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The FAA Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Linux
Neopallium writes "Red Hat has announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third of the original scheduled time and with 30 percent more operational efficiency than the previous system."
Disclaimer: I love Linux (and Un*x), and I hope someday Linux (and Un*x) becomes a majority player in the computing world. But, ...
The article paints a rosy success story, but consider the source. This is a Red Hat press release. While it all may be completely true with no misdirection, I put little stock in self-congratulation, especially after an amazing experience with a similar Microsoft claim.
I worked for a major Telcom years ago and we merged with a smaller firm... Shortly after the merger, Microsoft put a full page ad in Time magazine describing an enourmous success story of how our new company now comprised of two previous companies combined the two companies' IT systems and integrated them seamlessly with Micosoft's then new .NET
platform.
This would have been an amazing success story except for the fact that:
For those who doubt, I can provide the digital photograph of the ad, I was so amazed I actually took a picture of it (I will have to dig it out, but I know I have it.)
I know many would not be surprised by a bogus claim from a Microsoft, but I don't trust that any company providing a press release to be providing real news (or trustworthy, or balanced, etc.).
This whole "press release" presented as "news" would be more honest if they placed the disclaimer information up front. (If you don't read all the way to the VERY LAST LINE of the article, you won't know the source is Red Hat.
About time someone in the government did something right.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
This is good, maybe it might prevent a future upgrade of the flight control systems to Windows -- Talk about a Blue Screen of Death!
ebob9
"The FAA's successful and impressive migration truly exemplifies the value, performance and security
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,"
All the stories talks about is how they came in under budget. Another reason for saving 15 million
could be that someone simply budgeted too much money. Much like when your wife spends $200 on a pocket
book that normally cost $250, and then she tells you that she saved $50!.
D*mn women.. oh wait.. what was I talking about again?
Not much new here -- install RHEL for 0.4 times old line Unix.
1: How hard did Microsoft fight to try and keep the FAA in the fold?
2: How hard did Microsoft fight to try and suppress or diminish the results of their switch?
I suspect a lot in both cases, which makes all this even more surprising. All things considered, Microsoft needs some real competition. Once they get it, all the rest of us will benefit.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Linux is so stable and reliable that the FAA uses it. If you need a reminder who the FAA is: they keep the planes from falling out of the sky."
What OS did they migrate from? NetWare? SCO? FreeBSD? Windows 98? TFA says nothing about their previous platform.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Hmmm...apparently it was slashdotted even before I can read it.
talk about efficiency!
anyone have the google cache version handy?
..not a surprise that they'd move to Linux, given their recent bad experience with Windows.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
...or did they simply use that money for something else? Don't government agencies have "use it or lose it" funding?
It is not clear if they got $15m in savings by moving from Windows, another flavor of *nix, or some old paper based system. It would really help if the article had some more substantive detail. BTW, I'm personally $7m better off than I would be if I'd have bought myself a Bombadier jet. Now, if I could just find that $7m I'd be able to do something fun with it.
2. noone in our IT knew of this stunning success effort
3. our "integrated" systems weren't
The real question here, at least to me: Was Microsoft ever punished by your company for running this false ad?
Or did Microsoft pay for the privilege by giving you discounted software or something else of value. Something else, besides a nice lunch for the VP of MIS, I mean.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its workstations, servers and at the hub site, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems, while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment today and for the future.
Quite possibly this is from IBM (Aix) to IBM (Redhat). More likely is that it is another kick in the crotch for Sun.
Rod Taylor
I think that puts it into perspective quite clearly. This was just a conversion from say... Solaris over to Linux. It's not an agency convinced that Linux was better than Windows and then converted over to Linux. Making a really big deal out of this is like saying that it's bold step for environmentalism to replace a hybrid civic with a Prius instead of a 250mi/gal future version of the smartcar.
From red hats site
Benefits By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on their workstations, servers, and at the Volpe Center, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment.
Not so impressive after all.
I remember sometime back in the nineties, a government report was released detailing how secure the governments systems were from cyberterrorism. The only department that was secure was the FAA, because "their systems were so antiquated, they could not be accessed with modern equipment."
:)
Maybe they are finally getting something going?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"So, airlines are going bankrupt all over the place, ticket sales are down, and we're still in no position to catch terrorists."
"That sounds bad."
"But there is good news."
"What's that?"
