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07 February 2009, 14:50

Survey: Increase in "mission critical" Ubuntu Server use

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A survey of the Ubuntu Server communityPDF has been published showing that more organisations are relying on Ubuntu for "mission critical" tasks. The survey, carried out by Canonical, the commercial sponsor for Ubuntu, and RedMonk, an open source oriented market research organisation that makes all of its content freely available, breaks down the 6800 responses, from predominantly Ubuntu users, and analyses it by business size.

Because the survey was taken within the Ubuntu community, there is an obvious and admitted bias towards Ubuntu, as shown by the 80 per cent of respondents who listed themselves as Ubuntu users. Surveys of the more general community of Linux users put the Ubuntu user share at around 30 per cent. Despite that, the survey provides an interesting insight into how and where Ubuntu Server is being adopted within businesses.

For example, the main areas of use for Ubuntu were in providing web servers, databases, file servers and backup systems, with web and database servers being rated as "mission critical". The results did show that Ubuntu Server is preferred by small and medium-sized firms, while larger companies go for commercial varieties of Linux, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

The factors that Ubuntu users consider important include things like simple packet management and update management, good hardware support, and security. Interestingly, support and the availability of commercial applications scored lower, which may be a concern for Canonical in the longer term. Most Ubuntu server installations run on desktop or tower PCs, or on self assembled servers, although Dell servers were also a popular choice.

(trk)

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