HP: Linux ready for mission-critical applications

Linux is ready to take on a more serious role in enterprises, a senior HP executive has said.

Randy Hergett, HP's director of engineering for open source and Linux organisation, said at the Gelato Itanium Conference & Expo in Singapore on Monday that Linux is ready to be used in some mission-critical applications, despite a perception that there are gaps in areas such as manageability.

"[Linux] is ready for most applications," he said, noting that there are telecommunications companies running mission-critical databases on Linux, and overall adoption levels are ramping up.

Citing a HP-commissioned global study conducted by market-research company GCR earlier this year, Hergett said that three out of five decision makers were ready to deploy Linux for mission-critical applications within the next two years, while one in five saw that happening in five years' time.

According to the study, which surveyed more than 600 decision makers who were using some flavour of Unix, security and reliability were the top two concerns in a mission-critical environment.

On whether Linux can satisfy these two requirements of security and reliability, Hergett said: "It does... From a security standpoint, we think Linux is actually very secure."

"With reliability, I think it's not as robust yet [as HP's own iteration] or some of the other proprietary Unix systems, but it's making great progress," Hergett added.

On whether the availability of different flavours of Linux will affect its adoption for mission-critical applications, Hergett said he did not think so.

"In some ways it actually gives those decision makers more flexibility and more choices to choose from," Hergett explained, adding that Unix has several iterations too, and decision makers are "used to having that choice".