Linux slashes costs for bank giant

Andrew Butler, a vice-president at Gartner, said,

Linux has not yet matured enough to run the largest databases "You cannot run Linux on huge databases because it does not scale,"

What is it with these guys. He probably meant run Large DBs on Linux but aside from that maybe ask Oracle about running large scale DBs on Linux.

By "large" he must mean "in excess of a thousand nodes". (-:

But seriously folks, these reports really are just so much hot air. The practical statements from the banks are encouraging, clearly showing big takeup by extremely conservative users based on pragmatism not zealotry, but the sales figures are pretty much arbitrary. Not everyone buys servers with the OS software, and where in there does he account for people doing stuff like switching existing Sun and MS-Windows servers across to Linux by the simple expedient of popping in a free Debian or Mandrake (or FreeBSD) distribution? It's pretty obvious that going the other way can't be done legally, so any such conversions have to tilt towards FOSS and the vast majority would go unreported, probably even inside the organisation itself.

AC, I agree with your post however the notion that financial institutions are "extremely conservative users" is not correct.

IT is recognized as a significant competitive advantage in the financial sector and they are at the forefront of adopting new technologies. We are not talking about transactional services like retail banking etc. but pricing services characterized by Derivatives and the like.

At the bottom of this story there was a link touting Linux outpacing MS in sales: http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticle...

"Linux sales growth beats Windows"

Fine here are the numbers: 529 Million British Pounds and a 44% increase from last year for Linux. Whereas MS has "£2.8bn worldwide - an increase of 13.3% ...".

Seen so close together it should be obvious that just the simple growth of Windows sales is nearly half the total of current Linux sales. That certainly is not as impressive as a simple comparison of raw percentage differences.

The one very positive sign is that the units sold increase by only 27.4% for Linux servers. Moreover, this implies with the cost decreases (and software too) that the orders are for more muscular units. However, on a contrary note this may lend credence to the premise that Linux is primarily replacing older UNIX installations. While that well may be true it also implies that MS is being blocked from entering that area. And as a last consideration: Windows was a danger to UNIX installations with the former moving up to compete, now it will soon be time for the former installations to be the target of Linux that was always down market and size capable.