Linux vs Windows - Conquering a Windows Based World

The Department of Energy has awarded a $45 million dollar contract to DLT Solutions from Herndon VA to provide the agency with Linux information systems.

” The Energy Department’s first order is for products and services from Red Hat, a Raleigh, N.C.-based company.“

DLT was found in 1991 and employees 150 people with a revenue of $340 million in 2006. DLT is a great example of where jobs and businesses can grow and benefit with Linux in their lineup.

One of the largest food retailers in Scandinavia has made the switch and is standardizing its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  A quote from Rolf Berge the production manger at Axfood.

 “Axfood has very high demands on availability and performance. We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is a cost-efficient and safe platform for us to grow on.” 

The one word that caught my attention from the quote was “safe” .  It is different than the standard reasons of “cost-efficient”, “performance”, and “availability”.  We’re all used to hearing those.  “Safe” is how I feel when applications are running on Linux, “Safe” is how I feel about performance and uptime,   “Safe” is how I feel that an automatic update will not crash the machine.

HP and Redhat have joined forces and will be shippng the dx2250 HP work station with Firefox, Open Office, and Evolution email client in Australia. First was Dell and now HP, things are starting to look promising for Linux on the desktop now that the major hardware suppliers are testing the waters.  Covered by ZDENT.UK

Singapore airlines is differentiating itself from other airlines by adding a PC running Redhat Linux to every seat including the economy class seats.  What really separates this offering from any other airline is they are NOT charging for it!

Unlike many U.S. airlines, the carrier doesn’t view in-flight service as a cost center where cutbacks can be made to reduce losses or boost profits. Instead, Singapore Airlines’ latest investments in cabin service are designed to help it stand out from the competition and attract more passengers

It gets no bigger than SAP. Seems like a testimonial to me of what direction large corporations are moving. Covered in RedHat press release

“Customers can substantially reduce costs, time and effort with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform that would only otherwise be possible through the purchase, implementation and maintenance of software for virtualization, storage management and high availability,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager EMEA at Red Hat”

The Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute located at the Sydney Prince of Wales Hospital has made the switch, and are successfully using the open source Zimbra email and groupware platform. They are running Zimbra in a virtual machine on Redhat Enterprise Linux.

“In an effort to use open standards “as much as possible”, Cartwright wasn’t keen to go with Exchange as it is a Windows-only product and a lot of the researchers have a preference for using Mac OS X, while others need to use Linux for research.

“It’s not a standard business environment and I need to support a lot of systems,” Cartwright said.”

Definitely another group to pay attention too, hopefully they’ll post additional updates about the progress.

A large German Enterprise hosting company, ISP Host Europe, that works with more than 25% of enterprises listed on the German Dax has standardized on Redhat Linux.

“We saw a huge demand in the market for highly available web applications at a reasonable price,” said Patrick Pulvermüller, manager at Host Europe.

“The only way for us to satisfy this demand was to rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Other platforms suffered from definite weaknesses regarding pricing or service, some lacked in both respects,” he said.

McKesson Corp, which creates software applications for doctors’ offices and hospitals has entered into a reseller partnership with Red Hat.

This will be the first reseller agreement for Red Hat within the health care industry.This enables users to make just a single phone call and get support for the entire stack. Makes a lot of sense to me.

McKesson claims that hospitals running its software on Linux in Intel-based hardware, in general, have realized cost savings up to 60% compared with traditional system deployments. 

European DIY retailer has migrated 240 of its stores to Redhat Linux from and existing base of NT and Unix boxes has resulted in tenfold increase in performance.

Grulois said, “We have achieved a return on our investment in less than eight months, and we continue to benefit from the advantages Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers, in terms of maintenance, cost savings and high security.”

Don’t suppose this will make the Microsoft get the facts campaign page?

Hines Corp, a conglomerate of manufacturers in the Midwest and Texas is migrating all but 2 of its companies to Linux. The reasons for making the switch are pretty much what everyone else has experienced in the Microsoft world.

• High Costs
• Constant Server Reboots
• Security Issues
• Memory Leaks
• Bugs
• Rebuilding Crashed Servers

I have to agree, this is the most consistent feature set that Microsoft provides its users base. You will see this scenario repeated many times in the corporate world over the next few years, and Microsoft knows this.

Harper had a couple of Red Hat boxes; one for a VPN and the other a firewall. He was familiar with the stability and security of Linux. “We didn’t look at anything else,” he says. “It came down to two choices: Microsoft or Linux.”

Linux was always the dirty little secret that was placed in the back server rooms by the IT staff for certain specific projects or tasks. I think it is now becoming evident that “Linux just works”. Guess what? That is what people want more than anything. One more quote from Harper concerning the migration.

He says transitioning to Linux has been easy on his team. “Because we had a Unix background, it wasn’t such a leap. If you have a whole staff trained on Microsoft, it’s gonna be tough. You could see why people are willing to pay the ongoing costs. But if you have some people who are willing to make the change, who aren’t Microsoft bigots, once you make it, that’s it.”

I doubt this just one single company making the leap. It is becoming more of a common occurrence than Microsoft wants to admit.