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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.
The only thing that makes this news is that a CIO actually recognized it.
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.
Any other ideas?
An interesting question that this article raises for me. Is what intel arch was being used (itanium/x86). For example could the costs have been reduced just by using linux on say a large scale IBM server similar to their other mainframe?.
It also goes to show that just because something is old does not mean its slow..
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.
some guy name "bill" called from redmond. he wants to explain you why linux is more expensive...
What ? Me, worry ?
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
Actually, all of those bright, shiny websites (Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz) rely on a GDS (Sabre, Amadeus, Worldspan or Galileo) to provide their content.
Because you can't spell "slaughter" without "laughter"
Unix: $25 million
Linux: $2.5 million
These numbers were taken from a table in the article. Interestingly enough, the cost if something does break favors Linux as well. From the same table we get that the mainframe solution consists of 4 IBM mainframes, whereas Linux and Unix solutions require around 144 servers for Linux and 100 - 120 servers for Unix. If the hardware goes to hell it's so much easier to replace the single bad part than a mainframe.
Hopefully, more people will begin a transition to open source solutions when they realize it can be successful.
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
I switched my desktop and saved $90. Seriously though, do any slashdoters have experience switching their companies computers to, or even away from linux?
lol: You see no door there!
Now, let's get prepared to rebut any Microsoft officials whenever they talk about the common "Total Cost of Ownership" as far as Linux is concerned.
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.
I was hoping to see a "Windows has lower TCO than Linux" ad that slashdot runs for Microsoft when I clicked the article.
Most C** are idiots.
:(
And I thought C# was bad enough. This naming scheme is getting out of hand
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
But did he get a raise? Say about half of what he saved them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"In hindsight," says Lutz, "we shouldn't have tried to cut over to a new infrastructure at the same time we were deploying a new software application. It was too much at once."
They found that their Linux servers couldn't support the new application they had deployed at the same time. That doesn't mean it's less capable than the mainframes they replaced: they didn't even try running the higher-load application against the mainframes.
They should have first ported their servers to Linux on the mainframes, then switched them to Linux on clusters, then sent out new software that they could force back to the old behavior, then supported the new software in general.
That way, they'd have been able to isolate the problems more easily (which really turned out to be that the new application generated extreme peak loads, and nothing to do with Linux per se, aside from that they managed to improve the Linux performance to deal with it) and keep things stable while they fixed the issues.
Another flamebait from the idiot stephanie. This exact article was posted the other day. Please mod it down. Bill. Go Away!
The article did mention that Redhat and IBM were both part of the cutover team, so I guess they were the vendors.
Please be more specific about what ideological goals you're referring to.
Digital Citizen
First, you're feeding a troll.
Second, that's not exactly the most convincing bit of Linux advocacy I've ever heard...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Seriously, the biggest problem with mainframes is that switching them off is a big problem. These are not boxes you can easily - or safely - reboot, if there is a problem. There usually isn't, because the hardware is usually of very high calibre and massively redundant, but scheduled maintenance of, say, an Amdahl or a (when they existed) a Prime was not a trivial affair.
"Routine" maintenance wasn't much better - DEC would charge the Earth (and Mars) to swap tapes on even a humble VAX, and apparently had contracts with some places (such as my old University in Glamorgan, Wales) where absolutely nobody else was permitted to conduct such delicate operations.
This meant that no sane person ever did anything, if they could possibly help it. Which is one big reason that Big Iron started sliding into unpopularity the moment clusters started appearing.
The other problem with mainframes is that the manufacturer usually has the purchaser over a barrel. You can't exactly walk to Fry's and buy a new RAID controller for a CM-5 Connection Machine, or a new processor card for that Amdahl mainframe in the corner. The manufacturers know they have an absolute monopoly on parts, so charge the absolute maximum the market will bear.
For large clusters, the situation is very different. You probably wouldn't buy commodity off-the-shelf parts, if you could help it, but you COULD. That keeps the price somewhat checked on the higher-end higher-quality parts, because you can do fail-over. If you have twice the reliability, but over twice the price, it becomes more effective to use redundancy and hot-swapping.
Software is another important consideration. If you upgrade the software on a mainframe, you upgrade the WHOLE mainframe. If you upgrade a cluster, then so long as there is backwards compatibility, you can roll out the upgrade a node at a time, keeping the system as a whole running.
True, you don't usually do major brain-surgery on an IBM mainframe, as IBM isn't stupid enough to make severe enough changes to AIX to force a major overhaul on a regular basis, but (a) that limits how AIX can evolve (which will eventually kill it), and (b) major overhauls are a part of the computer business and do happen - you can't avoid them.
