Operating Systems
How do you choose an effective operating system for your computer systems? What defines a “good” computer system?
It has to work, yes. But more than that, it has to continue to work, doing the tasks you have set it, with a little intervention as possible.
This means that the system has to be stable and the applications should not accumulate unused resources (via memory leaks, for example).
In a large enterprise where computer systems are usually “single role” or even “single application”, that’s generally enough. Where there are issues, there is usually a group of system support staff on hand to run manual tasks to fix things up again.
However, in the more realistic world, systems are expected to be more general purpose, to support multiple applications, to be exposed to untrusted networks (like the Internet), and of course you don’t have a large specialist group on hand.
You need to be able to install a wide range of functional applications, you need to be able to configure them easily, to be able to update the system software as and when required (without downtime or breakage) and you need to have confidence that your system can operate safely while connected to the Internet. And you have to do it in a standard way that means you can access a large pool of experts to assist you when required.
So how do you do that? Talk to Inode.
Oh, you want the answer now?
The answer comes in multiple parts. First of all, you should be using Free and/or Open Source software. Second, you should be using a well-engineered and stable base system (in practice, this means Unix or Linux). Then you need to have a wide range of configurable & trustworthy applications. And it needs to have a solid pedigree of technical excellence.
The answer is to use the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, or possibly one of its major derivatives, Ubuntu.
With these you get stability, performance, trustworthiness and a huge catalog of world-class application software. You can easily integrate with any other standards-compliant systems you may have, and many non-standard ones as well. You can, with straightforward configuration, expose such a system to the Internet’s full wrath, and be confident that it will not fail.
And you won’t have to pay money for licenses, per-seat, per-CPU, per-install or even per-month. Debian and Ubuntu, and the complete set of software available for them, are available free of charge, as are all the security updates over the multi-year lifetime of each version.
You may wish to pay for support, but that money can go to a local support company, keeping your hard-earned cash in the country and not sending handfuls of “software tax” money offshore and out of our economy.
If this is news to you, you have a lot to learn. Talk to Inode now.
Why Debian/Ubuntu, and not some other well-regarded Linux distribution such as Red Hat or OpenSUSE, or a Unix such as FreeBSD or OpenSolaris? It isn’t because the “deb” package format is necessarily superior to “RPM”, for example; but it is because Inode have been successfully using Debian and Ubuntu to solve many different problems for many many years. The range and quality of their software repositories have been tested with real practical problems. Full operating system upgrades have been undertaken, in place, on running servers; and worked. We trust them.
There is a reason to run Microsoft Windows, and we’re happy to admit it. Because of the market share that Windows has achieved, there are many applications that a business may want to use that are available only on a Windows system. If you need one of these applications, you should run it in a copy of Windows installed as a virtual machine. There’s no need to waste hardware by running Windows natively upon it.