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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
The only thing that makes this news is that a CIO actually recognized it.
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.
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.
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!
I donno....google seams pretty reliable. Akamai web caching is designed to ensure online reliability (and is Linux based). The standard for Internet based systems that need long uptime and robustness is GNU/Linux. This is because the web as a popular medium is only about a decade old. The only reason why other organizations (banks and the military for example) that need reliable systems have not migrated to Linux is because they use legacy code that would be expensive to port.
The particular solution the CIO in the article choose gambled with reliability because they used 144 separate servers in 12 clusters. Well implemented clusters of x86 hardware can run seamlessly, but individual machines are likely to fail. Redundancy should mean that a couple blown power supplies or corrupted disks a year is no big deal, but it's still a slight risk and a pain to fix. There are Linux solutions that run on larger machines. They could have replaced their four IBM mainframes with four Linux mainframes. IBM supports Linux on the zSeries mainframes (formerly called System/390, before that System/370, which was the successor to System/360..its about as traditional a mainframe as you can still buy). The top high end computers are Linux based. The top 3 most powerful computers in the world at this time, two IBM eServers and a Sgi Altix, all run Linux. Linux offers the most flexible, powerful, and reliable solutions out there.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
"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.
Moving the backoffice stuff from expensive licenses of Unix and mainframes to Linux is a no-brainer.
No it isn't. There are many very high volume commercial and financial websites that use features of commercial Unixes, such as memory and resource partitioning, self-healing, fault management and very high scalability. Linux will certainly get all these at some point, but until then it is certainly not a 'no-brainer' to move. Even with smaller systems there are many applications that require certain Unix versions.