Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, March 23rd, 2007

ComputerWorld: IWL Limited ditches Solaris for Red Hat Linux

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing plenty more of these.

I’ve listened to quite a few customer CIOs and IT managers who are on an absolute “get as much as possible onto Linux” strategy – mostly Solaris customers facing a dead end SPARC roadmap and then a number of HP-UX customers who don’t like “sinking” processor platforms. AIX is now the reigning UNIX leader and while I work for IBM, AIX isn’t necessarily growing anywhere near as fast as Linux. Sun and HP are actually shrinking the UNIX market so AIX looks like it’s going against the trend – it’s tough to tell if it’s growing the market yet.

But Linux is definitely growing – on all platforms. Even IBM System p which is most commonly associated as meaning AIX now has well over 2,600 native Linux on POWER applications supported. That’s quite a few apps including Oracle, SAP, Sybase, 360 Commerce, EMC, etc, etc.

Take a look at IWL Limited’s story about their recent migration from Solaris to Linux – why wouldn’t they choose Linux?

I wonder if he refers to this Redbook in the last point (created by popular customer demand btw) I’m sure I’ll get plenty of hate mail emails from all my Sun-faithful readers after this post, but I get so many of these stories and post so few that I feel I’m allowed a little self indulgence here and there :-) Besides, how many times do we have to watch Sun blatantly beat up on their growth partners?

…”estimates cost savings in the range of $300,000 per year.”

“Once the systems went out of warranty, maintenance costs went through the roof.”

“We’ve reduced response time for critical business functions from around three seconds to half a second. The number of transactions that exceed five seconds has dropped from 12 per cent to well under one per cent. This is particularly important because we have service level agreements around system performance that include financial penalties if we don’t meet them.”

“The system almost pays for itself within a couple of years just in the reduction of maintenance costs.

“The easy availability and thoroughness of documentation such as IBM’s Red Books have also contributed to IWL’s ability to maintain the system in-house.”