Novell South Africa has announced that a significant milestone has been reached in a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server migration project, with the City of Cape Town having successfully moved its Oracle back-end infrastructure across to SUSE Linux on inexpensive commodity hardware.
Dennis Zanello, Principal DBA: Database Support from Directorate of Information Services at the City of Cape Town, says its current fleet of IBM AIX servers had reached the end of their maintenance contract period and the hardware had become end-of-life.
Since extending this contract would entail substantial costs, Zanello says the City of Cape Town decided to explore its options.
"The South African government has put in place an overriding mandate that encourages exploring open source alternatives wherever possible. Because internally we had good previous experiences with SUSE Linux and the operating system is one of Oracle`s supported Linux distributions, we decided to take this route forward," Zanello explains.
"By moving to Linux the City of Cape Town would also be able to take advantage of inexpensive commodity hardware platforms, a move which in itself, would allow it to save roughly R200 000 per annum on maintenance contracts alone," adds Dale Murphy, marketing and sales director for Tseleng 80/20 CPA, the City of Cape Town`s integration partner.
In terms of the hardware used, Zanello says the municipality decided on four dual-3.6GHz Intel Xeon-based HP blade servers. "This would allow us the flexibility to bolt computing resource onto our existing infrastructure as and when needed," he says.
Once the hardware was procured and SUSE installed, Zanello says his department started by moving its development, application and database servers across to SUSE in January. "We reached a serious milestone two months ago when our production environment was transitioned across," he adds.
While the overall solution still needs some work in the next phase of implementation, Zanello says performance has been noticeably improved.
"We have also found this to be a sound investment, since future scalability will be much more cost-effective and easy to manage. It really only entails adding another blade server to the foray," he concludes.
Murphy says that looking forward, his company sees more moves to SUSE Linux afoot. "The two platforms of choice going forward will be HP UX and Linux, with Linux being utilised wherever appropriate. Essentially, wherever Linux has perfect compatibility with the needs and requirements of a system, it will without a doubt be used," Murphy says.
Novell South Africa`s branch manager for Cape Town, Peter Hunter says the company is absolutely thrilled with the progress made by the City of Cape Town and believes this success will pave the way for future implementations of the cost-effective SUSE Linux operating system.
"For a mission-critical implementation like this to go off without a hitch, it bears strong testimony to the fact that Linux is in fact enterprise-ready and capable of handling the toughest workloads. Combine this with its ability to effect cost reductions and open a company up to new possibilities from an integration perspective, and the case for Linux becomes a no-brainer," he says.
"We look forward to more implementations that prove this and as always, offer our assistance to any party looking at reaping the benefits Linux can bring," he concludes.
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