Example #1:
German railways (Deutsche Bahn) is deploying 300 Linux servers to manage the total messaging requirements of its 55,000 staff.
(reference: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119537,00.asp)
Example #2:
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME) has shifted from expensive Sun gear to low-cost Linux servers, with excellent ROI and TCO results. Here are a few comments:
"Two years ago, Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME) was paying $20,000 to $40,000 for each of its Sun Microsystems Inc. servers running Solaris... Linux servers were priced at about $3,000 apiece, and a Red Hat Inc.
support subscription tacked on another $400 per box."
and
"But cost wasn't the sole metric in the business case... Transaction speed was another key driver. The CME makes money based on the number of trades it can process, so every millisecond it shaves off the round-trip trading time counts."
and
"Chicago-based online travel service Orbitz did a CPU-for-CPU comparison of Intel Corp. processors running Linux against Sun Sparc processors running Solaris and found that the Intel CPUs performed twice as well, according to chief Internet architect Leon Chism."
(http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,100013,00.html)
Example 3#:
North Carolina-based textile manufacturer, Glen Raven moved its mission-critical back-office systems from a 24-way HP Unix server to four-way Linux server. The results were impressive.
"Reports that once took five to six minutes to produce are now ready in 30 seconds," Glen Raven system administrator Jon Fraley said..." The replacement servers cost less than the support fees for the old hardware.
The Linux-based hardware "proved itself," he said, adding that more Linux servers are on the way for a disaster recovery site.
(reference: http://www.cio.com.au/index.php?id=800225882&eid=-601)
Example 4#:
And finally, just to prick the hot-air bubble that Microsoft has inflated in trying to show that Windows is actually able to cope in mission critical environments, you might want to take a look at the news story of the New
Zealand Ministry of Health dumping Windows because it just couldn't cope with real-world mission critical requirements.
"Windows can't support what we do, and its management controls aren't consistent with a datacentre operation," says CIO Warwick Sullivan.
(http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=277471129&eid=-255)
Con Zymaris,
director, Open Source Industry Association
