Migration news: Windows to Linux, and vice versa

Wotif.com

  • Industry: Travel
  • Employees: 126
  • Operations: Online operation provides booking services for more than 6,000 hotels, motels, serviced apartments and other accommodation in 36 countries. Offices in Brisbane, Toronto, Auckland, Singapore and London
  • Financials: Privately held

Wotif.com: When big ideas get even bigger

Wotif.com began to tear the Windows envelope to bits shortly into its explosive life; four years later, an alternative 64-bit Linux infrastructure is still keeping up with the fast-growing company. David Braue explains how.

Born in the heady days of the dotcom boom, Wotif.com statistically had little more than a snowball's chance of still being around five years later. After coming onboard to helm the year-old company's IT strategy in 2002, however, CIO Paul Young found that the problem was not its viability -- growing market demand had taken care of that -- but its core Microsoft technology, which was already showing signs of strain from fast-growing visitor numbers.

As was the habit in those days, the Brisbane-based company's original Web site was built around a slew of Microsoft technologies including, most importantly, Windows 2000 and SQL Server. This may have suited its initial design, but Young says from the moment he began with the company it was clear that the environment was struggling to keep up with traffic volumes that were increasing at 100 percent per year.

-I was feeling constrained [by the Microsoft path] and one of the large issues I had at the time was SQL Server being able to keep up with the performance that we required out of it," he explains. -Coping with sustained, ongoing growth of the level that we have is no small issue. It's significant, substantial, ongoing growth, and it hasn't changed for five years."

Turning that innovative culture into real results was the only way for the company to build a scalable infrastructure that would support what is now nearly 370,000 subscribers, 2 million user sessions and 110,000 bookings every month.

Even when these numbers were just projections on a whiteboard, Young believed the flexibility afforded by a more open Linux infrastructure would make it an ideal alternative to the struggling Microsoft servers. -We're a very innovative, quick moving company and some of the reasons behind our decisions were to not be bound into doing things the way proprietary solutions lock you in."

Shortly into his tenure, the development-focused company migrated from its previous architecture to build its core applications around the more open J2EE 1.5 development platform (renamed Java EE 5), supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS servers and Oracle10g Standard Edition database.

Making the switch
Not all Wotif executives shared Young's enthusiasm for the switch.

-There was a lot of doubt about it and we were early adopters of this for a commercial entity," he recalls. -But the CIO's drive is to politically go in and be able to educate, and to get buy-in on these kinds of decisions. We did a very critical pilot for them around a critical piece of functionality for the Web site, and proved that we could get a very highly scalable app out of it." Numbers don't lie, and the pilot test confirmed that a Linux-based infrastructure, running an Oracle database, would increase headroom for the system -by about 1,000 percent", Young says.

Choosing the new operating system and database platform was only part of the change, however: Young's reforms also included the creation of a more framework-driven development methodology, building on agile development techniques to iteratively develop and test the company's core J2EE applications throughout their lifecycle.

Paul Young, Wotif.com CIO

Endemic to this approach was the construction of a fully featured test environment where Wotif's 18 developers could automatically simulate the influx of thousands of database requests per second against code in development. With testing a core part of the development approach, the rules are clear: applications must pass all the tests thrown at them, and meet all relevant benchmarks, before they can be released.

True to its performance in initial tests, the Linux and Oracle-based system continued to scale along with Wotif's business for a couple of years. By 2004, however, Young's team was already looking at tapping into new 64-bit processors to open up even more growth possibilities for the company's systems.

Here, again, rigorous testing and benchmarking confirmed the best way forward for the company: recently released 4-way x86-compatible Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V40z servers, based on 64-bit AMD Opteron processors, offered linear scalability that Wotif testing confirmed put them far ahead of the decreasing performance returns seen from Intel's competing Itanium processors.

With performance a key factor in the company's planning, the decision to move to the V40z servers was made quickly; never mind that the CPUs had only been out for a few weeks and weren't yet supported in available operating systems.

In a Microsoft environment, Wotif would have had to wait nearly a year, until Microsoft's release of 64-bit Windows, to build on the new server platform. However, it took the Linux community just a few weeks to offer support for the processor in a subsequent release of the Linux kernel. Wotif installed and tested the new kernel and, finding it performed as promised, went right ahead with what turned out to be a quick and painless migration to the new server platform.

A community for the future
Wotif's strong adherence to plain-vanilla J2EE development was critical in easing the move from Red Hat Linux on 32-bit Intel servers, to the same operating system running on 64-bit AMD-based systems. Having avoided hardware and operating system-specific functionality, the application was easily portable to the new environment.

-Most of our applications run in Java, and I don't like to leverage off sophisticated, hardly used features of Solaris or Linux," Young says. -I think hardware and the operating system are starting to become an abstraction at the enterprise level; as long as I've got an operating system that will support Java, I'm set."

The pilot test confirmed that a Linux-based infrastructure, running an Oracle database, would increase headroom for the system by about 1,000 percent.

Paul Young, Wotif.com CIO

Relying on a community of interested technophiles to produce major code upgrades may not seem like every CIO's idea of a solid risk management strategy, but Young says time has shown that the Linux community's overall reliability, constant self-examination and the broad availability of relevant skills make the strategy viable.

-I'm a results-driven person, and basically we're not waiting a year for a version of software that we can run on bleeding-edge hardware," he explains.

-I've found that most of the really top-notch Java developers have a Linux background, and they're used to things like open source and open standards. It's a culture of bleeding-edge technology: due to the open source community and the amazing amount of contributors out there, [upgrades are] available in short burst increments and it's a very short time to get new enhancements. Bugs and issues tend to get addressed quite quickly; this is one of the defining differences that Linux offers."