"I just saved a bunch of money on datacenter operating and upgrading costs by switching to Linux."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The FAA's budget is something like 13-15 billion a year. While every little bit helps, OS licensing is really a drop in the bucket.
Yes, you can do this, it's actually firly common:
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1369/LWD000606S390/
I thought the problem was old, tube-based hardware in the TRACONS and elsewhere always going blinky. Software would be the least of their worries.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
So, pick one: Solaris, HPUX or AIX.
;-)
It's pretty well known amongst the compugeek-pilot community that the FAA had a boatload of stuff running on some pretty old RS6000 iron, with quite a bit of it still running on AIX 3.2.5 which was end-of-lifed by IBM like sometime last century.
So, from your three guesses... I'd have to say that the first two don't count
This is mostly for their "business" systems, not the national airspace operations (the flightplan and radar systems) which are being migrated to a Linux-compatible realtime operating system.
years ago (since merged) that SAP took out a full pager proclaiming what a big success story we were, blah.. blah..
forget the exact details (and publication) of the ad (this was '97) but the TRUTH was that there was one business unit barely up on general ledger.
the punchline came when they merged and Kervorkianed the whole SAP project for PeopleSoft which the other company ran (& still does to this day AFAIK)
For all of those who are curious as to what was there before. I worked on this project and was incharge of automating the installation process on the integration side and was part of the integration team for this project. The old system were old HP C360's running HPUX 10.20. The whole TFMI system has been ported and updated since the early 90's. Before they were running on the 360s the system was running on Apollo's before. Of course this refresh was way cheaper in '05 than the earlier refresh because in the '98 refresh they had to swap out thinnet for CAT 5. And if you ever seen some of the cable trays at some of these TRACONS on Towers.... some aren't pretty, espically at BWI. Since the CAT 5 was in place it was as simple as swapping out the machines and putting in the new routers when we got on site. And yes for a govement project this went realitivly smoothly. Once I set up the kickstart server and scripted the install for the ETMS software, intergrating the HP XW8000 workstations was as easy as just hitting F12, so even our warehouse logistic's person could integrate the machines.
Let's say you're this telco giant. Microsoft releases the ad (with approval from the telco's PR people, of course). Now, are you going to admit to your shareholders that the ad was, in fact, not true at all? No.
Microsoft was never punished because the telco couldn't admit that it wasn't true.
Behold the glorious bragging rights
Did the air traffic control center really have a "Microsoft server crash"?
Submitted by doc on Wed, 09/22/2004 - 19:02.
On Tuesday, September 14, something went wrong at the FAA's regional center that controls high altitude air traffic over Southern California and much of the southwest U.S. Two days later, this Associated Press story (carried here on MSNBC) summarized the problem in its opening sentence: "Failure to perform a routine maintenance check caused the shutdown of an air traffic communications system serving a large swath of the West, resulting in several close calls in the skies, the FAA and a union official said Wednesday." That same day, the Los Angeles Times ran a story titled "Human Factors Silenced Airports". Then, on September 21, TechWorld ran a story titled "Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up: Failure to restart system caused data overload". It begins, "A major breakdown in Southern California's air traffic control system last week was partly due to a 'design anomaly' in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Here's what the Times story said....
Officials from Professional Airways Systems Specialists, the union that represents FAA technicians, acknowledged Wednesday that an improperly trained employee failed to reset the Palmdale radio system.
But they said the quirk in the system, known as Voice Switching and Control System, is a "design anomaly" that should have been corrected after it was discovered last year in Atlanta.
As originally designed, the VSCS system used computers that ran on an operating system known as Unix, said Ray Baggett, vice president for the union's western region.
The VSCS system was built for the FAA by Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., at a cost of more than $1.5 billion.
When the system was upgraded about a year ago, the original computers were replaced by Dell computers using Microsoft software. Baggett said the Microsoft software contained an internal clock designed to shut the system down after 49.7 days to prevent it from becoming overloaded with data.
Software analysts say a shutdown mechanism is preferable to allowing an overloaded system to keep running and potentially give controllers wrong information about flights.
Richard Riggs, an advisor to the technicians union, said the FAA had been planning to fix the program for some time. "They should have done it before they fielded the system," he said.
To prevent a reoccurrence of the problem before the software glitch is fixed, Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman, said the agency plans to install a system that would issue a warning well before shutdown.
Martin, the chief FAA spokesman in Washington, said the failure was not an indication of the reliability of the radio communications system itself, which he described as "nearly perfect."
