Chapter 1: Introduction


Why Migrate?

In the 50-year history of the IT industry, there has been only one overriding constant: the continual presence of change, both in terms of the technology and the capability of computer systems. Few other areas in business have experienced such rapid development and often terrifying levels of obsolescence, with equipment that was purchased new at $10,000 barely able to recoup $200 a mere three years later ” a 98 percent depreciation rate.

The result of this continuing progress is that you as the IT decision maker are caught in a difficult situation. You can make no changes and risk that your systems will slip into obsolescence, or you can make a change and risk joining a computing trend that turns out to be an evolutionary dead end.

Background

Since the mid 1980s, corporate data centers have been moving away from mainframes running dedicated operating systems to mini-computers, often using one or other of the myriad flavors of UNIX. At the same time, the users experience of these systems has, in many cases, stayed the same, involving text-based interaction with dumb terminals or a terminal-emulation session on a PC.

More recently, IT managers have questioned this approach, and have been looking at changes in the UNIX marketplace and the increasing expense of being tied in to single-vendor software and hardware solutions. The growth of Linux as a lightweight version of UNIX has fueled this interest, raising the number of organizations that are considering a migration to alternative platforms.

While there may seem to be overwhelming reasons for organizations to consider migrating to Linux as the most obvious path , there are significant issues in taking this approach. When analyzed in depth, migration or coexistence with the Microsoft Windows operating system can make more sense in the long run, offering greater enterprise readiness and a more highly integrated future roadmap for application development and server support, along with quantifiable reductions in total cost of ownership (TCO).

The Changing Situation

The various implementations of the UNIX operating system have served industry well, as witnessed by the very large base both of installed systems and large-scale applications installed on those systems. However, there are increasing signs of dissatisfaction with expensive, often proprietary solutions and a growing sense that perhaps the concept of big iron has had its day ” in the same way as it has for most of the mainframes of the type portrayed in 1970s science fiction films .

One of the most extraordinary and unexpected successes of the Intel PC architecture is the extent to which this basic framework has been extended to encompass very large server and data center environments. Large-scale hosting companies are now offering enterprise-level services to multiple client companies at availability levels of over 99.99 percent on what are simply racks of relatively cheap PCs. Technologies such as clustering, Network Load Balancing, and Component Load Balancing (CLB) enable the personal computer to take on and match the levels of throughput, availability, and reliability of all but the most expensive big iron solutions and the supercomputers.




UNIX Application Migration Guide
Unix Application Migration Guide (Patterns & Practices)
ISBN: 0735618380
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 134

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