Ibex server features could be key for Canonical

Intrepid Ibex, the 8.10 release of Ubuntu due this Thursday, is not a milestone for servers, but it comes at a time when Canonical, the commercial backer of the operating system, is starting to emphasise the server side of its business.

What server side, you may be asking. with Ubuntu on about 60 percent of Linux desktops, it's easy to forget that the operating system has a server version, in the face of strong marketing from Red Hat and the others. But the server is there, and the company says it's strategic.

"I don't think it will be possible to make a lot of money, or maybe any money, selling the desktop," Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said at the Ibex announcement on Monday: "We're not going to try to make money selling the desktop." The company's revenue at the moment comes from support and custom engineering, and there's more potential for that sort of revenue around servers.

Ibex adds some interesting features to the server version, including the ability to build virtual machines quicker, and better support for virtualisation under Xen and KVM. It also has improved RAID and an easier firewall.

But Canonical doesn't expect a flood of users to switch production systems across. This version will only have 18 months maintenance, while Hardy Heron (8.04) is the Long Term Support edition, guaranteed to be looked after for another four and a half years. This time around, most people will treat the new features as technology to play with.

So how well is Ubuntu doing on servers? The OS has maybe a five percent share of Linux servers, Canonical's marketing director, Andrew Rodaway, told me last week. That's subject to the usual bucketful of caveats with open source figures. It's virtually impossible to tell the market share of a free product.

But is he being modest? At ZDnet in May, we found that around 19 percent of Linux server users had Ubuntu, in a reader survey. The same survey found that fifty percent of respondents had Linux.

This figure, of course, is based on only 195 response, from ZDNet UK readers, so it's not a true picture of the whole world. It also counts user sites, not servers, so the result means that 19 percent of the people who responded had Ubuntu in their server room somewhere. They might well be testing it on one server, while their production systems are all on Red Hat or Suse - or Windows.

I get the feeling that Ubuntu server has a bigger mind share than its estimated share suggests. In which case, I'd expect to see a lot of people trying out the new features, ready for the next Long Term Support release.