Typical Uses of Red Hat Linux in the Enterprise

Typical Uses of Red Hat Linux in the Enterprise.

Web Hosting

Red Hat Linux ships with Apache, the leading Web server on the Internet. According to a recent Netcraft study of more than five million systems, Apache and its derivatives command approximately 56 percent of the total Web server market. Apache allows for hosting multiple sites on a single machine using either a single IP address or many. Red Hat's Web hosting solution includes a wide range of modules to enhance functionality, including interfaces to common SQL databases.

Designed to meet normal Web loads, the Red Hat Linux Web server is a widely used, highly reliable, open source Web hosting solution. Deploying a Web server with Red Hat Linux will provide excellent real-world performance with substantially less downtime.

As a Web server, Red Hat Linux is especially useful for medium-size businesses that need to provide access to information systems for both internal and external users. For internal staff members, the Apache server can be used to access, distribute, update, and maintain a wide range of enterprise-wide data.

For external business partners, Apache provides restricted access via user name and password. This ensures that only authorized users have access to sensitive corporate information, such as price quotations and accounting and ordering policies and procedures. For an even more secure solution, Red Hat's Secure Web server provides SSL encryption plus other software components for additional functionality.

File and Print Server

Red Hat Linux ships with packages that provide Netware (IPX), Windows NT (SMB), and Unix (NFS) file and print services. Samba provides Microsoft (SMB-based) networking functionality to Linux and supplies the necessary services to transparently integrate Red Hat Linux-based file and print services into NT domain-based environments. Red Hat servers running Samba can also function as clients, capable of mounting exported NT file systems. Red Hat Linux servers running Samba appear to the client operating system indistinquishable from Microsoft Windows NT file and print servers.

Red Hat Linux file and print server solutions provide significant cost savings for users. For example, in a computing environment containing 100 systems, the total cost for a Windows NT implementation is $3,600 ($30 client license for each system, plus an approximately $600 server license fee). This compares with only $79 for Red Hat Linux (which is free if downloaded). The savings increase dramatically as a company scales its computing operations. Other advantages include a faster, more reliable system and the ability to access a single file space natively in today's heterogeneous LANs.

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