Having implemented Linux across the company's servers half a decade ago, De Bortoli CIO Bill Robertson is an enthusiastic backer of open-standards technology, most of which happens to also be open source. However, he says without the investment made at the turn of the century by companies such as IBM and Sun, open-source software could not have achieved the success it's currently experiencing.
After 75 years in the winemaking trade, De Bortoli is still a family run business with headquarters in Griffith, NSW, where the original vineyard was planted. With his scope encompassing the IT infrastructure of a restaurant, four vineyards, three wineries, as well as regional offices from Sydney to Perth, Robertson has his work cut out.
| "I could see that the shift to Linux was going to happen anyway, and that by adopting it I could increase the level of IT resources available to the company." Bill Robertson, CIO of De Bortoli |
He believes Linux provided him with the opportunity to save money, free up IT staff, and create a flexible infrastructure to provide for future growth.
"I could see that the shift to Linux was going to happen anyway, and that by adopting it I could increase the level of IT resources available to the company." Robertson says. "I knew that the sooner we began to work strategically the better we would be in the long run."
A project which began by consolidating the company servers onto Linux, has blossomed to the extent where the company uses Linux and open-source office applications on desktops, and a range of back-end open-source software.
"Initially we were running a mixed Windows/Unix environment on the servers, but we're only a small shop and we need to be generalists," Robertson explains. "There is a lot of overlap between Linux and Unix, and it just made more sense to consolidate the servers onto a Linux platform so we could have a pool of trained administrators."
Bemused by any notion that Linux is poorly supported in the enterprise, Robertson says he has never had any trouble in finding support for De Bortoli's open-source systems, and says that those IT managers having trouble simply aren't looking hard enough.
"In the early days we bought a support contract from HP, and they've provided us with gold-plated support all along," Robertson says. "All in all, five external organisations have provided support to De Bortoli's open-source software -- we've had no trouble finding help, and no trouble implementing on-site training."
The TransACT transaction
In a similar vein Stephen Supple, senior Oracle developer for Canberra-based telecommuncations provider TransACT, is surprised by concerns regarding support levels for open-source software.
"Because of my positive experience with Linux servers people are always coming back to me with 'but oh, it's not stable' or 'but oh, there's no support'," Supple says. "I just tell them what we've done and point out that we haven't come across any problems."
Supple began sifting through alternatives when the Unix system, which underpinned the company's entire telephony database, was nearing capacity.
Supple was simultaneously looking at software and hardware upgrades, including the installation of a Storage Area Network (SAN). With 70-75 percent of company revenue based on customer and network information contained on an Oracle database, data integrity was key to any technology decision.
"We needed to make sure that any technology we adopted fitted in within the context of Oracle's future directions," Supple says. "This system can't stop, we can't afford for it to stop."
After taking advice from various suppliers, TransACT opted to switch from a Unix to a Linux server environment.
With an internal Linux whiz on hand, Supple says it wasn't hard for a further two Unix-based systems administrators to learn what they needed to know about the new platform.
At the same time, Supple found vendors more than happy to support the integration of their business applications into the new Linux environment.
"The configuration of the connection to the SAN was the only hurdle, but StorageTek -- who we bought the SAN from -- came out and saw to that very quickly, and now we have an infrastructure that is bulletproof," Supple says.
To ensure data integrity, TransACT ran both the Unix and Linux systems side by side for a period of three months.
"The first time we ran the scripts the new server system finished the job in so little time we were sure something had gone wrong. So we ran it through again and again, until we realised it was just that the Linux server is so much faster than the older one," Supple says. "We're working on massive data sets, we're talking 250 million rows in the main working tales and we can now extract information within seconds."
And while cost savings wasn't initially a driving factor, the low cost associated with running Linux servers has enabled the company to add redundancy to the system, improving its disaster recovery capabilities.
"By running Linux we could afford to buy two servers instead of one," Supple says. "For TransACT implementing Linux on our servers has been a very good experience."
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