In 2006 IDC released a study showing that the costs associated with data center management escalate at an alarming rate – in large part because of rising software management expenses. For users of Linux in the data center, these costs can be striking, since expenditures for management software can run four times the cost of procuring the hardware and operating system.

The growing systems management costs underlie a bigger evolution at the heart of modern data centers. In years past, data centers were predominantly composed of big iron – mainframes or large Unix computers that could scale with the addition of a few powerful servers. These servers were part of a homogeneous operating system environment – and as a result could be managed centrally, keeping management costs relatively low.

But then Linux exploded on the scene and offered something new for data centers – scalable software and low-cost commodity hardware. Relative to the price of big iron, Linux offers a cost-effective solution. But for all the benefits, new heterogeneous Linux environments have quickly become a growing headache and an expense to manage – with many more moving parts than the traditional big iron-based data center.

A Linux data center often has several versions of Linux and many varying application stacks, and an administrator must manage a significantly greater number of servers, each with its own customized operating environment.