Four months ago, in September 2008, Canonical Ltd. started a survey for their Ubuntu Server Edition client, with the main purpose of finding how it was used in organizations, regardless of their type or size.

Today, Canonical, through Gerry Carr, head of platform marketing, announced the end of the project and the immediate availability of its results. According to the press release, 6819 organizations, having from 1 to more than 10,000 employees, were included in the very detailed survey.

The general conclusions that can be drawn from the results are that most respondents came from Europe and North America (55% for Europe and 28% for North America), covering most sectors, and that the use of Ubuntu Server Edition is mainly for common enterprise tasks like databases, email, Web, etc. Besides these workloads, the survey shows that Ubuntu Server Edition is also deployed for security purposes and as a back-up solution.

Respondents also indicated that hardware support, package and update management, high security, optimal life cycles and hassle-free upgrades were the priorities when choosing a product for mission-critical deployment. Regarding these mission-critical servers, most organizations would buy support contracts for them from a Linux vendor. A smaller percent would consider a local system integrator or the option of buying support together with the hardware.

In terms of platform use, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was the clear winner, with respondents also expressing their intent to install Ubuntu servers in their datacenters.

Users’ expectations for future improvements in Ubuntu Server Edition were mainly concerning virtualization and cloud computing. Regarding the subject of virtualization, the survey indicates a large gain in popularity for two open source solutions: KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Xen. KVM is also the default, fully maintained technology in Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server Edition.

More information can be found by accessing Canonical's blog.

About Canonical and Ubuntu

Canonical Ltd is the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution and a global organization headquartered in Europe. Canonical is committed to the distribution, development and support of open source software products and communities. Commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical's Global Support Services team and partners. Launched for the first time in October 2004, Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions, with millions of users around the world, and it will always be free to download, use and distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the center of a global open source software ecosystem.