In today's world, though, it doesn't make sense to use ultra-specialized hardware and software. It isn't cost-effective and it isn't maintainable. A glance at a number of mainframe manufacturers show many have SOME kind of Linux offering, which (to me) shows they feel the same way. Eventually, Big Iron will become just a very fast component in a much larger, much more powerful super-cluster, rather than something significant in and of itself.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The article seems to be comparing a $100 million implementation on a thing called UNIX against a $2.5 million dollar implementation using Linux on Intel. What's a UNIX? And why does it cost so much? A clearer definition of the hardware platforms being compared would be quite useful.
Additionally, in my opinion, the guy should have been canned by Cendant the moment United Airlines was off the air for 45 minutes. If YOU were responsible for this serious a screwup would you still have a job? Probably not.
I installed WinXP Pro SP2 on a machine at my house the other day. Not difficult, and it took a while to get all of the little extra we use: Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, PDF Creator, Firefox + plugins, nVidia drivers, wireless card drivers, etc.
However, the next step was to go to Windows Update and apply all critical & security patches. It did and wanted to reboot.
Then refused to reboot, even into Safe Mode. WinUpdate had hosed the system but good.
After searching around I found that one of the updates installed a bad agp440.sys file and I needed to boot into the Recovery Console to fix it. After that I could boot into Windows but it took another 10 minutes and 2 reboots to get it to allow me to install proper video drivers so it would work.
It doesn't play DVDs, is flakey with my wireless connection and I had to hunt all over the net for drivers to get everything to work. With my Linux set up, it all worked right out of the box, except for me wanting the latest nVidia drivers.
The kids are still whining at me to put Linux back and get rid of crap XP. The only reason it is there is because there is no Linux capable Shockwave plugin.
Conclusion: WinXP is a convoluted mess that takes too much effort and has too many limitations.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
same thing as yesterday!
Here's the rebuttal:
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
by NoMoreNicksLeft (516230) Alter Relationship on Thursday June 30, @03:01PM (#12952440)
(http://24.125.88.66/ | Last Journal: Saturday June 04, @12:50PM)
I tried switching the family over to JSF attack jets over the summer
vacation and the wails of terror, utter anxiety, and lack of any flight training whatsoever was enough to crash the jets straight into the ground.
So why all the troubles?
Afterall JSF pilots love to tell stories of how the JSF is so
much better than a donkey cart with a broken wheel and they would never try to fly across the ocean in one.
My conclusion after seeing real people in a real average Jane setting
crash and burn after being dropped in the pilot's seat midair is that the JSF advocates are just plain lying
because the JSF is really a step backwards for people used to using
technology several centuries behind what it should be.
To make this short and simple, virtually NOTHING worked properly in the JSF.
Telling the JSF to turn left and swatting it with your hand did nothing, it would not listen.
Stuffing oats and barley into the fuel tank did not refuel it. In fact, the jet technician said I caused 100s of 1000s of $$$ worth of damage!
I tried to nail a proper shoe onto the jet turbine, but the jet-grade aluminum just gouged.
I applied salve to where we attached the harness, but the weird metallic lesions would not heal.
We then took the JSF to a vetrinarian, but he said he did not treat JSFs.
I was unable to tie the reins up to the hitching post.
And it goes on and on for pages,but the bottom line is that the JSF lasted about 3 days in my house before I ditched it and went back to
my donkey cart with a broken wheel.
Conclusion is that the JSF is a birds nest of confusion. The JSF seems
like it might be good until you actually try and fly it and then it
shows it's ugliness, slowness and instability.
Why on earth ANYONE would use the JSF for personal transportation is beyond me.
--
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars) More like 86 chars.
My penguin ate my sig
MOD THIS TROLL DOWN!
I tried switching the family over to Linux machines over the summer vacation and the objections from the other family members was more than enough to send all 7 machines right back to Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
No one with any intelligence at all would switch all of 7 machines over to a new, untested OS at once. This is a troll.
> 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.
It's ok to stick to windows/osx if you can afford the licences and you're willing to. If someday you don't have money to buy a licence you can ask someone with experience in Linux for help installing it and give it a try again.
I, for instance, only buy hardware supported by Linux, so I don't have your problems, problems that will happen until the vendors add support to Linux.
Linux is not magic and doesn't automatically support any new hardware that may appear, someone must sit down and with a lot of patience make the proper drivers, because vendors *don't*.
You can install it and say: ok. a lot of things *do* work, and it is for free. With less money than you save in MS et al. licences you can buy a new linux-supported printer, graphic card, and a long hardware etc.
I use Ogg and not mp3, but nevertheless I never experienced skipping playing audio or video.
Stephanie is nothing more than a FUDBOT: The same message was posted yesterday.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
They had serious problems, but this sounds like a sufficient safety net: "a 40- to 50-person cutover team of IBM, Red Hat and Cendant engineers brought the problems under control by throwing more servers into the mix."
