Companies Want to Cut Down on OS Platform Sprawl

One of the major drivers of the server business these days is server consolidation. By this, vendors generally mean that companies have installed dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual servers to run distinct workloads, and now that servers are less expensive, they are consolidating some of these workloads onto bigger ones. Having fewer physical servers lowers the absolute cost of server administration for companies. But if research from Unisys is any indication, platform consolidation may be the next big thing.

Platform consolidation, as we are using the term, means cutting down on the number of server operating system platforms that a company uses. Server consolidation more times than not has meant using sophisticated operating system workload managers and logical/virtual partitioning technologies to bring workloads on one kind of operating system platform, but on many distinct servers, onto one or a few servers of the same type of operating system. With platform consolidation, companies are going to get rid of a whole slew of platforms and go down to a fewer number. This should simplify the administration of servers and cut costs in as much that expertise for controlling many different operating systems can be done away with.

While the data is a bit stale, a survey of IT managers done by Unisys in March 2003 (which Unisys has just made public) shows the kind of shift in preferences for operating system platforms that is underway. Companies move very slowly, so platform consolidation patterns are very likely more or less the same now as they were back in March. These things take time.

Unisys did online surveys of IT managers and was able to get responses from 730 of them. Because Unisys has a big business selling Windows Datacenter Server from Microsoft on its Intel-based ES7000 enterprise servers, and it is targeting Unix customers in particular with these machines, the company’s questions were slanted toward the plans of Unix shops, and its demographic data was skewed toward the customers who have Unix as well as other platforms. The Unisys data seems a little light on manufacturers and distributors (who have long since installed and still use proprietary midrange machines like the IBM iSeries and the Hewlett-Packard AlphaServer) and a little heavy on telecommunications firms. The data also skews a little bit toward bigger companies, with 27 percent of respondents having $1 billion or more in annual revenues. Nonetheless, the installed base data for operating system server platforms and the trends that it found in its survey are still intriguing. The table below shows what companies say they have installed (numbers add up to more than 100 percent, since companies have multiple operating systems).

According to the survey data, the average customer had four different operating systems in its data center. Companies with $100 million or less in annual revenues generally had Windows (96 percent), with Linux a close second (59 percent). Another 58 percent reported having a variant Unix, and 16 percent reported having Novell NetWare. Another 29 percent said they had a different operating system, such as OS/400, OpenVMS, or z/OS. At bigger companies, with between $101 million and $1 billion in sales, 95 percent of respondents reported they had Windows in the data center, followed by 53 percent with Linux. A lot of these bigger companies report higher use of Unix (Solaris, 55 percent; HP-UX, 31 percent; AIX, 17 percent; plus other variants making a showing) and higher use of proprietary platforms (OS/400, 26 percent; OpenVMS, 10 percent; NetWare, 19 percent; and MVS, 17 percent). Among companies with more than $1 billion in sales, the instances of all operating system installations and the absolute number of different platforms rise further still. According to Bill Jefferis, director of migration solutions for Unisys, a company with $100 million or less in sales has 2.6 operating system platforms in the data center on average; companies with $101 million to $1 billion in sales have 3.8 operating systems on average; and companies with more than $1 billion in sales are averaging 4.5 operating systems in the data center. None of this counts the proliferation of other server platforms in departments or satellite sites; this is just in the data center.

With the advent of cross-platform development environments like Java, the cross-platform application suites from third parties, and the long-established availability of cross-platform relational database management systems, now would seem like a good time for companies to start thinking about simplifying their operating system platforms. And that’s exactly what Jefferis says is happening, and he says further than Unisys is going to try to surf the wave of the adoption of Windows in the data center in order to push more of its ES7000 systems. If you have Unix, OS/400, MPE, or OpenVMS in your shop, Unisys and Microsoft will be calling on you more aggressively.

Not everyone can simplify their operating system platforms so easily, of course. This is particularly true for companies that have spent a lot of money developing customer applications for one platform or massively customizing a set of third party applications for a platform. (The lock-in amounts to the same, either way.) Nonetheless, Unisys found in its survey that 32 percent of those polled do plan to move to a single operating system in their data center. Of those, 56 percent said that they would be standardizing on the Windows platform, which has got Unisys pretty fired up. Another 16 percent said they were going to standardize on Linux, which is a pretty big number for such a relative newcomer to the platform wars. Some 9 percent said they would be standardizing on Solaris, and another 7 percent said that they would standardize on HP-UX. The remaining 12 percent said they would pick another platform.