Years down the road, Wotif.com has turned Linux into a competitive advantage by clearing a more open, scalable path for itself. The server environment now includes a dozen primary servers and another dozen mirrored servers that are used for development and testing.

Parsons and his team recently completed a scalability plan that will take the architecture forward for the next five to ten years -- and he couldn't be more optimistic about the future.

The future growth -is very exciting and completely supported by the decisions we took to be open standards, Linux, open source and agile development based," he says. -You know you've chosen a good strategy when you look into the future and don't see any significant roadblocks of a technological nature in front of you. The TCO story for Linux is excellent and, for me, the story just keeps on improving."







Editor: Fran Foo | Copy Editor: Ella Morton | Design: Brice Lechatellier | Production: Melissa Siu

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Talkback 9 comments

  1. GNU/Linux Does Make Coffee D.C. Parris -- 25/04/06

    Not only does GNU/Linux make coffee (http://www.linuxsa.org.au/pipermail/linuxsa/1998-October/002868.html), a recent news report has GNU/Linux operating an instant ice cream machine (http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT9296154631.html). It's called Moobella. :-)

  2. FUD Anonymous -- 25/04/06

    OMG.... more ZDNet FUD.... simply depressing. Oh well, I have first-hand experience with switching and know what is involved....and how to succeed.

    Too bad the dime-a-dozen MCSEs can't think in terms of anything outside of MSFT.

  3. Ringing True? Anonymous -- 25/04/06

    Something just doesn't seem right about this article.

    Austereo:
    “Importing our network environment and applications onto a new platform required some fairly specific skills,” he adds, “and those skills were not abundant within the group

    Sounds like the problem was lack of skills in Linux, and lack of knowledge of how to make it work at its best.

    Coffey International:
    "The way they set up their Linux-based infrastructure had promoted the silo mentality; information wasn’t stored in any sort of intuitive manner, and it wasn’t easy to access information across the various geographical areas".

    It seems that their Linux environment was not set up very well. This can happen in any enterprise environment Windows Linux etc. Did they consider doing it right with Linux before going back to Windows?

    Again, it sounds like a lack of experienced Linux admins was the problem, not the OS itself.

    If this is the case, then the article brings into focus the fact that Linux admins are in great demand because good Linux admins are thin on the ground. Perhaps it should have finished urging people to get Linux training so they can get jobs at companies like these and show them how it should be done on Linux.

  4. This tells a good story about the Microsoft/Linux differences Anonymous -- 25/04/06

    This article tells agood story about what I beleive are core difference between Microsoft and Linux environments.

    My experience is that Linux environments are still far superiour in security, performance and stability - even though Windows Server 2003 has made good gains. Linux is an excellent application environment. That's one reason why Oracle and similar application providers use it.

    But Linux still falls short when it comes to supporting a general IT solution for business. Just look at the integration that Exchange/Outlook gives with virtually no setup effort. It just can't be matched by any Linux based solution (yet - I've looked at a bunch in some detail). Add third party product support like Blackberry to the Exchange formula and the argument to deploy anything else is that much harder.

    This is illustrated by the story - the general IT infrastructure guys found it easier on Windows. The guys with the application focus found Linux better.

    So a lot of companies end up with a mixed environment - Windows server for general IT infrastructure, and Linux for application environments.

    A full Linux solution is still attempted by the brave, but until desktop Linux becomes mainstream (face it - Windows XP is pretty good and the best Linux desktops just don't compare e.g. fonts), and Linux servers provide a complete out of the box business environment Windows will have a place.

    For me, the cost of Windows is not the issue - rather my main concerns are the restrictions, overhead in just managing licenses, interoperability and security issues. But that's the price we pay.

    1. Touche Anonymous -- 27/04/06

      It's hard to see the story revolving around two different environments one is general IT and second is Application Environment. Obviously for the companies that moved from Linux to windows, infrastructure isn't setup properly or the network personnel people didn't do proper job. However, Application development especially j2ee provides scalability and security, technical skills are not that hard to find. I believe that if Linux wants to survive they need to concentrate more on provide general IT solutions. I think linux made much progress in this area and it will continue to do that.

  5. linux admin Anonymous -- 02/05/06

    now there IS a good thought.
    BUT what constitutes a good linux admin?

  6. Less resources required Anonymous -- 04/05/06

    I agree that Linux is far more superior in terms of security. However a hardware firewall will overcome that. for simplicity and ease of implementation Windoze wins.

  7. Demonstrative of the Microsoft Mentality Anonymous -- 09/05/06

    This whole article is filled with the result of the mentality of increasing complexity which has been the hallmark of Microsoft from the beginning. For exceedingly "collaborative" environments, one of the simplest solutions is a wiki. Everything is documented (even deletions) which covers the legal trail, everyone has easy access, and access can also be controlled. Instead, people are convinced they need a bloated microsoft application to fill this requirement. I find it quite amusing that so many IT staffers fall for being upchanged like this, especially since it generally equates to an increased workload for them.

  8. The users drive IT - not admins Greg -- 09/05/06

    Perhaps we (IT Admins) need to remember – it’s the users that drive IT procurement, not the Admins. I know the average user in my company wouldn’t have a clue or even care about what a wiki is, or Linux, or GNU whatever. They used Outlook in their last job so they want Outlook here. They know employers want skills like MS Office, Windows XP, et al, so that’s what they want in this job. They used a certain popular Windows-only application in their last job, probably will in their next, so that’s what they want here. I can’t tell them that OpenOffice.org works just a well for most tasks – they don’t care. They want IT to be completely transparent from all that consideration, so they can focus on just doing their job – and not on ours!

    So sorry, until the users themselves request a Linux solution, it won’t even get look in in my office.

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