The reality is that open-source―based technologies are here to stay; there's little doubt about that. You can pick up almost any industry study from companies such as Gartner and IDC, and they all say the same thing: A large percentage of companies have either already moved part of their IT to open-source solutions or plan to do so within the next 12 months.

When it comes to embracing open-source technologies, the IBM i user has a wide range of options to select from. In this installment of Earley World on Open Solutions, I look at these options by breaking them down into three broad categories of deployment:

• infrastructure solutions
• open-source applications
• desktop solutions

In this column, I make several recommendations regarding specific open-source technologies and applications that you might want to explore. In making these recommendations, I keep the following considerations in mind:

• For most IBM i shops, moving part of their IT infrastructure to open source is their first foray into open source.
• Most IBM i shops tend to treat open-source products as turnkey solutions. That is, they implement single partitions (in the case of infrastructure solutions) for single solutions.
• As anyone who has been around open source for awhile can attest, numerous applications can provide good candidates for any given solution area. The applications and ideas that I share in this column are based on my experiences with actual customer implementations on IBM i

Let's first look at the deployment of open-source–based solutions for infrastructure-type functions. By infrastructure, I mean those functions that the IT side of a business simply can't run without—file serving, domain name services, firewalls, and so forth. These functions may not be glamorous, but they're crucial to the functioning of the enterprise. When it comes to open-source infrastructure solutions, Linux-based solutions typically come to mind. Anyone who has been around the IBM i knows that it has been able to run Linux for a number of hardware releases—dating all the way back to the iStar processor family.

Usually, the first open-source solution that IBM i customers implement is a Linux-based file server. They use this file server to migrate their existing file server function (typically from Windows). The file server of choice tends to be Samba, the open-source implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. SMB is the protocol that Windows clients and servers use to share files and printers in a peer-to-peer environment. SMB is also the protocol that IBM i implements with QNTC (for accessing resources) and NetServer (for sharing resources). File Server is a good first choice because, properly implemented, it can provide reliability and stability benefits (especially if the I/O is hosted by the IBM i partition) while imposing little in the way of IT management overhead.

Another infrastructure solution that IBM i customers move to open source is their email filtering requirement. Although most customers will not want to replace their existing email servers, the possibility of front-ending that function with open-source solutions that can filter their email can be attractive. Solutions in this space include items such as SpamAssassin for filtering email spam and Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) for scanning email to identify potential viruses.

When I refer to open-source applications, what I mean is business-level applications such as e-commerce, CRM, and CMS solutions. In the open-source world, many (if not most) of these applications are based on the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) stack of open-source components for the deployment of open-source applications tied to dynamic content. IBM i customers have had the ability (and many have exercised it) to deploy LAMP-based applications ever since Linux LPARs were first supported on the platform. The advent of PHP (Zend Core) and MySQL on the platform has since enabled customers to deploy those same applications directly on the i without the management (and potential resource) overhead of deploying a Linux partition. And with the release of the IBMDB2I storage engine for MySQL, customers can now deploy those exact same applications and have the resultant data stored in DB2 tables.

So what open-source applications do IBM i customers tend to implement? The most popular applications are SugarCRM for customer relationship management, Zen Cart for e-commerce, and Joomla for content management. Thousands of open-source applications that can be run on top of the open-source web deployment stack on IBM i (i.e., IBM i, Apache, MySQL, PHP) are available. Places at which you can investigate these applications include hotscripts.com, phpjunkyard.com, phpfreaks.com, and php-freebies.com.

Now, let me talk about the desktop. Most IT shops have tended to steer clear of looking into open source as a viable desktop solution. This avoidance is due in large part to the impression that moving to an open-source desktop solution means that shops must immediately move their users to a Linux desktop. The concern, of course, is that such a move would impose a learning curve and be disruptive to the business. What some organizations have done is start a slow migration to an open-source desktop by moving the productivity requirements to open-source solutions first, followed by the operating system. Think about it: If you can get your users to switch their web browser to an open-source solution (e.g., Firefox) and their office-productivity suite to an open-source solution (e.g., OpenOffice or IBM Lotus Symphony), it becomes somewhat trivial at that point to move the underlying desktop operating system to an open-source solution.

Finally, switching gears, I want to discuss open source in the news. Zend has released version 7.0 of its IDE, Zend Studio. Features in this new version include support for version 5.3 of the PHP engine, Zend Framework integration, enhanced source code editing, and enhanced performance. Like previous versions, Zend Studio continues to be a free download for IBM i customers to use to develop customized PHP applications for the IBM i platform.

Open-source–related technologies are here to stay. Over the years, they've radically changed the IT landscape and will continue to do so. If your organization hasn't embraced open source yet, you can believe that it will do so before long! I encourage you to email me your experiences about moving to an open-source solution set. You can reach me at opensolutions@askerwin.com.

Erwin Earley is a managing consultant at IBM who has worked with the Rochester, Minnesota, development lab since 1996. Erwin currently heads up the Open Community Center of Competency in the IBM i Technology Center. He has worked in the IT industry since 1980 and has experience with several Unix variants as well as Linux and IBM i.