With Linux now officially "mainstream" in the enterprise, the industry pundits are starting to pay a little more attention to Linux penetration figures further down the food chain. Early stats show that we still have a ways to go before Linux penetration in SMEs (small to medium-sized enterprises, or companies with 100-249 employees) and SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses that have 1-100 employees) hits the levels we're seeing in the enterprise.

According to a recent study by Info-Tech Research, only 27% of mid-sized companies currently have Linux installed. And the same report cites that fewer than 5% of companies with 10 employees or less either own or plan to install desktop or server Linux.

The Linux kernel is stable and robust enough for the core of the enterprise datacenter, so it's certainly robust enough for the SME. Linux also offers the cost-conscious SME IT manager an attractive alternative to more expensive solutions. So why aren't more SMEs using Linux? One answer is simply the lag time before SMEs follow enterprise adoption trends.

But the answer also has to do with the cost and complexity of managing Linux systems.

"SMEs and SMBs just don't have the resources or staff to address a lot of the support issues," says Arthur Tyde, CTO of the Free Standards Group. "If the servers are running the IT staff at these smaller shops don't touch anything. IT guys at small companies spend all of their time fighting fires. It's a lot less sophisticated than enterprise IT."

And that goes for the tools that the smaller shops have at their disposal as well. SMEs and SMBs certainly aren't running Tivoli or CA Unicenter to manage their Linux environments. The small shops that are running Linux are doing so in a very manual, labor intensive way.

Top Linux Management Issues and Options for SME/SMB
When examining capital costs, Linux offers SMEs the best bang for the buck of any platform. However, when looking at the big picture, which includes skill sets, heterogeneity challenges, change management, disaster recovery, and overall management costs, things become a bit more murky. And it's this big picture that provides critical insight into why Linux adoption by the SME market hasn't been as rapid as some expected or hoped.

Let's take a look at some the challenges, and possible solutions, for Linux IT managers in SMEs.

Skill Sets
The SME must have in-house Linux expertise or the ability to get cost-effective Linux consulting services and support. Sadly, despite the advances of Linux in the marketplace, Linux expertise is still hard to come by in many areas.

Over time, this will gradually change as Linux becomes more popular among the next generation of IT administrators. However, the biggest skill set advantage that Microsoft has over Linux in the SME market is the fact that ubiquitous Windows power users can transform themselves into adequate - not brilliant, not gurus, just adequate - Windows systems administrators - which is often good enough for many SME needs.

Why is this the case? In large part because the management tools commonly used in Windows have a lower skill set barrier to entry than those used in Linux. Add the diversity of Linux species to the mix and the "heterogeneity problem" makes the management challenge more complex.

Which leads us to our next topic...

Chasing a Moving Target
Enterprise system administrators chase an ideal environment where the platforms they manage are all uniform. Uniformity is enforced (at least on paper) in large enterprises through policies for both initial deployments and ongoing upgrades. The SME administrator faces a work environment that is usually less policy-driven and therefore more chaotic.

There's no single source for Linux. A wide variety of Linux distributions are available from commercial vendors such as Novell and Red Hat and from Open Source community projects. Upgrade and patch management solutions are usually specific to each distribution. The SME administrator is faced with a situation where previous administrators installed different versions or flavors of Linux.

A seasoned Linux guru, armed with good tools and adequate resources, has a decent chance of overcoming these obstacles, but as we noted earlier, such gurus are in short supply in SME environments. More strictly implementing policy- and standards-driven platforms would allow Linux admins to overcome much of the heterogeneity FUD that scares SMEs.

Geared To Charge Forward, Not Back
Upgrades and configuration changes are geared more gracefully to go forward than they are when needing to rollback. Linux upgrades and system changes usually go smoothly and quickly. However, like any other platform, sometimes version incompatibility problems occur. System administrators are sometimes forced to scramble to find the last known working state, and may spend hours or days on root cause analysis. While this problem exists on every platform and Linux does have tools to assist with rollback, the severity of the problems are often heightened by the firefighting work lives of many SME admins.

SME business owners can be wary of a platform that they perceive requires too much "tinkering," especially if their buddies at the Rotary Club aren't using the same thing. Implementing change management approaches that work equally well in both directions won't force the boss to wonder if he shouldn't be using Windows instead.

Disaster Recovery and Shared Storage
If you're a small business and your box dies, hopefully you have some sort of backup solution, and protecting data is the cornerstone of an effective disaster recovery. Sadly, the ability to manage storage isn't something small businesses typically do very well. While the SME SAN and NAS market do have some new and cheaper products, sophisticated shared storage is still far from common among SMEs. Rebuilding a server will take you the better part of an afternoon if you're doing it by hand...even if you have backups that you can get to.

Implementing even moderately advanced shared storage (e.g., iSCSI server) technology in an SME environment can greatly increase the speed of disaster recovery and lend credence to arguments that Linux is as bulletproof as the business needs.

Consider Virtualization
Virtualization can mean many things to many people and is often associated with hypertech like utility and grid computing that seem, at first glance, to be beyond the purview of the typical SME's needs.