Start with the Web

The Internet is the wellspring of open source and the focus of many of its applications. So if you're looking to get your feet wet, it makes sense to start there.

Pete Sattler's company, SPX, a Charlotte, N.C., valve and motor manufacturer, is highly decentralized, with divisions and plants spread around the country. Its websites grew like weeds during the '90s - mostly small, low-transaction sites, each with its own Windows server. The servers and websites propagated to the point where the annual maintenance bill started to add up.

"We figured the websites would be a low-risk way to bring Linux and Apache in," says SPX's chief e-business officer and CIO. "There aren't a lot of hits or activity on these websites, and it gave us a chance to work with open source and see how it operates in a production mode." Sattler consolidated 75 websites and went from 40 Windows servers down to four Linux servers. He hired a Linux expert to lead the project and develop an enterprise architecture for the Linux system. Sattler's expert tweaked Linux to fit SPX's needs, creating a master version of the software that Sattler can install on as many servers as he wants. For free. "I'll be able to replicate that image onto new servers as I add them," he says.

The image will help as Sattler experiments with open source in the next level of the infrastructure: the network. Open-source tools exist at varying levels of maturity for network-centric functions like management, intrusion detection, middleware and databases. "These are commodity activities," says Sattler. "I want the infrastructure to be cheap, standard, reliable and provide good performance. Linux is helping me swap out more costly components of my infrastructure, drive down my costs and increase my reliability. You want this stuff to be like an electric utility. It just runs and you don't think about it." That is, Sattler doesn't want to think about his network in tactical terms (such as bringing crashed servers back up); he wants to focus on infrastructure strategically.

The network is about as high as most CIOs are willing to go with open source right now. Even at the network level, the transition will be gradual as tools continue to mature. But Sattler says that the lowest rung on the ladder, the Web, is a lock to be turned over to open source. "We just had a security and penetration audit last month, and the only systems the auditors weren't able to penetrate were the Linux systems," he says. (Of course, now that more people are using Linux, hackers are getting better at hacking it. Everyone agrees, however, that good software is safer than bad software.)