Report: Linux Server Deployment Expanding

IDC researchers predict that spending on the Linux ecosystem will rise from $21 billion in 2007 to more than $49 billion in 2011, driven by rising enterprise deployments of Linux server operating systems.

Linux server deployments are expanding from infrastructure Relevant Products/Services-oriented applications to more commercially oriented database and enterprise resource-planning workloads “that historically have been the domain of Microsoft Relevant Products/Services Windows and Unix,” noted IDC analysts in a white paper commissioned by the nonprofit Linux Foundation.

“The early adoption of Linux was dominated by infrastructure-oriented workloads, often taking over those workloads from an aging Unix server or Windows NT 4.0 server that was being replaced,” according to the report’s authors, Al Gillen, Elaina Stergiades and Brett Waldman. These days, however, Linux is increasingly being “viewed as a solution for wider and more critical business deployments.”