Yeah ... like a 1970s era mainframe could run Linux! They could have LEASED enough Linux servers to do a full test run. Still, until you actually do the cutover, it's hard to really know what will break with a complex app.
of course, your experience speaks for everyone, doesn't it? last time i checked, more devices were natively supported in XP than in any linux distribution. just because you fcked up doesn't mean the product is broken.
It may not support all of the latest sound and video cards, but it sure makes a better server.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Well, for my organisation it is much cheaper. After all discounts we get from both sides, we'll spend about $3,500.00 over 3 years for RHE licences. Quote I got from MS was in a range of $50,000 over 3 years (server/desktop OS/CALs, SQL/CALs, Exchange/CALs, Office). That's a no-brainer. We are lucky not to depend on any particular apps written for windows, which makes our life much easier, though. Once ISVs start realising that people actually want to move from very expensive Windows environments and finally make native Linux ports of their apps, you'll be able to see plenty of Win-->Lin switch statistics.
via Stephanie Klugg Aug 15 2003, 6:33 pm
Someone is obviously paid to do this.
Patience, patience.
Remember this is an article targeted to top brass; they can only handle so much information at one time.
Please do not overload the Chief Information Officer with too much information.
Using the best knowledge of today to create the problems of tomorrow.
This article is badly focused. Their porting problems are not with the Linux platform. Their problems are related to lousy application architecture. (Or they would seem to be. Since I have not seen what they did I really can't say.)
... we do the up front analysis, and should have a pretty damn good idea that it will actually work when we build it. It sounds like this system might have been hacked.
...
Yes, distributing software is HARD, but it's something that can be modeled ahead of time with suprising fidelity. That's the difference between engineering and hacking
This seems to be a common issue and I don't understand why CIO types can't outgrow it. If you build the software correctly the platform becomes more or less irrelevant (E.g, Linux, BSD, SCO, LynxOS, whatever.) Why is this so difficult to understand? I've personally DONE this for several large systems (albeit not as large as GDS) and the guys in charge of the port are always locked into moving to a specific hardware/software platform. Maybe it just comes from an olde skool mainframe oriented mindset.
Unless, of course, this was truly a port and not a new architecture. I which case I have nothing but respect for these guys. It's always a miracle when those work at all
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
The Fares application and infrastructure represent just 10 percent of the Galileo computing platform. The rest houses the massive collection of flight information for every airline, every route in the world, written in a 1970s-era mainframe language called the Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). "Unlike today's operating systems, TPF was designed almost exclusively for speed," says Wiseman.
... that raw power being speed. During top loads the system easily handles 4000 messages per second ... which will choke off any other OS I know of.
... apache has/is being ported to it ... a web server in TPF will then be every WebAdmin's dreams ... as it can never be slashdotted :-)
I am one of the programmers who develop for TPF. What is mentioned here, the part about TPF being designed for speed is 100% correct. It is still the fastest OS available IMO...
Most of the development projects are done only in Assembly, and even in that we generally concentrate a lot on minimizing the code base and MIPS. There is no way any other architecture now, which includes Linux, Unix, BSD's can compete with TPF in terms of raw power
And there is another new development in the horizon for TPF
That said, I am really hapy that Linux is improving it's position in the market. I would've been much happier if this was in the desktop rather than the backend server .
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
The moment that major CAD software operates reliably on Linux I'll start to pay very close attention. I said *major* software, not some homegrown thing that can draw only lines and circles.
Here, from TFA:The CIO decided not to TEST the system correctly?Their customers cannot access their new Linux system!They were LOSING money with their new Linux system.This guy made novice-level mistakes and it was only because Linux is so good that this became a huge success rather than a terrible failure.You always have a back-out plan. Always.
This guy took a huge risk
And the Linux system STILL saves him $$$MILLIONS$$$ every year and OUTPERFORMS his old system.
It's one thing when you're a genius CIO who plans and test for every contingency and deploys a working Linux system.
It's a completely different thing when you don't BUT YOU STILL SUCCEED BECAUSE OF LINUX.
This story is important because it shows the average CIO that, even if you aren't a genius and you DO make mistakes, Linux can STILL save you barrels of money and make you LOOK like a genius.
There are a lot of things in the article that make me think that these guys are throwing a bit of smoke and confusion - or just don't know what they're doing. Here's one example:
According to Lutz, the number of possible combinations of flights and prices for all the airline carriers between two major cities has been estimated by researchers at MIT to be 10 to the 30th power.
Sure, if you want *every single* combination. Yes, I could fly from Denver to Las Vegas via Miami, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angelas, Houston, Salt Lake, and *then* to Las Vegas - with up to 7 day layovers in every city - but that's just silly.
But by assuming just a few simple sanity checks (such as fewer than X stopovers, change carriers fewer than Y times, longest layover no more than Z hours, or "dont-use-puddle-jumper=1"), I would imagine that you could pull that number from 10^30 down to no more than 10^3 - perhaps less than 10^2. When you trim the size of your data set by 27 or 28 orders of magnitude before you even start your processing, then suddenly those 700 or so transactions/second start looking a lot easier.
