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Linux From A CIO's Perspective
An anonymous reader writes "CIO.com has a story on Linux and OSS in the enterprise from the perspective of the CIO of Cendant Travel Distribution Services, Mickey Lutz. '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.'
His organization saved 90% in costs in so doing. Read on if you want to see how the top brass views OSS."
This pretty much sums it up:
;-)
Lutz's IT group rewrote a complex, real-time airline pricing application that serves hundreds of thousands of travel agents around the world and that also acts as the system of record for all of United Airlines' ticket reservations. When this application came up on Linux, it proved to be so demanding--it handles up to 700 pricing requests per second--that it completely redefined Cendant's expectations about what it would take to get Linux to work. "We have broken every piece of software we've ever thrown at this platform, including Linux itself," says Lutz.
With Big Iron you're paying a LOT of money. But you're not paying it for nothing. Big Iron will give you a lot of guarantees for stability, reliability, and thoroughput that don't exist on other systems. The key to this CIO's success is that he was willing to accept the challenges of doing Big Iron work on Little Brass systems. As long as you work all the details out yourself, this *can* work. (As Google has so eloquently proven.) The issue is that you're working without a safety net. If things go really wrong, there's no backup army of specially trained techs to run in and fix things. (And trust me, if you're paying enough money you'll have your own personal army of techs.)
The upshot to all of this is that if the gamble pays off, it pays off in a big way. All that money you were spending for a personal army, plus some other company's R&D now goes into your own pockets. You don't get away scott free (someone has to maintain the systems), but you see your rewards. And isn't that what business is about? Taking risks and making profits? If you've got the infrastructure to go for something like this, then go ahead and grab fate by the balls. No one ever got anywhere in life by playing it safe.
The "black box" of open source has transformed into something any CIO can appreciate: reliable performance and consistent uptime. The penguin can fly now.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Moving desktops to linux might be considdered revolutionary, but this isn't. The big iron market of servers and HPC machines has really been dominated by linux for several years now.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
would consider unthinkable: He moved a critical part of his IT infrastructure from the mainframe and Unix to Linux.
This is actually quite thinkable. Now if some CIO moved all his desktops to Linux, I would be impressed. Moving the backoffice stuff from expensive licenses of Unix and mainframes to Linux is a no-brainer.
Most don't come out of geekdom, rather from business school and worked previously marketing, sales, or some other management area. The don't have the knowledge or skill to be geeks and must rely on them. To make a move like this one, you must have good ones that you trust not just with the business but **with your career**. That's ultimately more important since your family depends on it.
When making a decision to change OS platforms, you must consider the cost in moving legacy applications over.
This news is all well and great, but it's been known for a while that moving from UNIX->Linux was cheaper.
That's not entirely true. If you look at the TCO, Linux is only cheaper if you're willing to cut out the safety nets that are so expensive. i.e. If you get an annual mantenence contract with RedHat and Dell, then how much are you actually saving over a Sun machine with a contract for both?
Corporate purchasing decisions are never as simple as the upfront cost. The key is that if you're willing to take a little bit of risk, you can save a lot of money. That's effectively what this article is about.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This may just be my ignorance speaking, but last time I checked Windows had horrific High Performance Clustering capabilities, so there is no comparison to make. In addition, the licensing issues to go along with Windows 2003 advanced server or whatever you need to get HPC is ridiculous. Meanwhile, Red Hat has great clustering capabilitiesn enterprise support for it, and the clusters work well and are integrated giving high ease of use and great performance. Thats why this CIO went with them and if you read the article, he is sticking with them because he's been so impressed by them. Microsoft has no game in HPC.
Regards,
Steve
If the hardware goes to hell it's so much easier to replace the single bad part than a mainframe.
