Workloads studies, including business processing, business intelligence,

decision support, and analytics.

IDC's 2012 Workloads Study, based on data from 1,000 customer sites, shows the

change in the way customers are using their Linux servers. The annual Linux server

spend worldwide ($8 billion of the annual $53 billion in annual server market spend in

2011), while still supporting IT infrastructure, Web serving, application development,

and high-performance computing (HPC) business applications such as business

processing, business intelligence, collaboration, decision support, and analytics, is

growing more rapidly — 300% from 2003 to 2011 — and accounted for 37% of the

new Linux installs in 2011 versus 27% in 2003 (see Figure 1).

F I G U R E 1

C u s t o m e r A l l o c a t i o n s o f W o r k l o ad s o n N ew L i n u x S h i p m en t s ,

2 0 0 3 V e r s u s 2 0 1 1

Note: Business processing includes enterprise resource planning (ERP), online transaction

processing (OLTP), customer relationship management (CRM), and other such custom or

packaged business applications.

Source: IDC's 2012 Workloads Study

©2013 IDC #239148 3

G r o w i n g U p w i t h t h e I n t e r n e t . . .

Given its invention in the early 1990s, Linux grew up with the Internet and

rapidly supported Web-serving, proxy-caching, and Internet-style security. From the

beginning, Linux ran on an extensive range of hardware architectures. Starting in the

mid-2000s, it supported deep virtualization on those platforms. These capabilities,

enhanced in recent years, allow Linux to become a vehicle for workload

consolidation. The ability to support high virtual machine (VM) density levels on each

physical server permits many applications to run, side by side, on the same physical

hardware. Businesses benefit from this approach because higher VM densities allow

more work to be done in less datacenter space — and fewer server "footprints" make

it easier to manage large amounts of work without expanding IT staff as the work per

server scales up.

V e r s a t i l i t y i n I T I n f r a s t r u c t u r e

Linux shows its versatility in the types of servers it supports (in terms of the form

factors that can be used), which include bladed servers that can be added, as

needed, within a single chassis; rackmounted servers that provide new server

resources to rising user demand; and scalable servers that take on the largest and

most demanding workloads, such as large data warehouses. This means that Linux,

as well as the IT skill sets that support it, is applicable across the entire datacenter —

another factor that, in many sites, keeps IT staff costs within budget.

With this continued, widening use and the hundreds of thousands of improvements over

the years, Linux has matured from its early beginnings into a robust operating system

that shows great versatility and usability for many tasks. Perhaps even more a driver for

its adoption, the number of skilled Linux professionals has increased immensely.

Computer science students who become system administrators and programmers often

learn Linux first when they attend college, and as a result, the pool of developers, for

customer sites and application software companies, has expanded.

W o r l d w i d e L i n u x A d o p t i o n

The combination of available talent for both programming and system administration,

comprehensive hardware platform support (e.g., across x86, RISC, EPIC, and CISC),

and economy has led to worldwide adoption of Linux with deployments spanning the

Americas, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa, along with Asia/Pacific and Japan.

This widespread use of Linux and open source technologies has moved Linux into a

strong position as a major platform for business. A number of key market factors bear

this out:

Linux has become a key part of virtualization and bladed infrastructure. IDC

supply-side research shows that Linux servers and Linux operating system

distributions are growing, in units, and are generating $8 billion in revenue on an

annual basis. IDC notes that Linux and Microsoft Windows are the two most

frequently deployed operating systems in distributed computing based on VMs.

Linux servers are also heavily adopted in the HPC and technical computing

spaces, in telecommunications worldwide, and in network-based arrays of

4 #239148 ©2013 IDC

distributed application servers. The combination of virtualization and bladed

infrastructure is often seen as highly granular control of workloads, and the ability

to move them from one blade to another is important as computing flexes and

adjusts to the changes in business demand for computing resources.

Programming and administration skill sets are available. Many developers are

familiar with a wide array of languages (e.g., Java, PHP, and Ruby on Rails) and

programming technologies for Linux and open source software and middleware —

all of which run on Linux. The wide-ranging support for programming languages

invites new development for Linux servers.

