Although Ubuntu is generally regarded as a desktop Linux distribution, the sever variant is becoming increasingly popular in the cloud. It is silently infiltrating server rooms and gaining traction in enterprise environments. A recent survey published by Canonical provides some insight into adoption trends of Ubuntu on production servers.

As Ubuntu's presence in the server space grows, it is showing up in some unexpected places. Weta Digital, the New Zealand company that did the special effects for Lord of the Rings and some of the 3D rendering for Avatar, reportedly runs Ubuntu on its 35,000-core render farm and virtually all of its desktop computers. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the popular Wikipedia website, rolled out Ubuntu on 400 of its servers in 2008. We even use Ubuntu ourselves on several of the key servers that power the Ars Orbiting HQ.

One of the factors that is potentially driving Ubuntu adoption on servers is the pricing model. Canonical makes Ubuntu updates available for free, but also offers commercial support as a separate service. As companies that deploy Linux cultivate better in-house support capabilities, they want commercial Linux support options that are more granular and less expensive.

Some of the major Linux companies like Red Hat have been slow to respond to that demand, creating an opportunity for alternatives like Ubuntu and CentOS to gain traction. We looked at this phenomenon in 2008 when Ubuntu was beginning its ascent on servers.

It's worth noting, however, that the Linux server market is big enough to accommodate a plurality of players with very different models. Canonical is still a small fry and won't be displacing the reigning incumbents in the immediate future. Even though companies that want to decouple support costs from updates are starting to shy away from Red Hat, it's pretty clear from Red Hat's latest impressive quarterly earnings that there is no shortage of companies for whom its current offerings are still highly desirable.

One way in which Canonical is aiming to differentiate its server offerings is by emphasizing Ubuntu's support for the cloud. In the Ubuntu server survey, Canonical cites statistics from Cloud Market which show that Ubuntu is the most popular platform on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cluster (EC2), representing over 30 percent of all EC2 platform images.

Cloud Market also has a timeline that shows the usage rates of various platforms on EC2 since May 2009. The chart shows a trend of massive and rapid growth for Ubuntu starting in October 2009. This correlates with the release of Ubuntu 9.10, the first version of Ubuntu for which official Amazon EC2 images were made available.

Although EC2 is relatively popular, there are some workloads for which it is not a particularly good value and there are a lot of companies that are unwilling to entrust sensitive data to a third-party provider. When consulting firm McKinsey & Company tackled these issues last year, they pointed out that companies for whom EC2 is a poor fit can still improve cost-efficiency by using virtualization technologies to boost server utilization in in-house data centers.

One potential solution is Eucalyptus, an open source framework that allows companies to create their own self-hosted elastic compute clusters. Eucalyptus is built to be interoperable with EC2 APIs, which means that it is largely compatible with tools that are designed to work with Amazon's cloud. The researchers behind Eucalyptus launched a company last year with the aim of commercializing the technology. They recently brought in Marten Mickos, former head of MySQL, to be the new CEO.

Eucalyptus is said to be a compelling option for companies that want to have elastic computing capabilities in their own data centers. Canonical uses the Eucalyptus technology as the foundation of its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) package, which allows companies to roll out a private Ubuntu-based cloud. Canonical sells a number of services on top of UEC, including consulting, training, support, and management tools.

Canonical is building a roster of partners to boost the strength of UEC. In an announcement earlier this week, Canonical revealed that Dell will offer UEC software and technical support with several enterprise hardware packages. The bundle will be based on the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04, a long-term support release.

"Behind the scenes we've worked with Dell's DCS team for over six months to test and validate the integration of the [Ubuntu] cloud stack on their new PowerEdge-C series," wrote Canonical global alliances director Mark Murphy in a statement. "This is the first major offering of a true open source Cloud solution backed by a major corporate vendor."

The cloud is playing an increasingly central role in Canonical's evolving business strategy. The company's commitment to UEC and Ubuntu's popularity on EC2 are both clearly growing. At the same time, Canonical is attempting to monetize the desktop with its integrated Ubuntu One cloud service. As Canonical climbs towards profitability, the cloud-centric strategy could give it a lift.