"There is no room for error or down time in our systems," said Joshua Gustin, TFM-Modernization program manager, FAA. "When we first considered refreshing our entire system, we were looking at $25 million in costs and 18 months to full deployment. By switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we were able to spend less than $10 million and accomplish a major system modernization in one-third that time. Red Hat Enterprise Linux fixed our problems of reliability and scalability, and gives us the support we need to reduce our risk."
The FAA has a long history IT disasters, dating back to the early 1980's. Whatever happened to the Advanced Automation System,
a =25163,00.asp
originally contracted to IBM and EDS in 1981 and still not deployed? Taxpayers have spent about $40 billion on that one, with still
very little to show for it.
A brief history of FAA competence. Not the best source, but then the government isn't good about revealing its failures.
http://www.baselinemag.com/print_article2/0,1217,
And just think how much they would have saved had they used Debian...
flame on!!!!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Actually the FAA keeps planes from running into each other. Pilots and mechanics keep them from falling out of the sky.... and the wings help a little. In this political climate though, it is usually the left wing that gets blamed when they crash.
Never has the wildcard had it so easy...
Or keeping with "redhat compatibility" so people don't freak out, CentOS.
This is one system used for flow management (planning of routes and clearances but not actually Air Traffic Control)
TMS was hosted on Apollos using Sys5
ETMS migrated to Sun/Solaris
TFM-I upgrade replaced ETMS
You'll be pleased to know that the Air Traffic Control radar systems dont use Windows either.
There has been a seemingly inexplicable decrease in plane collisions across North America...
I know, I know, it is the FAA, not air traffic controllers. Cut me some slack, it's Thursday afternoon.
They use a little-known distro called Bernoullix.
Considering that Federal Government pisses away $15 million every two hours in Iraq, it hardly makes a dent.
The Article is biased by the use of the word "migrating". Given all of the illegal immigration news in the US, the term was used to slant the article towards Microsoft by the use of the derogatory term "migrate" in reference to Linux. But, more correct term should be "upgrading". To be fair.
In other news, Microsoft and Sun announced the joint purchase of a former Soviet manufacturer of ground-to-air missiles...
So far many/most large to-Linux migrations have been from some Unix-like or big-iron OS. Very few have been from-Microsoft.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A few years ago they were in the news because of a crash, bad wording, I mean system failure.
I didn't realize that the 2.6 kernel ran on vaccuum tubes! Suppose they just compiled it all "-O2 -march=eniac"
-=JML=-
In my opinion, press relesaes are worthless. They are put together by marketing and PR people. They can not be trusted (both the people and the press releases). I don't care how great a company is or how otherwise respectable they are. Marketing, PR, and advertising people are dishonest by default (with exceptions, I'm sure). What is sad is that press releases have become news in and of themselves. Far too many supposed news sources just pass the releases on as news rather than critically examining them.
The only exceptions I can think of to the "don't trust press releases" rule are cases where there is nobody stands to profit from the news or there are no specific claims made beyond mundane facts such as a product launch.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
These computers are not networked to the outside world. I can only see some update to pick a security hole being applied and bombing something also the reboot. Or Not doing it and being compromised. Sorry I would feel much more comforted with a BSD style Unix.
lower costs? more efficiency? my government? guess the world's ending tomorrow!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
According to her, the migration from was from Unix to Linux. The assumption (or wish?) would have been that the migration was away from Microsoft. In the absense of any such information, I asked.
That said, it's still not a migration from Unix to Microsoft, but still...
It just stroke me. What about an ad campaign with the theme:
...
"I just saved a bunch of dollars by switching to Linux!"
National airspace operations (http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/technology /eram/) is migrating to a handful of Solaris machines (limited purpose) and a boatload of AIX ones.
Those RS6000's are getting upgraded to pSeries AIX boxen (at least in the ARTCCs). The D-positions already have.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Yeah, I'm trolling. But admit it, when you read "migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux" in the summary, you too thought: "from Windows". In fact, FAA switched from the "proprietory Unix platform"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Now how much could we save by switching the Iraq war to Linux?
You just need to install the bsodsim package; that'll take care of it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Companies always like to trumpet things like this and make it seem like their hardware or their OS was magically the reason when it was really incidental.
For example, if the existing system is 5 year old hardware (or older), the mere process of upgrading to *anything* is probably going to save you a lot of money and get your better performance. If they have hardware support contracts, most places charge a very hefty premium to support older equipment, and if they are using any commercial software licenced by CPU, simply moving to a newer system with fewer CPUs is likely to result in cost savings.