Many ISVs now offer enterprise applications for Linux. The number of Linux

software vendors has expanded greatly in the past 10 years; today, there are

more than 2,500 worldwide. In addition to the branded packaged software titles

that run on Linux servers (e.g., IBM, Oracle, SAP, and others), many customers

design and use custom programs that were developed on Linux platforms.

VM densities are increasing per physical server. Linux use has grown

dramatically for what IDC is calling "phase 2" deployments of virtualization. (Phase 1

was the early adoption for resource utilization. In contrast, phase 2 includes more

demanding enterprise workloads in the virtualized environment, which require more

resources per VM [memory and I/O]. Phase 3 is leveraging virtualization for the

purposes of enablement of cloud computing deployments.) Following the earlier

adoption of virtualization for improving resource utilization, now there is a move to

consolidate more demanding applications and databases onto smaller numbers of

Linux servers for the sake of efficiency (e.g., power/cooling, maintenance of physical

servers, and reduced use of datacenter real estate). This is true across multiple

types of server platforms.

Support for enterprise capabilities. In recent years, the major Linux

distributions (e.g., Red Hat and SUSE) have worked to enhance support for

enterprise-level availability and now include that support in the enterprise

distributions of their software. Support for security is also included, meeting

government-level standards in the Americas, Europe, and Asia/Pacific.

M a r k e t P r o o f P o i n t : L i n u x G r o w t h b y t h e

N u m b e r s

IDC supply-side data shows that the Linux market extends to a broad range of

components — from Linux server hardware to Linux operating system distributions,

programming (application development) tools, middleware and system infrastructure

software, and application software. IBM's POWER-based platforms, along with the

company's rich ecosystem of Linux extensions, have played a prominent role in this

Linux environment.

The overall industry ecosystem for Linux and open source software is expanding

more rapidly than the ecosystem for traditional operating systems. Figure 2 illustrates

the revenue growth rate for the entire ecosystem of Linux operating systems, open

source software, and associated products from 2009 to 2016.

©2013 IDC #239148 5

This is the broad ecosystem of hardware and software that IBM's PowerLinux

systems are designed to tap when it comes to providing technology stacks for Linux-

based business solutions. By leveraging Linux on its Power Systems platforms, IBM

is making the POWER-based platforms accessible to large numbers of developers,

system administrators, and IT staff who are familiar with the Linux ecosystem and

who work with it extensively.

F I G U R E 2

L i n u x a n d O p en S o u r c e E c o s y s t em : W o r l d w i d e R e ven u e f o r

H a r d w a r e , P a c k ag ed S o f tw a r e , a n d S e r v i c e s S u r r o u n d i n g L i n u x

Source: IDC, 2013

I S V S o l u t i o n s

ISV Ecosystem. When IBM started shipping PowerLinux servers in the early 2000s, the

selection of commercial applications available for deployment on PowerLinux was

limited. That did not pose a problem for the custom applications written by corporate

programmers for use in their own companies. However, IBM recognized that more

ISV programs would need to be made available on PowerLinux — and it instituted an

IBM-funded program to jump-start certification of Linux applications for use on

Power servers. Code-named Chiphopper, the program proved to be popular and

resulted in more than 1,000 Linux x86 applications being made available on Power

Systems. The IBM program still exists — more ISV programs have been shipped on

6 #239148 ©2013 IDC

Power Systems — and the total number of commercial Linux applications certified for

use on Power tops 2,000.

Demanding Business Applications. ERP systems have been widely deployed by

customers who have IBM Power Systems running Linux. These types of systems have

been refined over a period of years by collaborative work between hardware and

software engineers. Through a partnership between SAP and IBM, SAP modules have

been optimized to provide high performance on both POWER-based servers running

Linux and the IBM PowerLinux line of branded servers.

IBM works directly with SAP developers, and with the developers of other ERP, CRM,

and HR systems, to ensure that these types of applications perform well on

POWER-based servers. IBM tests performance of Power Systems (based on POWER

processors) running Linux by using a battery of benchmark tests, including those from

well-known industry testing groups, such as TPC and SPEC.

