How one CIO moved from mainframes to Linux, saved a whopping bunch of money and lived to tell the tale. Basic story: it works folks...
The publication for Chief Information Officers (CIO.COM) has the story:
Open Source AscendantThe article continues in a lot more nuts and bolts detail and basically concludes that he had some really rough periods but the transfer worked well and Linux runs like a champ. Instead of running on four large IBM Mainframes, they are running the application on 144 multi-proc servers arrayed as twelve clusters. Annual maintenance dropped from $100 Million/year to $2.5 Million/year. These words were written on a Windows 2K box but they have been uploaded to a Linux box running Apache. Win2K for the applications (Photoshop, Sonar, CAD), Linux for server reliability...
How Cendant Travel Distribution Services replaced a $100 million mainframe with 144 Linux servers and lived to tell about it.
In the summer of 2003, Mickey Lutz did something that most CIOs, even today, would consider unthinkable: He moved a critical part of his IT infrastructure from the mainframe and Unix to Linux. For Lutz, the objections to Linux, regarding its technical robustness and lack of vendor support, had melted enough to justify the gamble. "The issues raised around open source, around its viability, were in the past," recalls Lutz, CIO for Global Agency Solutions with Cendant Travel Distribution Services, the parent company of online travel brands Orbitz and CheapTickets.com.
