Linux vs Windows - Conquering a Windows Based World

The Illinois based banking conglomerate, Metropolitan Bank Group, has successfully moved from Microsoft to Suse Linux. Its complete infrastructure is almost entirely based on Linux now. Because they grew via acquisitions they found that they were spending vast amounts of time in the field bringing remote locations into the infrastructure. To alleviate this problem Tom Johnson, IT Director, began a complete migration from Windows to Linux. Mr. Johnson saw an immediate increase the stability, efficiency, and a decrease expenditures with the migration. His advice

“Take a migration to Linux slowly. Work on proofs of concept. That way, if something blows up, it’s not huge. It’s called a migration for a reason”

Sounds like successful project overall, for more detailed information the full story is at http://www.linux.com

Paypal can currently processes nearly $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different countries on 4,000 Redhat Linux Servers.  Not surprisingly, the ability to perform incremental growth by adding additional Intel based servers rather than mainframe step increases tends to keep costs in the thousands and not millions.

“Thompson supervises a payment system that operates on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux in the same manner that eBay and Google conduct their business on top of a grid of Linux servers. “I have been pleasantly surprised at how much we’ve been able to do with this approach. It operates like a mainframe,” he said. “

The mainframe will never be replaced, as new tasks and jobs always seem to find their way onto them.  Nonetheless, it is interesting to see Linux based grid servers providing a clear advantage in certain environments.

The South African Bank Company Tanzania, has recently migrated to Novell Open Enterprise server on Suse Linux.  The migration was completed by www.NetCB.com (Networking Collaboration in Business), an innovative IT company in Pretoria South Africa that includes Open Source Technology in the solutions they provide, when it makes sense.

“Novell’s SUSE Linux platform is a secure and reliable foundation for enterprise computing from the desktop to the data centre. It delivers powerful solutions built on open standards for all of the most important technology arenas within today’s enterprise, from data centre, workgroup and desktop, to security and identity, and resource management.”

NYSE is moving from mips mainframe to IBM p servers running AIX and x86 HP servers running Linux, in an apparent move that will cut costs in half.

“Francis Feldman, the vice president of the shared data center for Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC), the NYSE’s technology arm, said the bottom line for the migration was the bottom line. He estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions, and though he wouldn’t detail how much that would mean on a yearly basis, he said it is “serious financial savings, very serious.”"

HSBC, a bank based in Britain that has 9,500 offices, 284,00 employees, and 125 million customers in 76 countries, is standardizing on a single Linux Distribution, Suse Linux.  HSBC believes that it will reduce its total cost of  ownsership.

“The HSBC move is a direct result of the technical cooperation agreement penned between Microsoft and Novell in November 2006. As part of the agreement, the two companies committed to make their products work better together, to jointly build, market and support new solutions to improve interoperability, and to deliver new virtualization capabilities. “

Covered over at www.eweek.com