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June 04, 2014

Linux-based Enterprise Packages: What CentOS has to Offer?

By TMCnet Special Guest
Dayan Jeremiah, CEO of IceWarp Asia-Pacific

CentOS is quietly becoming an operating system of choice for many organizations, countries and even regions. At IceWarp (News - Alert), we see very impressive adoption rates in South Asia, Central Asia and the former Soviet Union.



The reason is that many organizations do not want to be locked into Microsoft’s (News - Alert) restrictive environment.

“We are thinking of moving to Linux completely to avoid the Microsoft complications,” explains Ferdaus Ahmad Zaki, Manager for Network & Infrastructure Support Services at Northport, one of Malaysia’s largest private port operating companies in the region. “We don’t want to pay for Client Access Licenses (CAL)”.

Another graphic example is, actually, a whole country.

Uzbek Computerization and Information Technologies Developing Center (UZINFOCOM) deployed countrywide messaging services for a wide variety of organizations in the national Internet segment on CentOS 6. Thus CentOS became the official national operating system in Uzbekistan, a rapidly growing country in Central Asia.

In Russia, we’ve just migrated a major defense contractor from Windows to CentOS, along with all messaging infrastructure.

Here are the reasons CentOS is getting so much traction:

First, it was developed from the source code of the popular, stable and commercial Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux distro. Because of its basis in Red Hat, CentOS boasts stability, usability and reliability.

Second, CentOS also features reliable releases. CentOS follows the release schedule of its base, Red Hat. Since Red Hat is known for its frequent, tested and stable releases, the CentOS version of Linux is a very safe bet.

Third, CentOS is also widely used with a large number of the world's web servers, meaning it has a vibrant and thriving online support community.

Issues remain, however. For example, it is not easy to find a messaging package that would be comparable to (and, ideally, better than) Microsoft Exchange and MS Lync and run on Open Source (News - Alert). Virtualization is possible, of course, but it will still bring about hefty MS Server fees.

One option IceWarp Asia-Pacific decided to implement to solve this problem is start offering a Linux Version of our popular messaging server as Virtual Machines (VM) on CentOS5 32-bit and x64 as well as CentOS6 32-bit and x64. Each VM comes pre-configured with the recommended security, anti-spam settings, and anti-virus settings. It also includes a preinstalled and preconfigured iptables firewall, a database server with all the required IceWarp related databases, a sophisticated syslog analyzer, as well as a web-based system administration tool.

To sum it up, with CentOS and operating system-agnostic packages, organizations can eliminate a lot of hassles and really make the most of their IT infrastructure investments.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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