Linux has also matured into a development platform for network services, next only to Solaris. Present day ISPs adore Linux for its ease of use and comprehensive range of Internet services. What’s more, Linux hasn’t let us down in terms of performance here.

Let’s take a look at typical ISP needs. In addition to the charter of providing Internet services, the core needs of an ISP include a significant volume of development for customizing its services. Linux provides a ready-to-use development platform for such development and comes ready with most "rapid prototyping" utilities. It’s a little wonder then that ISPs love Linux.

There’s more to this, especially in money matters. Linux plays a key role here. I am referring to operational costs and not to the cost savings from a free OS. Let’s take a look at a few of the major cost savings.

Hardware obsolescence: Old and otherwise unusable hardware can be deployed to provide some services.

Multiple functionality: Support for application services (Mail, News, DNS, WWW, etc), and network services (dial-in services, IP routing, etc), being part of the basic distribution, allows a Linux box to take on multiple roles, particularly at remote points of presence (PoP). No separate server, router, and so on. A Linux box, all rolled into one.

High availability: My experience with Linux speaks here. Linux boxes that I have deployed have shown incredible uptimes. No evidence of those memory leaks that clog up memory on other OSs. Of the systems that I have deployed, there has been one single failure of service, due to a faulty hard disk. Very low MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) seems to be an unwritten virtue of Linux and is to the advantage of the ISP. MTTR (Mean Time To Repair), is also very low in the case of Linux (see "Backup and Disaster Recovery" on page 83).

Linux provides support for high availability through disk mirroring and RAID. High availability can also be built by deploying older hardware with Linux, as a second line of servers.

A welcome move is the availability of Linux consultants. With Linux certification too coming up, support wouldn’t be bothersome, leading to wider adoption of Linux. (I’d suspect that the Linux support infrastructure would evolve into something quite weird and sophisticated. Let’s wait and see.)

ISPs in the Asia Pacific region would welcome any cost saving to offset their overheads, given the trauma they face with currency devaluation, high obsolescence rates and very high connectivity charges. This is not to say that Linux will remain a poor ISP’s choice. With good performance and glaring cost savings, it wouldn’t be long before the big boys use Linux, or are they already using it?