The phrase "mission critical" is one of the more misused marketing terms in the IT industry, frequently cited to describe operating conditions that might more accurately be defined as “business critical”, “enterprise-ready”, or just plain “important”. In fact, a true mission critical application should be defined as one which is vital to the successful completion of an entire project, the mission of an organization, or in extreme cases, the protection of human lives. In the long-running debate over the technical maturity of Linux, its ability to handle such applications has frequently been cited as a critical milestone separating it from other more established operating systems.
With the shipment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, following Novell’s release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 last summer, the leading enterprise Linux distributions have completed their transition to a new technical foundation, bringing important new capabilities related to virtualization, security, and clustering to the Linux platform. It is still too early to tell how much the technical gap has closed between Linux and alternatives such as UNIX in terms of functional capabilities. However, it is clear that user confidence in deploying critical workloads on Linux has reached a significant new threshold. Some leading-edge users are now using Linux in a way that can truly be classified as mission critical in the most conservative sense of the term.
At its recent Brainshare conference, Novell revealed that the German air traffic control agency, DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung, which controls air traffic and flight plans for the entire German airspace, uses SUSE Linux for managing runway information. The agency plans to deploy all future air traffic control systems on SUSE Linux. Meanwhile, IBM is collaborating with Red Hat and Raytheon to produce a modified Linux kernel that can support real-time Java applications. The U.S. Navy is an early adopter of the system, and plans to use it for speeding the development of mission-critical combat systems as part of the Total Ship Computing Environment for its DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer Program. In both of these cases, Linux will be hosting applications of which the importance to their users is hard to exaggerate. At some point, lives will probably depend on them.
UNIX continues to evolve, increasingly offering functions that were formerly only available for mainframes, which have traditionally represented the industry’s gold standard for robust operations. Many users still view UNIX as the platform of choice for hosting critical workloads that demand the highest levels of scalability and reliability. However, Linux developers are steadily chipping away at the most significant functional gaps that limited its suitability for these workloads in the past, allowing it to progress far beyond the “edge of network” domain where it has traditionally thrived. The impressive wins by Novell and Red Hat prove that user perceptions about Linux’s limitations are gradually crumbling as well.
We are a medium sized county government on the west coast and our 911 dispatch system runs on Suse Linux. Lives are on the line every day here. Not exactly a military weapons system but still mission critical for us and our taxpayers.
Posted by: Kennon | April 24, 2007 at 12:25 AM