The range of ISV workloads running on the PowerLinux servers is broad, numbering

thousands of applications certified to run well on Power Systems. For example, IBM

PowerLinux servers host Oracle applications and databases. They also host IBM

WebSphere middleware products such as WebSphere Message Broker, MQ for

Linux, or Enterprise Service Bus. These components in turn enable multiple types of

packaged and custom applications, allowing them to integrate preconfigured, certified

capabilities. This avoids the need for one-off, customized tuning and optimization of

an application at the customer site. Migration from other platforms is also supported:

For example, by leveraging WebSphere, which runs on all major server platforms,

customers are able to move applications from non-Linux platforms to Linux platforms

with a minimum of cost and time for IT staff.

Business Analytics. Customers often have to consider what kind of infrastructure will

best support their analytics workloads. Sometimes this results in a scale-out

configuration; sometimes it leads to a scale-up configuration. On IBM Power Systems,

capacity is available to work with databases with multiple terabytes (TB) of transactional

data. IDC notes that Power Systems are scalable, with up to 16 sockets per server but

also can scale out to clusters of 8–16 servers, or more, depending on configuration.

Some clusters, such as those used in the HPC space or scale-out analytics, are very

large, encompassing 90 or more individual server nodes. Importantly, Power Systems

support many ISVs' products, along with the latest editions of IBM Cognos and SPSS

and third-party analytics software titles. IBM's PowerLinux servers have been optimized

for the open source scale-out model of computing based on Apache Hadoop, which is

then leveraged by IBM software such as InfoSphere BigInsights to analyze many

petabytes of "data at rest." Another type of deployment leverages IBM-optimized

InfoSphere Streams on PowerLinux servers for analyzing "data in motion."

One example of Power servers supporting deep analytics, and doing real-time problem-

solving, is the IBM Watson system, which became widely known for its performance on

the TV game show Jeopardy! In this use case, Watson tapped multiple terabytes of text

data to find real-time answers to the Jeopardy! questions while playing against two

human contestants — proving that machines doing real-time analytics can compete with

human intelligence and win. Now, IBM is applying the same technology to analytics

problems in a number of vertical market spaces, including healthcare (for rapid

diagnosis) and financial services (for real-time fraud detection).

©2013 IDC #239148 7

Open Source Infrastructure Services. Many service providers, including cloud

service providers, are building out IT infrastructure with Linux. Linux has long been

used as a strong platform for open source applications running across large numbers

of volume, low-cost servers. With the new generation of PowerLinux servers, the

same can be done: With PowerLinux, the VM density supported on each Power

System physical server can increase to 20, or more, per processor, which is generally

higher than typical x86 Linux deployments. In multiprocessor, multisocket servers, the

total number of VMs supported can exceed 40, depending on workload requirements.

This capability provides high-density deployments that allow customers to consolidate

Linux workloads onto fewer server footprints than would otherwise be the case. For IT

organizations, this reduces the power/cooling requirements and datacenter real

estate requirements (space in the datacenter), which allows customers to delay or

avoid costly datacenter buildouts that are driven by the need for more capacity.

IDC's Business Value survey studied respondents who had deployed Power Systems,

providing substantial data about their deployments. It measured the costs associated

with deployment of new systems and the operational results — including reductions in

IT operating costs, costs related to system downtime, and employee productivity

improvements associated with those deployments.

L i n u x a n d D e l i v e r i n g B u s i n e s s S e r v i c e s

So what does all this market adoption mean for the IT executive? Many enterprises

are either planning or implementing a strategy to standardize and decouple their IT

resources from the applications and users they serve. This approach is, in short, a

cloud computing strategy. Lead implementers of this decoupled, virtualized approach

find a few critical factors for successful outcomes. Successful strategies depend on a

virtualization infrastructure that can provide the scale and security that the various

workloads required to run in the enterprise demand. Success also depends upon

implementing an easy-to-use self-service interface that enables enterprises to deliver

services to their customers quickly while reducing operational costs (e.g., IT staff,

maintenance, and power/cooling).

End users and customers need reliable business services that can be accessed over

the Web, over the cloud, or over a corporate network — and accessed using devices

ranging from mobile phones to tablets and PCs.

