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/.
OSS PING
If you are interested in the OSS ping list please mail me
Time to convince John that FR should be reprogrammed using .NET Frameworks 2.0, SQL Server 2005 and Atlas. Could build in some really cool stuff then!
I don't know what those central systems were but FAA uses a lot of Solaris at individual airports/strips. I know somebody that works at one and I'm SURE he would have told me if it had been changed to something else.
One of the best certs out there 100% practical not multiple guess! Its also multi-tiered meaning you may not score high enough to get the RHCE but you may get the RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) which is a great cert for admins..
Fortunately, 'cheap' != 'low cost'.
Knowing what I do about OpenSource platforms, I will feel no less safe.
If you see this message the answer is yes.
One of the worst things about government is that it rarely keeps itself to the standard of what's cheapest that will accomplish the mission. They just saved $15 million of my tax dollars, so I'm happy.
Oh, I forgot, you prefer subsidies to IT companies in the form of the government always paying more than it needs to, and you don't mind that the taxpayers get stuck with the bill.
I for one know I won't feel any safer next time I'm flying!
Just be glad they didn't go with Microsoft. There was a Microsoft system in air traffic control that required regular restarts to keep running. They were normally scheduled every 30 days to avoid the bug (which blew every 49.7 days), but someone forgot and the machine restarted itself right in the middle of operations, threatening air traffic. It was a problem with using Microsoft's RPC and GetTickCount(). They didn't have that problem when it was running on UNIX.
I guess you haven't heard about all the problems Airbus has been having with their various uses of Linux?
Rebooting Your Airbus
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1620586/posts
Contact me if you'd be interested in post #26
What benefit could that give over simply expanding his current free software setup vs. the cost of retraining, reprogramming and purchasing?
Probably, but I think it would have to be on the server side, rather than the client side.
What you save with "free" software you lose in development time and effort!
bump
First, not necessarily, and second, you lose in retraining and rewriting. In this case the cost of licenses plus retraining (for JR) would probably exceed the cost of adding some desired functionality using the open source tools he's familiar with, or simply downloading and modifying an existing open source application.
Microsoft likes to use costs of migrating from Microsoft when doing Linux TCO studies, but street does go both ways.
BTW, I say this as a .NET developer.
Byte you tongue!!!! ;-)
This could be done with a Firefox extension:
reply #26 was done with curl. it's basically a one line shell script.
What was Windows Server Footprint in 1996? Ten Years ago MS IIS had 5% of the web server market, today IIS is running at about 33%. I am relatively certain that you will see similar behavior for Mail Servers, DNS Servers, and the like. All this talk about how Only Linux is hurting Unix is a joke..
Whay would you need all that crap to make the ping list automated
Linux has come along way in the last few years. That, and the fact that it is UNIX based is a big plus for stability and security to boot (har har). The "geek toy" days of Linux are long gone as a growing number of large corporations are adopting this OS platform.
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