It’s high time our cumbersome monolithic operating systems offered increased agility, enhanced security and lower support costs. Steve Harris, senior director for Data Centre Solutions at Novell puts the case for customisation.

For far too long, users have been bogged down with cumbersome operating systems (OS). Mass customisation—the process of customising a product to meet individual needs while leveraging mass production efficiency—is now commonplace in the manufacturing of everything from cars to laptops. Yet, the OS has remained monolithic, even while there has been an explosion in hardware platforms, mobile devices and applications.

To date, the ability to customise, test and deploy a tailored OS for a specific use case or device has been slow, expensive and complicated. Furthermore, those who customise the OS do so at their own risk, as the result of the process is often unsupported by the OS vendor. This changing now as IT departments now recognise the need to tailor the OS to gain agility, drive down support costs and enhance security.

This is particularly true in the Linux environment where new tools are making the promise of a tailored, fully-supported Linux OS a reality. In fact this is one of the most compelling elements of Linux: its flexibility and adaptability. With tools such as Novell SUSE Studio and SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS, developers and ISVs can now take just the components they need to run the application or workload. As virtualisation and cloud become ever popular the desire for stripped down, configurable systems will grow. This new paradigm is part of an emerging market we call intelligent workload management (IWM).

Historically, major OS distributions have been notorious for their bulk and complexity. The time, effort, and resources required to install, maintain and upgrade a complete OS are substantial. Operating systems are designed to support every possible hardware device and software function, yet most applications require only a fraction of the full capabilities of these heavy operating environments. The extra, unused assets become a liability from a security and management perspective. For example, in financial institutions, everyone from bank tellers to the CEO often have access to the same operating systems, with far more than is needed for the majority of the staff.  Given this level of access, an unauthorised employee could unwittingly walk away with proprietary customer information, which he or she should not have had the ability to access in the first place.

The infiltration of computing into everything from cars to coffee makers is driving new mobile and desktop computing platforms to be fully customised for the user experience. This mindset is also permeating into the OS as users are beginning to demand that the OS provide the same fully supported mass customisation they have come to expect elsewhere.

A better approach is to create an environment using only the OS resources needed for a particular application set. This is known as JeOS (just enough operating system). The question is: How do we move to a JeOS environment?

Ironically, although Linux is modular and is designed to be customised, relatively few organisations have taken advantage of these capabilities due to a lack of vendor support. That’s why businesses are moving toward the new approach of mass customisation. By using the existing building blocks within Linux, and applying them in different combinations based on each user’s needs, businesses of all sizes as well as the public sector gain the benefit of a tailored OS environment with the confidence of having a fully supported OS. Linux’s modular architecture is ideal for creating JeOS because it can be easily stripped down and modified. 

Highlighting the shift towards open source, Linux and indeed, JeOS, is the recent decision of the UK Government to look at open source as the building blocks for its future IT requirements. While several major Government departments including the NHS, which runs most of its core network on Linux, have already embraced open source, the new proposal indicates a major move away from relying on proprietary software and to embrace open source.

One of the key drivers behind this move is the desire for the UK Government to embrace the open source culture of sharing, re-use and collaborative development across government and its suppliers. At the core of this is the Government Application Store (G-AS), which is geared towards re-using programmes that have already been written and can be re-applied. This approach works as we can testify with our own Appliance Program, which has seen over 250,000 appliances built in SUSE Studio since its launch in mid-2009 and tens and even hundreds of thousands of downloads of these appliances. Sharing and re-use is the power of Linux.

Mass customisation leverages the cost benefits and efficiencies of mass production, coupled with the ability to tailor an OS for different use cases. Importantly, this tailoring is achieved through the arrangement of standard Linux components and it is fully supported by the community and vendors alike.

One of the most obvious benefits is the ability to deploy a compact OS quicker and more easily than a full-blown version. In the just enough OS model, deployment and testing time can shrink from weeks to minutes. A preconfigured, self-contained package with no external dependencies is easy to transfer through testing into the production environment, and is highly portable between virtual environments, making it beneficial for disaster recovery and other scenarios.   As we move to an IT model that will have physical, virtual and cloud environments, this easy portability is critical and one of the central reasons why developers, ISVs and IT directors must look for a strategy built around IWM.

Another benefit is that mass customised Linux includes only the packages needed for a computer to function properly for a given use, vastly simplifying maintenance. By replacing a cumbersome OS with a smaller set of packages, IT staff benefits from a simplified software management lifecycle.

These compact, finely tuned JeOS environments allow applications to run more efficiently, with all components tested and optimised to run together. This is similar to how devices such as DVRs and wireless access points work. They are purpose-built devices equipped with only the OS and applications needed to perform a specific set of functions. As the devices run on a ‘trimmed down’ OS, they are easier to set up, operate and maintain.

With mass customisation security is a critical component and this where the need to look for solutions that can blend OS and security together. With businesses needing to comply with a host of regulations organisations need to control access to sensitive data. By deploying a trimmed down environment tailored to include only the applications, components and associated data needed by each user, organisations can build a foundation that prevents access by unauthorised users. Moreover, since JeOS contains fewer packages, there are fewer attack points for potential intrusion.

Finally, mass customisation helps IT departments become more agile as they are able to speed the time-to-deploy new servers and respond to changing business needs faster. New use cases can be precisely configured and deployed in near real-time to address market shifts. Additionally, these highly portable environments can be scaled up or down to rapidly respond to resource peaks and valleys. As a result of mass customisation, IT is better positioned to tailor and adapt its systems and processes quickly and easily in order to adapt to business demands.

In the future, virtually all computers will be tailored to meet an individual’s unique profile, from the OS on up through the technology stack. The use of mass customised operating environments will proliferate as enterprises and public sector organisations realise the considerable financial, security and maintenance benefits.

Virtual appliances are one example of mass customisation, with $1.1 billion in revenue expected to be spent on software and virtual appliances by 2012 worldwide according IDC. Likewise, IDC predicted that there will be more than seven million thin client devices on the market worldwide by 2012. As demand for mass customisation of Linux increases, we’ll see businesses explore new use cases, from USB stick-based computers to cloud computing.

With the launch of software appliance tools and programmes, the days of monolithic OS is over. We are now able to create mass customised OS using Linux that will fuel a rise in new applications and services. In doing so IT will need to shift their mindsets towards building, securing, managing and measuring intelligent workloads within a mass customised Linux environment. As organisations look to become more fleet of foot and efficient, mass customisation of Linux is the logical path for IT.

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