such as a mail server built on top Tommy Hilfiger is also in the
of Microsoft’s Active Directory process of phasing out its IBM
to Linux. He says he’d be “ridden AS/400-based wholesale, ware-
out of town on a rail” if users house management, accounting,
lost access to their mail folders. retail and back-office systems in
“One of Microsoft’s major favour of Windows-based ap-
strengths is the degree of integra- plications, according to Singleton.
tion between the Web server and
the applications,” Saul says. TURNING BACK TO WINDOWS
going to turn into a hot trend “Given the Even Ed Anderson, vice-presi- Dulles, Va.-based FLYi Inc., which
anytime soon. The problem isn’t business we’re in, we do a lot of dent of global product marketing flies under the name Independ-
just the hard work and the differ- monitoring and auditing. From a at SUSE Linux distributor Novell ence Air Inc., has always been a
ing skills and development tools security point of view, we make Inc., says the company doesn’t Windows-centric organization.
that are needed. The old adage, “if sure that people have appropriate see much Windows-to-Linux About 95 per cent of its 105 serv-
it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” tends access to the database and the conversion. “We’ve seen Linux ers are Windows-based, according
to rule. operating system. So we bought servers being installed alongside to Stephen Shaffer, director of
and built a lot over time to do the Windows servers,” he notes. software systems. But the airline’s
Windows-to-Linux migration barriers
Different skill set required to maintain environment
Different programming environments and
operational tools
Expense and effort required to change
Intellectual property concerns
A CASE IN POINT that,” says Saul. reservation provider recom-
State Street Corp. undertook a State Street gave Microsoft LINUX TO WINDOWS mended Linux for its new Web
Windows-to-Linux project when plenty of opportunity to keep Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s general site, so the company hired outside
it wanted to beef up the function- Windows in the running, accord- manager of platform strategy, consultants to do the work.
ality of an internally developed ing to Saul. Microsoft even put says he has seen scattered cases of Independence Air had hoped
fund administration application. on a workshop to show how the companies that tried Linux servers there would be a knowledge
The Boston-based financial insti- application could be redesigned to for their Web sites but decided transfer from the Linux consult-tution also wanted to enable more scale better. But the database ulti- to replace them with Windows ants to its Windows-focused IT
employees to use the application, mately became the critical factor
which collects data from a variety in the decision, and the financial
of sources, to prepare reports for firm sided with IBM and its “class
outside customers. of the industry” DB2 optimizer,
Drivers of Linux adoption
Initial cost
Ongoing cost of operations
Reliability/availability
Desire to reduce dependency on current operating
system vendors
To add the new capabilities, he says. Microsoft’s upgrade to
the IT department determined SQL Server 2000 was still in
that it would need to change the works at the time.
the front-end user interfaces “In our view, in this applica-and redesign the database for tion, DB2 was a better choice as
the Windows-based application, far as the scaling and the capa-which used Microsoft’s Access bilities. It’s a bit more forgiving boxes. That tends to happen if staff so it could gain the skills to
and SQL Server databases. because of its optimizer. When it users encounter integration issues, service the site and add function-
State Street tends to view its IT develops its database plan to do spend more money for support or ality in Java. That didn’t happen.
landscape from the standpoint its join?, it does a better job than put more effort into maintenance “We went live, and we were still
of scale. Mainframes, Unix SQL Server,” says Saul, although than they expected, he says. heavily reliant on the consultants
and Linux are favoured when he does note that performance Hong Kong-based Tommy to maintain the site,” says Shaffer.
the company plans to run the can vary by application based on Hilfiger Corp. had three small “We ran into a whole bevy of
application at an enterprise how well the developer writes to informational Web sites that problems that left us feeling kind
or global level. Windows is SQL Server. outside consultants built to run on of helpless.”
typically the choice for smaller State Street rewrote the fund Linux. When the company needed Internal staffers struggled to
applications, when integration administration application in to revamp its Web presence, it configure Apache Web servers
with the desktop environment Java and redesigned the database, faced the choice of staying with the and BEA Systems Inc. WebLogic
is an important criterion or saving only the basic process open-source operating system or application servers to handle the
when the company won’t have flow of the original application. moving to another platform. CIO load, and the site often went down
the resources to provide local The rebuilt application went into Eric Singleton says he was laying as they did, says Shaffer. The
support, says David Saul, a senior production nearly a year ago. out a three-to-five-year road map network operations staffers had no
vice-president in the office of IT Linux skills either, he adds.
architecture at State Street. Recognizing that the site would
Since the fund-administration be generating 80 per cent of the
application was about to undergo company’s revenue, Independ-a substantial rewrite, State Street ence Air made the decision
figured it was a good time to “to go back to the Microsoft
move to IBM’s DB2 for added world,” Shaffer says. It had taken
scale and functionality. Shifting six months and US$400,000 for
to Linux rather than Unix allowed consultants to build the initial
the company to reuse some of its In the coming months, the for a Microsoft .Net-based site. One consultant and two
Intel-based hardware, at least on company plans to apply its analy- environment at the time, and it full-time internal staffers built
the development side, Saul says. sis to a few more applications, made no sense to have the Web site the Windows-based site in three
Plus, State Street had perform- including a mix of Windows- and as the only application on Linux. months, he says.
ance and operational tools for its Unix-based applications that are “It was about a business “You have to stick to your
DB2 environment. Those types of due for a significant rewrite. “If decision based upon a bigger view core competencies,” says Shaffer.
tools “really weren’t there at the you’re not doing a significant and a personal belief that a model “Right or wrong, we’re a Micro-time for SQL Server,” says Saul. amount of rewrite,” Saul says, with more governance and process soft shop, and that’s where our
They’re also lagging for Linux, “that takes away a lot of the in- and structure — what Microsoft talent lies right now. You really
but since the fund-administration centive for rethinking the whole represented — was simply a better need to evaluate whether moving
application isn’t transactional, platform and everything else.” thing to do for the company than to another technology in as rapid
those were less significant issues, Saul says he can’t see much an open-source, less-governed a timeframe as we did is the right
he says. point in moving infrastructure model,” Singleton adds. thing to do.” 054657
Key LINUX Workloads
Web servers Application and software development
Firewalls Custom business applications
Databases File and print servers
DNS, DHCP
