Microsoft Widows is still the dominant player based on raw numbers but looking at the bigger picture, the momentum is behind Linux for enterprise server applications. Why? Because large corporations are concerned about cost and security.

We see the OS market divided into three categories:

• Windows for client machines and laptops
• Windows Servers for SMB users
• Linux and Windows Servers for Enterprise users

A recent survey by the Linux Foundation “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” showed the growth is coming from cloud computing, big data and “greenfield” deployments as new opportunities, complementing the current dominance of Linux in web server applications. The survey made it clear that enterprise users are flocking to Linux servers for the TCO, features set and overall security benefits.

Significant growth in Linux is not simply expansion at incumbent customer sites. More than 70 percent of new Linux deployments during the past two years have been for new applications and greenfield installations, nearly twice that number were migrations from the Windows server.

Where are all of these new Linux installations being used? The survey revealed two key Linux growth markets: big data and cloud computing. More than three-quarters of the respondents expressed concerns about handling the growth of big data and 72 percent expected to use Linux servers in their big data plans.

The survey also showed strong worldwide growth for cloud computing with 61 percent of the organizations now using cloud-based applications and two-thirds using Linux as their primary cloud OS. Cloud computing platforms depend on a highly virtualized infrastructure to derive efficiency, productivity and flexibility. Given the large deployments of cloud computing, it’s not surprising that 72 percent of organizations have more than one-quarter of their servers virtualized, while 46 percent expect to have up to three-quarters of their servers virtual by the end of this year.

This massive shift towards virtualized computing holds the potential for sunny cost savings but it also holds potential for a mighty downpour. As enterprises plan new Linux deployments across private, public or hybrid clouds, those with virtualized environments will need to pay special attention to the storage I/O bottleneck, endemic in virtual server installations.

Server virtualization boosts the resource utilization of physical servers, taking advantage of the power of multicore CPUs to share across multiple virtual machines. But storage I/O performance was not built with virtualized environments in mind. Running a single data-intensive application on a fast physical server can choke the I/O to attached hard disk storage, so packing dozens of virtual machines across the same I/O bandwidth is a sure way to kill application performance and create legions of angry users. And that’s where intelligent caching software comes to the rescue.

There’s little doubt a Linux server is in your future and chances are good that it will be virtualized too. Count on us to get you there.

More on that later,

Steve

A blog by Steven Lamb, CEO

NEVEX Virtual Technologies was conceived as a solutions company, not a pure software play. So when we went looking for a SSD hardware partner, it had to be a company with an SSD hardware platform that was performance-matched to the market-leading speed of our NEVEX CacheWorks software. Texas Memory Systems was an obvious choice: the company is well-established and has the well-earned reputation for consistently delivering the World’s Fastest Storage. The power behind TMS market leadership is its engineering superiority backed by an intense understanding of how SSDs can be optimized to meet the needs of specific applications.

CacheWorks software, with its ability to target acceleration to specific applications rather than accelerating everything in the cache, and its multi-level caching technology that leverages a combination of memory, SSD and DRAM, drove the Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan-70 PCIe flash card to unprecedented performance standards. We’ll soon be publishing performance benchmarks for the new NEVEX-TMS solution but it’s safe to say this is truly a case of the world’s fastest cache powering the world’s fastest flash.

The NEVEX-TMS partnership resulted from the recognition that for flash to gain deeper penetration into the enterprise market, intelligent software was required. Our state-of-the-art caching software opens up the server-side caching market for flash vendors, such as TMS. Those in the know have been quick to recognize this hot and rapidly growing market. Witness the recent acquisition activities of hardware vendors such as Fusion IO-IO Turbine, SanDisk-FlashSoft and OCZ-Sanrad.

Now that the industry has begun paying close attention to server-side caching, we believe the competitive landscape is about to ratchet upwards. The deciding factor will be not who offers the best cache but who is best at delivering white-hot data to the applications that need it. Enterprise customers will be looking for solution providers who can deliver high-performance SLAs utilizing application-specific caching.

Beyond the TMS relationship, we intend to bring our software expertise to application providers who can leverage the Selective Optimized Caching technology within CacheWorks to accelerate any and all enterprise applications that are currently constrained by the I/O-bottleneck. Working with them will expand the market for NEVEX software and SSD hardware vendors will benefit, too.

The potential for growth of server-side caching in the enterprise is enormous. It’s an exciting time for all of us.

Until next time,

Steve