Why this move to standardization? Well, companies figure that they can save money. Some 80 percent of the respondents who said they were going to consolidate to a single operating system also said they expected it to lower costs, and another 75 percent said that it would reduce staff training and skills requirements. A little more than half of the respondents who were going to standardize on one platform said that they expected it to help them implement better security on their servers and would improve their disaster recovery operations. Some 40 percent of respondents said that they were going to replace unsupported platforms.

Among the remaining companies that did not have a plan to standardize on a single operating system platform in the data center, about half did indicate that they intended to consolidate onto fewer operating system platforms. The bigger the company, the stronger the desire to consolidate platforms. This stands to reason, since bigger companies tend to have more platforms and, hence, more headaches. Fully 90 percent of the companies who said they were consolidating platforms said that they were going to pick Windows as one of their platforms, and another 53 percent said that Linux was going to be one of the platforms. Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX were also popular choices, and IBM’s OS/400 midrange platform and the z/OS-OS/390-MVS triumvirate for the IBM mainframe also saw decent representation. What it looks like from the Unisys data is that vendors are picking their core application operating system and then opting for Windows and Linux for other infrastructure and application workloads.

Source: Unisys. Reprinted with permission.

Customers seem to be consolidating Unix platforms in particular, if the Unisys survey is any indication. Where companies once had many different kinds of Unix, they now appear to want to get down to a lower number of variants. Microsoft and Unisys would like to believe that many of those companies that have Unix will jump to Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition for big jobs or Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition for midrange jobs. But it seems more likely that many will consolidate on a single Unix platform or move many workloads to the current Linux 2.4 and the future Linux 2.6. With Sun standing behind Solaris for X86, which it was not doing when Unisys did its survey, Solaris has a real chance of making a comeback in the data center. Many companies have deep experience with Solaris, but they have been disappointed with the cost of Sparc servers relative to 32-bit Intel machines. Within a few months, Sun will start selling its own servers using the 64-bit Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, and its Solaris 9 for X86 software already is supported on most of the core 32-bit Pentium and Xeon servers made by rivals Dell, IBM, and HP.

Citing internal Microsoft estimates, Jefferis figures that there are some 1.6 million Unix servers installed and running in the world, with about 252,000 of them being machines with eight or more processors. Many of the Unix machines that were acquired during the dot-com build-out are either aging or coming off lease, so those footprints are in play. There are probably some 500,000 OpenVMS machines in the world, and another 500,000 OS/400 servers, too. The mainframe base is somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 footprints. These are all very large targets for any platform vendor to chase, and chase they will. But they will be practical, just like Unisys is. “We are not in the religious conversion business,” explains Jefferis. “I’d rather send my sales people golfing. But we are targeting the people who already want to standardize.” To that end, Unisys has established an “independence alliance,” comprised of itself, Microsoft, Intel, disk maker EMC, Indian offshore consulting firm InfoSys, and European consultancy Cap Gemini Ernst & Young to help customers port to Windows, if they want to. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young has a pretty large OS/400 and Unix migration practice, incidentally.

The Unisys survey data clearly shows Windows gaining momentum and Linux building support in the data center. This is exactly what Windows and Linux proponents have been hoping for, and what other platform providers have been either fearing or quietly accepting. This is also reflected in the sales pattern for the ES7000s. According to Jefferis, 20 percent of the ES7000 sales to date (it has over 1,000 systems installed) are part of a Unix migration to Windows; about another 25 percent are ports from other midrange platforms, such as the IBM OS/400, HP MPE, and HP OpenVMS platforms. However, 250 installs against an installed base of over 1 million midrange machines is not even noise in the data (although it is hundreds of millions of dollars for Unisys). There is not as yet a mass exodus of these platforms. It is more like a continuous trickle.

What Unisys is not going to do, however, is jump on the Linux bandwagon. At least not yet. Unisys has tested and certified SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.0 to run on the ES7000, and that’s what it is suggesting companies with Linux need to do on their iron. “We are keeping our fingers on the Linux pulse,” says Jefferis. “The boys in the labs are looking at all of the Linuxes, and we can quickly shift gears if we need to.” Both IBM and HP have a server consolidation strategy that put Linux and Windows beside their own proprietary environments on the same platform, and this will be a good countermeasure against any attacks that Microsoft and Unisys bring to bear on their customers. It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out.