First National Bank of Omaha throws Sun Out

Grifter writes " First National Bank of Omaha said this week that it's nearing completion of a complete changeout of its distributed server infrastructure for a mainframe and blade-server architecture based on Linux. While only 80% complete, the move is already expected to save the company $1.8 million this year in operating expenses and another $9.6 million through 2011." More proof that banks know how to save money.

Comments

Slashdot title is strongly misleading

[marat]

Bank throws out Sun not in favor of Linux, but in favor IBM zSeries mainframe and other IBM's big and small iron. Since words "ibm NEAR cheap" never returned many matches in search (you know the famous "IBM hardware is slow, but expensive"), it's probably an example of some special deal, not a tendency. Nothing to see here... but, probably, "bank managers know how to earn money"?

Re:Slashdot title is strongly misleading

[Old Uncle Bill]

Have you looked and any of the benchmarks lately for Unix based hardware? IBM is the fastest out there and has been for a while. Sun is one of the slowest platforms you can buy, and comparative pricewise to IBM. While Linux on Intel is pretty fast, and definitely the best bang for your buck, most banks are not betting on it yet. There is a lot that goes with that, like a lot of banking software does not run on Linux. Sun is no longer a competitor in the hardware arena, as much as it pains me to say it. Five years ago I was the biggest Sun biggot you could find. Now all of my clients only use Sun to beat up IBM on price, and they typically get a better price with IBM than Sun and much better performance. Don't underestimate IBM performance and pricing, it's not 1987. I price out multi-million dollar infrastructures for my banking clients every day of the week, and trust me, they are looking at cost/performance, not names. The new pSeries server rock in an unbelieveable fashion (and I don't work for them).

Suckers!

[HogynCymraeg]

They would have saved even more money using windows. Pah! They need to Get the facts!

Here's the problem

[zemoo]

Here's the problem - quote:

Kucera said he would have considered Sun Microsystems Inc. products had they been available. But when he began hunting for a way to consolidate his infrastructure in 2003, Sun had nothing to offer in the way of blade servers or Linux.

I'm planning to buy a big Unix Server. Think I can go with Microsoft?

If they had done this with BSD

[MarkRose]

If they had done this with BSD, you know there would have been a devil in the details.

Other banks?

[thule]

I wonder how many other banks are doing this, but don't shout it from the rooftops. My understanding is that Washington Mutual has a Linux team. It would be interesting to find out how extensively they are using or planning to use Linux.

I know they recently deployed a huge web farm of Windows boxes for some business web site. It's not surprising they use Solaris, AIX, Windows, Netware, and zOS, but how much do they and other banks use Linux?

Anyone have first hand knowledge that they can share?

Re:Other banks?

[dpilot]

I've gotten quite a bit of email from Washington Mutual, lately. They want me to verify my account at their web site.

I'd really love to help them out, but I don't have a Washington Mutual account. Maybe I should direct them to that guy in Nigeria.

Re:Other banks?

[Old Uncle Bill]

I wonder how many other banks are doing this, but don't shout it from the rooftops?

Speaking from direct experience, not that much. They are starting to look into it seriously, and I say go for it, but they are starting really small. I suspect in the next few years many of their mission critical apps will be running on linux, but not many of them are today. Oracle has really been pushing RAC/10g on linux, with mixed results. A few of my clients have gone to marketing seminars with Oracle and come out preaching, but once their dbas go through the actual classes they have completely bailed on the idea. I don't think that speaks negatively on linux, just the whole RAC solution in general. It's a big bet and the reasoning is simpler than you would think. It doesn't come down to whether the solution actually works. It comes down to not wanting to be the infrastructure manager when the press release goes out saying your RAC/Linux database went down for several hours in the middle of the day. No one wants that Computerworld interview. I'm a huge fan of linux, and I think it is ready for prime time, but don't look to financial institutions to set the pace. They are in the business of making money, not trying to be bleeding edge on technology. The savings honestly is not that great in the scheme of things. Consider saving a couple hundred grand on going with a linux solution with an hour of downtime that costs 500K. This does not mean linux is less reliable, but the suits are going to question your motives for going with this "linooks" thing.

FNBO

[two_socks]

I worked at FNBO for a number of years - the thing that impressed me most about them was the consistent high quality of everything IT there.

I went through the rollout of a few software packages, and they always "just worked" right out of the gate. The uptime on all of the systems was just as impressive.

Re:AFAIK

[DrSkwid]

I'd prefer they just stored it in plain text over proprietry binary formats, no matter how open they are.

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

[Dark Coder]

[cue Ennio Morricone spaghetti western music....]

While Angel Eyes Gates laggerly leers on....

"They were late to the game,"...

Broken-heartedly, Tuco McNealy rides off to the sunset...

...Sun had nothing to offer in the way of blade servers or Linux.

Gunsmoke hangs in the air around the penguin with No Name.

Convert, but have to fight the sun engineers

[Bruha]

Where I work the datacenter is primarily sun based hardware. Sure we have a few multiproc machines running redhat and I cringe every time I see a department say were going to use a sun workstation for each employee. When in fact for each complete workstation we could have better performance from a properly configured Linux machine and get 3 of them for the same price.

When you get into the lets buy Linux servers the sun engineers are quick to tout that the sun servers are better and every other excuse in the world. There are no official "Linux Engineers" in the company so our counter arguements are always brushed off like we dont know anything.

Re:Convert, but have to fight the sun engineers

[nathanh]

When you get into the lets buy Linux servers the sun engineers are quick to tout that the sun servers are better and every other excuse in the world.

The Sun servers are pretty good.

• Hotswap PSU, hotswap Ultra320, hotswap CPU, hotswap blades, hotswap memory, hotswap PCI-X.
• LOM standard on every device, ethernet and serial varieties, remote poweron and off.
• Binary compatibility from a single-CPU Netra all the way up to a 100+ CPU mainframe.
• Automatic detection and disabling (without downtime) of faulty CPU, DIMM, etc.
• Dynamic domains on the big iron, including partitioning of CPU and memory.
• Extensive capacities for hardware expansion from even the cheapest chassis.
• Enterprise management software; monitor 1000s of servers for hardware failures, capacity limits, etc.

Sure, none of that says desktop, but in big computing centres those Sun server features are pretty damn useful.

There are no official "Linux Engineers" in the company so our counter arguements are always brushed off like we dont know anything.

Well, maybe you're thinking about the problem in a different way. You're thinking about the software. They're thinking about the hardware. It isn't the case that you don't know anything, but rather that you're focussed on problems that they don't think are important.

For what it's worth, I don't work for Sun. I think Linux is superb. I've been running Linux exclusively as my desktop for 13 years now. I even run Linux on this Apple PowerBook; no dualboot, just Linux. But I'm not so blinded as to ignore Sun servers and Solaris. They're both good too. There are some situations where I would never recommend Linux.