Then, of course, there's yet another old standby of people needing lots of computations: Don't repeat your work. Insert a machine or process that watches each incoming request, and caches the results in a lookup table for future use. Yes, there are implementation challenges (such as marking entries as dirty when route information changes), but $50k in programming could save them more than $1m in hardware.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
At 400w a piece, that will make for one nice electric bill; I wonder why they didn't put linux on the mainframe.
I personally hate them, but their software is powerful and considered major CAD software.
The mainstream vendors, (Solidworks, Solid Edge, Inventor, et al.) are all married to the win32 API. For them, it will be a good long while just like Microsoft likes it.
However the big three, Dassaut, PTC, UGS all run on UNIX today, with one PTC Linux port. The others all claim too many support issues. (copout, support one distro and let your users sort it out.)
It's coming, but slowly.
Blogging because I can...
of course, your experience speaks for everyone, doesn't it? last time i checked, more devices were natively supported in XP than in any linux distribution. just because you fcked up doesn't mean the product is broken.
No, it doesn't speak for everyone. My post was meant to highlight that exact fact to the parent.
I think the number of devices supported "out of the box" by major Linux distros and WinXP is about the same. I've had LOTS better luck with Linux. Of course, it is a moot point -- the first thing I do in many cases on both systems is update to the latest drivers.
As far as screwing up, no I didn't. The product IS broken. It was a standard Intel MB, nVidia GEForce 5200, stock everything. XP goes on, then SP2 then wireless drivers then Windows Update and it borks. No other software no nothing. And I couldn't even boot to Safe Mode. That, by definition, is BROKEN.
It was fixable, and to be fair it has worked fine before on half-a-dozen other systems and I rarely install the OS so this problem is only possible once a year or so.
My point to the parent was no software works 100% out of the box. I've dealt with dozens of people (I'm in customer support) who bitch and scream at XP because it doesn't support all their hardware or software. I've seen people fight for days trying to get stuff that was working in Win98 to work in XP.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They could have their partitions running in modern mainframe environment first (the original stuff was from IBM so this is a no-brainer as IBM's mainframes are really well backward compatible, even on word length issues and such), then add Linux to the mix. After that, porting on Linux/x86(-64) would have been trivial.
This has been part of IBM's strategy for a while: run Linux from mainframe to the cheapest possible x86 hardware. The benefit? Single unified programming environment lets customers gradually migrate applications to hardware of choice. It's not that unusual to see Linux on zSeries as it makes perfect sense for consolidation in cases where VMWare ESX Server just does not cut it. The bottom line? Efficient IT operations management when system administration is focused on one operative environment (+ some mandatory Windows backoffice stuff).
>> I tried switching the family over to Linux machines over the summer vacation and the objections from the other family members was more than enough to send all 7 machines right back to Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
>No one with any intelligence at all would switch all of 7 machines over to a new, untested OS at once. This is a troll.
Not only that, but what kind of person would admit that someone in their own family was running Windows ME (and wanted to go back to it)!
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." - Mitch Ratliffe
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
I'm not certain this guy is trolling---
Given what he describes, it's a realistic scenario, in that He didn't do ANY research etc.
If you walk into something totally unfamiliar/ blind, the expected happens. You step in something or worse.
Kudos for using Ghost, btw. I use a Knoppix CD and partimage. YMMV.
He also doesn't indicate how long ago this "event" occurred... Things have improved greatly in recent years.
Also... ATI SUCKS. There, I said it.
NVidia drivers, both the free/Free ones WORK as a rule, and the hardware is very good.
Brother? perhaps it was a brand new unit, insufficient info (IIRC at least SOME Broter products DO work well under Linux)
Most (at least commercial) Linux distros have this neat feature available online usually called a "hardware compatability database".
If some widget works for one distro, it probably CAN work on all of them if you add the drivers, but at a totally green user/admin level, that's unlikely to happen as it requires work/knowledge..
It lists what is OFFICIALLY supported, and sometimes things that work anyway, but have limitations like nonstandard video modes and undocumented, nonstandard interfaces.
The All In Wonder series video cards/grabbers are a perfect example of this... They have never worked well if at all under Linux.. Everyone elses does for the most part.
Better luck next time, and Google is your friend.
A fifth of the capacity of their system before they switched to Linux was on hardware purchased in 2001 to handle the rush of bookings when airports reopenned after September 11th. Most likely, routine upgrades in capacity and regular equipment replacement meant that the rest of their system was relatively recent as well; the savings on running a modern mainframe over running a 1970s era one (in terms of maintenance, power usage, and space occupied for the amount of computational power) would pay for buying a new one.