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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
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.
"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.
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)
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
> 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.
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.