To deliver on these goals, enterprises need to address the following areas:

More demanding SLAs and quality-of-service (QoS) agreements. Customers

need to be able to count on access to applications, whether they are in a

midmarket business (100 to 1,000 employees), a large enterprise (1,000+

employees), or a very large (10,000+ employees) enterprise. In addition, an

unlimited number of end customers may be logging onto a Web portal, asking to

access the company's business services. Any delay in doing so could impact the

company's revenue, profits, or corporate reputation.

8 #239148 ©2013 IDC

Energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is a top priority for datacenter managers.

They say that it is top of mind and have cited it as a priority for several years

in IDC studies. IDC data shows that energy use is a key contributor to total

operational costs — and, as such, it is singled out as a target for cost reduction.

Various approaches have been employed to address energy costs in the

datacenter, including hot aisle/cold aisle designs, isolation of "hot" servers, and

the use of ambient air when outside air conditions meet computer room operating

parameters (such as during off-summer months) — all of which allow servers to

run with less air-conditioning, thus reducing cooling costs. Servers that minimize

heat dissipation are also prized for their contributions to energy efficiency.

Datacenter real estate. The efficient use of "real estate" in the datacenter is key

to benefiting from the reduction of operational costs. Housing fewer servers per

square foot is an important way to reduce total heat output — and that, in turn,

reduces overall energy-related costs. It is a form of cost avoidance in that it can

help postpone, or delay, future expansion of a company's existing datacenters.

Workload consolidation. The ability to consolidate application and database

workloads onto fewer server "footprints" than would otherwise be the case is

another way to contain costs — including both system costs and IT staff-related

costs. Having fewer servers to maintain is a way to contain IT costs in terms of both

maintenance and actual hours worked. In the past, many applications were

assigned to specific "dedicated" servers, but today, they could be run more

efficiently if they were consolidated on fewer servers. Today, processors are faster,

memory capacity is greater, and storage is more accessible and physically closer

to the server using it than it was five or more years ago, making consolidation more

attractive to customers.

Support for advanced management capabilities. Highly virtualized infrastructure

needs advanced management capabilities, both to keep track of all of the workloads

(running on physical servers and virtual servers) to be managed and to move

workloads quickly and seamlessly throughout the virtualized infrastructure. ISVs and

the open source community have provided deep levels of support for broad and

comprehensive management of physical and virtual servers running Linux.

L i n u x , V i r t u a l i z a t i o n , a n d C l o u d C o m p u t i n g

How does Linux fit into this discussion of the movement to decouple and virtualize

datacenter resources? The well-known characteristics of Linux as a ubiquitous,

abundantly supported, and easily virtualized operating system make it an attractive

ingredient of these cloud datacenter strategies. Increasing the number of applications

that can run as virtualized instances plays a critical role in meeting the types of

resilience and efficiency goals outlined previously.

©2013 IDC #239148 9

Organizations prepare their applications for cloud computing by supporting them in a

fully virtualized computing environment. By presenting "software stacks" that can be

provisioned, on demand, virtualization supports cloud computing. This approach allows

flexibility through the ability to provision more resources, based on changing levels of

user demand, and provides business agility, via the ability to adapt to changing

business conditions (without rearchitecting the datacenter).

Virtualization improves resource utilization through the more efficient use of

computing resources. The use of VMs isolates workloads from the individual server

node, avoiding the interruption of work that would occur in the event of a node failure.

Virtualization allows more work to be done in a side-by-side fashion, supporting more

applications and databases in the same physical space. The maturity of the

hypervisor is a key factor in providing advanced virtualization, with higher VM

densities per physical server, and better management of workloads as they run

across the physical server. Organizations virtualizing industry-standard Linux images

(e.g., Red Hat, SLES) on Power Systems have seen utilization rates climb from an

average of 34% to over 70%, resulting in more cost-efficient and reliable operations.

For these reasons, many see virtualization technology as a stepping-stone to

deploying cloud capabilities — either private clouds (within the firewall) or public

clouds (outside the firewall), or a combination of both (hybrid cloud deployments).

The reason for this is clear: Virtualization allows workloads to become more mobile

so that they can be moved, or shifted, to alternate server resources if required.