:-)
Not to detract from your point, but mainframes don't break as a single piece unless the machine blows up or is otherwise completely destroyed. Big Iron systems are designed with redundant *everything* including motherboards, CPU, memory, network cards, power supplies, and disk drives. If any one part fails, the system will route around it. The part can then be powered down and ejected from the machine. To bring it back up to full capacity, you simply plug in the replacement part and walk away.
In that light, Linux system failures are actually going to be more difficult to repair. However, the cost of repairing a Linux system is far less (disposable box) despite the inherent difficulty.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Like most critics, I'm not good at leading large companies. But I know good leadership when I see it. This guy Lutz has his head bolted on right.
The first thing most CIOs usually throw at their workforce is not to re-invent anything. If a product exists off the shelf at a reasonable cost, there are lots of disadvantages for taking the risk of inventing another one and few advantages if you succeed.
However, most of us workers have known that the "big iron" mainframe technologies of yesteryear are starting to "rust." It's getting difficult to find technical help who understand this stuff reasonably well. That brings me to the second point: Follow the technology market. The people will be there.
I suspect that in the not too distant future, many big-iron mainframers are going to be asking theselves whether the many millions they're spending are a good ROI. Open source databases and distributed computing are starting to look awfully attractive.
It's scary from a CIO's position because the old systems are working, even if they're not well understood any more. They're leaping from the systems they know, toward a high cost potential boondoggle. This guy apparently knew how to hire and retain good technical help, he knew how to organize that help, and he knew how to keep them focused on the goal.
Most leaders aren't that good. All too many businesses operate by habit. Only the red tape holds them together. Those organizations won't be making this leap until a certain critical mass has been reached to convince them one by one to make the effort.
We should be doing everything we can to encourage others like Lutz to push these efforts. This is how you really evangelize Linux. And when all this is over, the desktop will be an afterthought.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
An interesting read. But very interesting for what was left unsaid as well. There was a fair amount of pain associated with the switch - aggravated by rolling out a new application simultaneously. The slowdowns and the associated costs are glossed over but I wonder how the business side feels about this change to only 25% of the entire infrastructure.
The time window seems fairly broad as well. No one disputes that lots of cheaper intel servers can do the same job as big iron. THe question is how many does it take and what happens with the applications involved.
Quite telling is the comment that they needed every bit of support possible. Although it is great that one CIO bit the bullet here....there is an ominous side to this story which means that few others will follow suit.
Yeah, yeah. CEO's are dumb, CIO's are dumb, PHB's are dumb.
Notice how they're probably all making more money in a year than you'll make in a lifetime, though? Guess there's something to being stupid after all.
Or maybe, just maybe, you're dealing with your frustration toward those who are truly successful through cynicism. But hey, I could be wrong.
Well you can turn that logic around too. When you have 144 boxen, you much more likely to have a failure then when you have 4. But neither that nor your arguement makes any sense. Mainframes as a whole do not go down. Period. A CPU (or 3) can get completely fried and the machine won't miss a beat. Really. And you'll probably have an IBM tech there to fix it before you even know it's happened, since the machine phoned the problem in as soon as it happened. Big iron is expensive no doubt, but if there was really that small of an advantage to it, do you think banks would be paying for it???
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
> Last time I checked Windows had horrific High Performance Clustering
I have no personal experience with that, but I suspect you're right, based on extrapolation upward, given that, at the low-end, recent Windows versions seem to require more hardware to do almost anything.
> In addition, the licensing issues to go along with Windows 2003 advanced
> server or whatever you need to get HPC is ridiculous.
That's irrelevant for this article. This CIO was dealing with systems at the high end of enterprise servers, where your tape backup system goes into five figures. On that kind of budget, a site license for anything Microsoft has ever written will fit nicely under "Miscellaneous". Robustness and how well the hardware can be utilized are much more important considerations.
For small business, or for desktop scenerios, the licenses are a big issue, but not here.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I bet a year later he's kicking himself from being the most important (visible to the Board because for every 1% he saved on that $100mil makes or breaks the quarterly reults) guy in the company to a nobody.