Posted on 04/27/2006 11:25:00 AM PDT by Salo
Federal Aviation Administration Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; FAA Achieves 30 Percent More Operational Efficiency for 50 Percent Less Cost
Apr 26, 2006 8:00:00 AM
Copyright Business Wire 2006
RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 26, 2006--
Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today 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. In addition, by switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the FAA realized 50 percent savings and spent less than $10 million on a project initially estimated at $25 million.
Related Quotes Last Change % Change RHAT 30.10 0.15 0.50
The FAA accommodates more than two million passengers on domestic airlines every day. With roughly 8,000 airplanes in the air at any given time, the successful execution of the FAA's mission largely depends on the highly complex Traffic Flow Management (TFM) infrastructure and its real-time Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). When the administration embarked on a technical refresh effort for the TFM and ETMS, the FAA faced significant implementation time along with a high price tag.
"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 deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux first in its remote computing locations and later moved Red Hat Enterprise Linuxto its central processing facility located at the Department of Transportation's Volpe Center. 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.
The FAA also used Red Hat onsite training during the modernization project to effectively transition engineers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux through the Red Hat Certified Engineer program.
"For training, we decided more was better, particularly with the developers," said Gustin. "As a result, we made training a priority, and it has really paid off."
"The FAA's successful and impressive migration truly exemplifies the value, performance and security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux," said Paul Smith, vice president of government sales operations, Red Hat. "There are scores of agencies across the entire federal government, as well as state and local governments in all 50 states that are moving Unix-like capabilities to Linux on commodity hardware. The fact that Red Hat delivers a platform for better total cost of ownership, throughput, and credentials for strong security makes it the obvious choice when agencies look at either a technical refresh or infrastructure modernization."
To learn more about the FAA's migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, read the case study and view the video testimonial, please visit http://www.redhat.com/.
Ping.
Works for me!
(Or will soon)
Bravo, Redhat! Bravo, Linux!
Tech pings. Nice to see how government spending can be cut and taxpayer money saved by using the right tools.
Please tell me you're joking. Linux is way more reliable and robust than anything Microsoft has ever released, or will release.
And Scott McNealy resigned from CEO yesterday after announcing another down quarter.
Hmmmm.....
I am joking.
Sun having a down quarter hardly counts as news anymore. :-)
Exactly. As much as many try to portray the advance of Linux as progress against Windows, the reality is that Linux is eating away at commercial UNIX and Sun Micro in particular.
Although it doesn't say, I presume the FAA's previous systems were of a commercial UNIX variety.
No love lost for Scott but I'm not sure this is a good thing.
Here comes SCO and its lawyers.
Well, RedHat is an American company providing software solutions in a competitive industry, as is Sun. If Red Hat can do the job better for less money...that's what capitalism is all about.
No love lost for Scott but I'm not sure this is a good thing.
Ya beat me to it. I posted the article and was attempting to locate an aviation ping list to ping it to, but it was pulled.
That's one of the worst things about the government. They base almost every decision on what's the absolute cheapest, and free software is as cheap as you can possibly go. I for one know I won't feel any safer next time I'm flying!
I'm in Perl class today. Don't have access to my ping list.
From what I understand of the FAA infrastructure, chances are whatever was being replaced predates unix, probably by decades :-)
I wonder if there is a way to automate pinglists, where you could feed a script the article number, and it would generate a ping message automagically.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.