This, in turn, provides the IT flexibility needed to deploy software to meet user-based

demand for cloud computing. The result is agility for the business unit, which can

scale up IT resources, as needed, to meet seasonal deadlines and time-of-day peak

demand periods and then wind them down when demand ebbs.

Linux's support for multiple hypervisor offerings, which are already in place and have

been adopted across the enterprise, make it an attractive means to all of these ends.

It also prevents a rip-and-replace strategy for multihypervisor datacenter sites where

Linux-style management software is used.

L i n u x f o r I B M P o w e r P l a t f o r m s

IBM offers a combination of server-based solutions for datacenters that run Linux,

including the following systems: IBM Power Systems, IBM System x x86 servers, IBM

iDataPlex blades, IBM Pure Systems for converged architecture, and IBM zEnterprise

mainframes — each of which aggressively enables and supports Linux virtualization.

IBM Power Systems, which are based on POWER processors, include products

ranging from entry-level volume servers with one or two sockets to midrange servers

with four or eight sockets and high-end systems with 16 or more sockets. This

includes systems deployed for both commercial uses and high-performance

computing uses (e.g., financial services, manufacturing, and government).

10 #239148 ©2013 IDC

I B M P O W E R - B a s e d P o w e r S y s t e m s

IBM's Power Systems are based on POWER processors from IBM. They can run

Linux, alongside IBM AIX Unix and IBM i operating systems, supporting workload

consolidation across the datacenter. Specifically, these systems offer:

Support for POWER7+ processors in IBM's Power Systems. When IBM

announced the POWER7+ processors in October 2012, it said it would ship them first

in the Power Systems 770 and Power Systems 780 high-end servers. In early 2013,

IBM announced that it will add POWER7+ to all of the models within the Power

Systems product line, including the PowerLinux 7R1 and 7R2 volume servers.

Virtualization software. IBM PowerVM (IBM hypervisor for virtualization) offers

a secure and resilient virtualization environment built on the advanced RAS

(reliability, availability, and serviceability) features, extreme scalability, and

leadership performance of the IBM Power Systems platform.

Management software. IBM SmartCloud Entry for Power Systems enables

datacenter managers to quickly deploy self-service provisioning of virtualized

workloads with a simple interface that provides oversight while increasing IT

efficiency and lowering administration costs.

IBM PowerLinux Systems

More recently, IBM has begun to offer a line of branded PowerLinux servers, each of

which has been optimized to run Linux workloads — including applications and

databases and Web workloads that would otherwise run on Linux x86 servers.

IBM developed the PowerLinux servers to optimize Linux's performance on POWER-

based systems. These servers leverage POWER's inherent capacities and the IBM

PowerVM hypervisor's virtualization capabilities — including micropartitioning, memory

sharing, virtual I/O for virtualized networks, and virtualized storage — to pool resources

and optimize their use across multiple Linux VM instances. This technology creates high

(60–80%) resource utilization rates for Linux, an approach that offers important

operational cost benefits in the form of reduced maintenance and power/cooling costs

through efficient management of Linux workloads on fewer server footprints.

New PowerLinux Server Models

Specifically, IBM has introduced three new PowerLinux models: PowerLinux 7R1,

PowerLinux 7R2, and PowerLinux p24L system boards for bladed system

deployments. The 7R1 and 7R2 are low-cost Linux-only rackmounted servers priced

to compete with x86 servers from other vendors. They are a good fit for Web-enabled

workloads, for network-oriented end-to-end applications, and for running both custom

applications and packaged applications supporting critical business services.

These systems are compact and can be used in infrastructure-heavy deployments to

reduce the datacenter "real estate" needed to support workloads, which in turn reduces

power/cooling costs within the datacenter or computer room. The PowerLinux p24L

system boards fit into the IBM PureFlex integrated systems (running Linux on

POWER7+ processors). A total of 14 compute nodes are housed within a single 10u

chassis, supporting high-density deployments within the datacenter.

©2013 IDC #239148 11

S u p p o r t f o r L i n u x W o r k l o a d s

For Linux customers, IBM's strong support for Linux means that a wide range of Linux

applications, many of which were originally designed to run on x86 servers, can now

be deployed on Power Systems to gain the following:

Scalability, with up to 20 VMs per POWER7+ processor, and the ability to scale

up to 16+ sockets per Power System and to scale out via Linux-based clustering

software, supporting hundreds of individual Linux server nodes (More scalable

platforms have enabled IT organizations to meet the growing needs of their

businesses and reduce their compute and networking footprint by up to 60%.)