Then there are instances where the improvements are just because during the migration process, long standing architectural issues with the application are fixed.
It's times like these that I wish /. had a "Dumbass" moderation, among other possibilities.
Back in 1992 I got a tour of the Atlas Computing Centre in the UK (I was doing a particle physics course at nearby RAL). We got to touch the Cray. Ooh geek heaven. Anyway, in the foyer was part of one of their first computers, the Atlas 1. It looked like a modular synth, all cables and patch leads. The guide then told us there were only three of these left - this one here, one behind glass in the Science Museum in London, and one other... ...currently doing Air Traffic Control for Heathrow Airport. He wasn't joking.
Who got the facts NOW!??
You ain't got no facts, Bill! We got the facts!
MS is probably completely aware of this and simply asks any companies that merge that use MS products if they can publish such a statement. Its in both companies best interest. I doubt if MS paid for it as it just reinforces (im sure) what the telco itself was saying. The merger went smoothly.
It's extremely easy to install on linux.
launch the package manager and select what you want to install and insert the disk, and click the mouse.
if you consider trying to install something you need to compile from source as "hard as hell", I don't know what to tell you.
millions of admins install from source for a lot of reasons. you prefer to install binaries.
well, bottom line, you prefer a computer system that doesn't require you to think because you're lazy.
Not that I'm a linux snob, but you really are just lazy.
They're using their grammar skills there.
It is right in there.
The thickheadedness of some of you guys just floors me.
My read on the story is that Linux on x86 replaced expensive proprietary unix systems.
"By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its workstations, servers and at the hub site,"
How exactly is this being read as a blow to microsoft? Linux is killing off the Unix market.
Most tech news on tech sites is either press releases (rehashes sometimes, barely re-written) or opinion pieces, with reviews falling below that. I find it astounding you didn't know that! And most "regular" news is reprints from one of the three major news wire sources, and THEY rely on press releases, then they slap their copyright on it like they thought it up in a vacuum or something. They are real bad on that, you can see exact copy/pastes from various corporations or academia or someplace, then AP/UPI/AFP/NBC/CBS/ABC whatever copies it and calls it "news" and demands you pay them for it. Ludicrous! Only a small percentage of news is independent investigative journalism, REAL SMALL. I see it all the time (one of my jobs). Pick some news stories one day and google your way back in the food chain, you will find most news is corporate press releases, thinly disguised corporate fluff (looks like fanboyism/payola stuff) pieces, or governmental propoganda press releases masquerading as news.
I would bet less than 5% of the "news" is original. Maybe only 1%.
Well, now you know, better late than never. Millions of people never pick up on it either,especially those who rely on a half hour of headline news that is one third commercials, one third sports scores and local weather and traffic, leaving one third as press release rehash, most of that being governmental propoganda and some shock value sensationalism crap to grab eyeballs (Local idiot screws goat! Twister flattens trailer park! Local government politician caught being a crook!) At least around slasherdotz someone will point out reality for ya.
Sir, I think it's time for you to switch to decaf. Also, you might consider putting in less brandy.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
Red Hat is not Linux, it its own unstable little perversion of Linux, and they have the gall to ask for money for it.
I cannot believe the FAA has made such a blunder. Doesn't exactly instill confidence.
OTOH, it does seem distressingly easy to write code that will run only on Linux.
I've done the compile-from-source thing A LOT. After dealing with the mess that tends to occur from this, I'll spend much more time finding a binary package than it would have taken to build from source.
A government agency delivering a project on time and under budget? Nah, gotta be a fake.
"Microsoft was never punished because the telco couldn't admit that it wasn't true".
Very good point, and one worth remembering. (Although how could Microsoft have been punished for being "economical with the truth", when it was never punished after being found guilty of serious crimes?)
Back around 1991, a salesman told me he could make no headway selling software development tools against IBM. Seems the IBM salesmen had got this huge insurance company to issue a press release quoting its managing director as saying it was committed to IBM's AD/Cycle. Although there was no sign of AD/Cycle ever materializing, and the insurance company's software continued to be written by an army of COBOL programmers with notepads, there was no way it would ever admit that AD/Cycle was not working for it. Until IBM formally withdrew the AD/Cycle program, all the companies that had been suckered into issuing those press releases were effectively locked out of buying tools from anyone else. Neat.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.