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Like the Old Days: Cisco Runs Print Jobs Off Linux November 15, 1999 By Kelly Jackson Higgins John Chambers was getting worried that too much conservatism was creeping into Cisco's corporate culture. So Chambers, the spirited CEO who spearheaded Cisco's feeding frenzy of acquisitions in the '90s that created the Cisco networking empire, last year gave Cisco engineers and marketers a pep talk about getting back in touch with Cisco's entrepreneurial roots. "He was concerned that Cisco wasn't taking risks anymore," recalls Damian Ivereigh, enterprise print architect for Cisco. Ivereigh knows all about tradition at the company. He was the mastermind behind Cisco's worldwide distributed print-server architecture, based on Linux: It is classic retro-Cisco given Linux's open source code. Cisco's move to Linux began three years ago when the company began expanding its branch offices and added a data center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. The company needed more print servers to support the growing number of PC desktops that now had begun replacing its old Macs. "I couldn't budget to buy more SunOS servers, so I started playing with Linux at home and realized there was no reason I couldn't do [Linux] instead," Ivereigh says. A big power outage in Cisco's San Jose, Calif., data center a year later knocked the company's two main SunOS print servers offline. They didn't come back up, and Cisco's production printing for its manufacturing line was down for a couple of days. Meanwhile, two little Intel-based Linux servers sitting alongside the Sun servers recovered from the outage, so Ivereigh ported the production print jobs to them and three other PC-based Linux servers. That sold Cisco corporate on PC-based Linux as a print server OS. The cost was a factor, too--at the time, you could buy four or five PCs for the price of one Unix server. The next step was distributing the print server functions so that print jobs weren't all being sent over the WAN. Cisco now has three main hubs in San Jose; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Sydney, Australia. Branch offices house their own Linux print servers. "It's all remote administration [to the branches]--I've never even physically seen most of the servers," Ivereigh says. "I send them a floppy and load the system from scratch over the network." New Cisco acquisitions also automatically get sent Linux print servers, too, he says. Aside from the obvious economics, Cisco's Ivereigh likes the flexibility of the open source code in Linux. It helped him and his team configure an integrated directory among the now-130 Linux print servers the company has spread around the globe, so every print server knows about every printer. A client can send a print job to any server. Cisco now also runs all its NNTP news services on Linux, and is considering Linux as a fax server as well. But don't look for Linux to replace the Unix and NT Servers that run Cisco's ERP (enterprise resource planning) or other high-profile applications anytime soon.
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