Availability, with more than four nines of uptime (99.99%) per server platform

(Organizations consolidating on Power Systems were able to reduce unplanned

downtime by 50%+.)

Security, with hardware supplementing the software-based security already

delivered in the Linux distributions

Management, the ability to consolidate workloads for efficient management

The use of highly virtualized Power servers, which leverage IBM PowerVM

hypervisors, makes it possible to host dozens of workloads on a single server. A high

degree of consolidation for separate workloads improves operational efficiency in

Linux deployments within the datacenter. Consolidation helped organizations reduce

their operational cost per workload by 50%.

C u s t o m e r P r o o f P o i n t s : H o w L i n u x

A p p l i c a t i o n s H a v e G r o w n " E n t e r p r i s e "

IDC researchers have encountered a variety of diverse Linux implementations that

convey the flavor of adoptions. Examples include:

U.S. federal agency. This large agency moved a series of custom Linux

workloads from a compendium of x86 systems arranged into clusters or grids

onto a consolidated Power System that ran the workloads more efficiently.

Power Systems provide advanced virtualization capabilities, which help

customers manage Linux and open source workloads efficiently on fewer server

"footprints" than is possible on many other types of Linux systems.

European auto-service system. Deployment of PowerLinux 7R2 systems

helped a large European car services company scale up its resources for an

online reservation system that schedules yearly inspections of customers' cars.

An online portal allows customers to self-schedule their appointments. The new

PowerLinux servers took the place of older x86 servers that did not have enough

capacity to support the amount of customer demand the company was seeing for

its online sign-up system.

12 #239148 ©2013 IDC

Chinese transportation system. Linux frequently takes the place of older

servers that are used to manage arrivals/departures at municipal and provincial

train stations. In this case, Linux and open source software has been widely used

to support custom applications in transportation and selected ISV programs that

serve the transportation industry.

Korean retail company. This firm acquired four PowerLinux 7R2 rack servers

with V7000 storage as part of an infrastructure buildout project. This kind of

infrastructure project is leveraging knowledge of Linux and open source — widely

available among university graduates and software programmers — as large

commercial companies extend Web-based infrastructure to support ecommerce

and Web-based transactional workloads.

F i e l d R e s e a r c h R e s u l t s

Importantly, our research indicated that these customers experienced significant

benefits by transitioning and consolidating workloads on Power Systems (see Figure 3).

Specifically, they increased productivity for IT and employees, reduced opex

(e.g., reduced downtime), and could do more with the same number of staff.

Companies consolidating Linux onto Power Systems experienced savings in a

number of categories, including server and network cost reduction; licensing fee

reduction; and avoidance of costs associated with IT staffing, datacenter facilities

expansion, and power and cooling.

Without consolidation, these costs would have increased because larger numbers of

physically separate servers would have been needed to support all of those

workloads and to support all of the end users accessing the servers. End-user

productivity was enhanced as the reduction in downtime ultimately meant less lost

productivity due to system failures or downtime.

©2013 IDC #239148 13

F I G U R E 3

I T C o s t S a v i n g s a n d Im p r o vem en t s D u e t o C o n so l i d a t i o n o f

L i n u x o n P o w e r

Notes:

All values are per year (12 months).

All values are per 100 connected users. We define connected users as the number of users

actively linked and interacting on the infrastructure network.

All $ values are in units of $1,000.

Datacenter IT Staff cost refers to the cost of IT staff time to manage and implement all

aspects of datacenter operations.

The Software License category sums the fees for software licensing and provider

maintenance and support.

The Lost End-User Productivity category refers to the user's lost productivity due to

system/application outage and unavailability.

The Server and Networking category refers to the cost of servers and switches and cabling

network equipment of the infrastructure.

The Facilities and Power category sums the cost for power and cooling, datacenter space,

etc.

Downtime refers to system/application outage and unavailability causing lost user

productivity.

