By: Jason Marquand
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Why should your company care about this?  How is your company going to benefit from this? 

There are two camps of operating systems that are commonly used for corporate entities.  You either fall into the Unix/Linux variant camp or the Microsoft camp.  For years this line has been blurred by necessity, and above all, return on investment.  Almost all corporations use Active Directory (AD) as their back bone for managing users, policies and providing mail services like Exchange that, for the most part, is the only game in town for keeping a corporate entity on track and wired into their business.  With the benefits that are bestowed upon a company by using AD, there comes a lot of cost.  Licenses for every server, desktop and laptop put into service, can stack up in cost quickly.  How do we avoid some of this cost without losing the tools that keep everything so well organized?

As we start to spool up Unix variant machines, whether you prefer Linux or Unix, that falls more into the arena of personal preference, more than differences in functionality.   Once you start to put these machines into service, it seems like they don’t really fit into the whole scheme of things and there is a break in how everything fits together.  In the marketplace, you cannot have this sort of divide requiring a learning curve for your staff or your clientele.  There needs to be a seamless layer of services users and clients never notice. The benefit of this is of course less cost for setup and integration, and less cost for your clients. 

But how do we get it all to play nice and work together?  Do I need a degree from MIT and a squad of elite IT ninjas to get this accomplished?  No, the tech is already there.  For years the Open Source crowd has been trying to get their tech into wider distribution.  Packages like Samba, Winbind and Open Directory have been around for a while and are just now reaching a level of maturity and ease of use and setup that will now make them far more marketable.   With the rise of usable Linux desktops that are now being shipped by Dell, IBM, ASUS and MSI becoming more and more popular, integrating the two is becoming more and more important a task to tackle.  More vendors will be jumping on this boat in the years to come.  This is even more believable since the release of Vista and the discontinuation of XP.  Companies can either switch to Vista with the new machines they purchase, and be forced to require more expensive hardware to run Vista.  It all just equates to a higher cost of doing business, and everyone will feel that burn.

One thing the Unix/Linux crowd has done remarkably well for decades is Homebrew solutions.  If you don’t know what this means let me explain it for you.  Homebrew is using cheap equipment and free open source software to do the job of a more expensive commercial of the shelf (COTS) product.  There are usually downsides to this, as you would expect.  Setup is more technical and some features are lost in the shuffle.  There is a greater learning curve as you have to hunt for support on your selected software and some parts, you have to fill in the blanks yourself.  But this is more and more becoming history.  The level of community input, and easily configured solutions are becoming a common place occurrence, since Unix/Linux packages have been refined.      

We’ve talked about the cost of doing business and that we can tie them together, but what is the actual benefit from using a Homebrew solution?   Every company should have a backup and archival plan in place to assure that nothing that is of great importance is ever lost.  Looking at COTS products a smaller startup will cringe and possibly need counseling to aid in the trauma that they will feel in the cost of these products.  We are after all in a recession and every dollar spent must have a value.  You can setup one of these Homebrew solutions relatively easy and be on your way.

But how am I going to get this to tie in with my existing network of Windows machines?  Active Directory is already there providing the back bone for the corporation.  It already allows for centralized user management.  Software like Samba and Winbind allow us to attach these Unix/Linux machines to AD.  This will allow your backup and file storage solutions to work together seemlessly.  Products like Open Directory are making it even easier to manage user access and file sharing from AD.  Working in an IT department I know that storage is an ongoing struggle and is never going to go away.  At least with the usage of these technologies, a solution can be put into effect, that only involves the cost of the hardware, and the ongoing cost of keeping it powered up and online.  That savings will equal higher profit for the company, and cheaper costs for the client.

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