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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.
"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?
What OS did they migrate from? NetWare? SCO? FreeBSD? Windows 98? TFA says nothing about their previous platform.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
..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
I think lift has more to do with keeping planes in the sky. Otherwise the FAA coud declare gravity a terrorist "force"
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Umm...you didn't read TFA, did you? This is a Unix->Linus transition. Microsoft wasn't involved in the case at all.
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.
"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.
Poor Linus, he must be working his fingers to the bone providing all the services that Unix computers were providing beforehand!
I hope Linus isn't free-as-in-beer.
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.
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."
Gravititional forces are terrifying. At this point, it's the second strongest force known to man behind p0rn. Nothing is stronger than p0rnal forces.
Here is a link to a story regarding antiquated air traffic control systems. It is more than just a few years old. Eleven in fact. But nevertheless I doubt that things are much more advanced even eleven years later. Maybe the FAA in the /. story could have invested in some of the $150 Chinese peecees?
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,
Well that rules out a migration from Solaris since RedHat would have had no problem naming Sun as the vendor they replaced.
HP-UX they might be a bit quiet about since their close to HP and definately if it was AIX RedHat wouldn't want to antagonize IBM.
It looks like it was HP-UX ased on this snippet from http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:9WrQ3EspDRwJ:w ww.academy.faa.gov/ama200/S20Catalog.doc+faa+%22tr affic+flow+management+infrastructure%22+ibm&hl=en& gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
It always makes me laugh when people say they upgraded a system for less money and more power. Every time I upgrade my computer it's cheaper and I get a lot more power. That's just the way computers work.Open Source Java DAO Generator
They use a little-known distro called Bernoullix.
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.
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.
they keep the planes from falling out of the sky
I've flown for hours at a time without talking to the FAA, and my plane didn't fall out of the sky. The FAA doesn't keep the planes from falling out of the sky, they keep them from hitting each other, and *then* falling out of the sky. And even then they're barely up to the job.
But this isn't that system. I'm not sure, but I think this is the system that gives airlines ground holds to keep them from spending too much time in holding patterns.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
If you need a reminder who the FAA is: they keep the planes from falling out of the sky.
If you've ever known or talked with an amateur pilot, you would know this is not what the FAA does. Instead, they make sure that instead of driving 4 hours along the highway, you spend 3 hours filling out paperwork and a flight plan, then 1 hour flying to get to the same destination.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I didn't realize that the 2.6 kernel ran on vaccuum tubes! Suppose they just compiled it all "-O2 -march=eniac"
-=JML=-
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...
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.
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!