Source: IDC's Business Value survey of sites that had deployed Power Systems, 2012

14 #239148 ©2013 IDC

The major enterprise applications, such as SAP, are able to run on many types of

servers, hosted by many types of operating systems and processor architectures.

However, earlier trends toward highly distributed computing led to the use of many

dedicated servers running just one application module, or the use of multiple servers

running the same application, for purposes of redundancy and availability.

In many cases, this approach kept applications close to the end user, but it did not

take advantage of improvements in high-speed networking and the ability to

consolidate workloads onto more scalable servers for more efficient operation.

Today, customers have a wide range of deployment choices, and a number of

customers have decided to consolidate some — but not all — of these enterprise

applications onto scalable servers for central site management and to reduce ongoing

operational costs associated with maintenance, repeated software upgrades and

security patches, and the need to maintain large numbers of small servers, many of

them distributed over multiple sites.

C H A L L E N G E S A N D O P P O R T U N I T I E S

Like all systems companies, IBM faces challenges in the marketplace. It must keep its

technology on the cutting edge of competitiveness, refreshing the hardware and

software frequently. Beyond that is the need to explain the business benefits of the

technology stack to line-of-business (LOB) managers who are focused on the

business, finances, and costs.

In the Unix server space, IBM is competing with two longtime Unix system providers

— HP and Oracle (which acquired Sun Microsystems in January 2010). Although the

overall Unix server market is shrinking — and was at the $12 billion revenue level in

2011 — IBM has been growing market share compared with its competitors and has

garnered more than 50% market share in the Unix space. In recent years, many of

the applications that formerly ran only on Unix systems have been made available for

use in the $8 billion worldwide Linux server market. This has increased the total

available market for Linux servers and enhanced the overall Linux ecosystem for

suppliers of hardware, software, and services.

IBM supports Linux across all of its server system platforms, including Power

Systems, IBM System z, and the IBM System x line of x86 servers. In addition, IBM

supports deployment of Linux onto its System z series of x86 servers and blades and

also onto its line of integrated systems: PureFlex, PureApplication, and PureData.

IBM's PowerLinux servers support a wide range of applications and databases and

are ready for deployment across the Web, application, and database tiers of

customers' datacenters. They are also being deployed in hosting and service provider

sites to support critical applications on behalf of end customers who access those

workloads across the Internet. This means that the servers address a wide range of

deployment scenarios: enterprise datacenters, midmarkets, and service providers,

including cloud service providers.

©2013 IDC #239148 15

C O N C L U S I O N

Linux increasingly offers an attractive platform for the class of business applications

normally run on other traditional high-end operating systems. As companies

recognize Linux's appeal and run the platform more extensively, they will achieve

significant efficiency and resilience improvements by consolidating virtualized Linux

instances on larger systems. IDC found that this type of Linux consolidation resulted

in savings of over 50%.

The IBM Power Systems line has a new processor, the POWER7+, as the engine in its

Linux systems product portfolio. Linux is an operating system that reaches across all of

IBM's server product lines — IBM System z, IBM Power Systems, IBM System x,

IBM System z, and IBM System z zBX x86 servers. In that sense, Linux is a unifier of

systems across the datacenter — helping end-to-end applications span multiple

computing tiers and supporting end-to-end workloads for the datacenter and cloud

computing. It also allows customers to pick the right platform for their current set of

Linux applications, with the knowledge that they could easily move to another platform

later if their needs change.

Power and Linux have been combined in IBM server products for more than 10 years,

and substantial optimization of this hardware/software platform has taken place in

recent years. The wide adoption of Linux in the technical and commercial communities

means that it is highly useful to programmers/developers, system administrators, and

service providers across the board. By making a range of software tools available to IT

organizations using Linux, IBM is making it possible for many businesses to keep

operational costs in line and to leverage Linux and open source in their use of

production applications and databases.

Rather than put off capital expenditures and expand server instances or extend

server life cycles via a buy-and-hold strategy, organizations that are faced with sharp

budget challenges should consider selectively upgrading their servers to the latest

available technology. As part of this process, they should target the workloads that

would benefit most from workload consolidation, including Linux workloads running

across the organization and deployed for a variety of use-case scenarios.

C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e

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Copyright 2013 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden.

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