The two-phase rollout will see the 20 existing Oracle database servers running on HP-UX that support the City's health and welfare applications replaced with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 running on HP Integrity Itanium 64 bit servers.
The second part of the implementation will see the city's educational network migrate and consolidate from 100 Windows application servers to about 20 IBM eServer BladeCenters running Linux.
We spoke to the city's CTO, Ole Bjoern Tuftedal, to get his take on why Norway's second-largest city was making the move.
What made you initiate the change?
Most of the major Norwegian cities have economic problems, so it's always important to us to see if we are delivering our services in the best possible way. We had several of our systems and server platforms reaching the end of their support life, and we needed to do something about them.
We were looking at moving to 64-bit platforms, and moving from proprietary processor architectures to Intel, so after some reviews and lot of studies we saw that Linux was an interesting alternative, it's reached maturity and stability in comparison to many other systems.
We are doing a server consolidation project. We've got Oracle running on HP-UX and then will go on to look at our network servers, mail servers, DCHP, many of those which are already running on Linux, but may be running on different versions - so we are consolidating all of them partly to new hardware and to SUSE Linux.
Can you provide an example of the kinds of applications that students and citizens will be accessing with the new system?
We can roughly divide our infrastructure into administration and education. The administration is the standard one for the city employees, so all databases for the system used by the city administration, including health care, are included in this.
Depending on how we count, there are between 20 and 30 servers that we hope to migrate to approximately ten HP servers. For the educational networks, we have 32,000 students and pupils -- first through tenth grades -- and up until now we have 100 schools, and each has had its own NT server. We are moving this -- which is totally decentralised -- to be centrally managed from our computer centre running on IBM blade servers.
We are moving across server applications for students, which will be things like e-mail, home directory, filing and print services, and Web services. The network is standardised on NT 4.0 with Windows 98 clients; we are moving to Linux servers and Windows 2000 clients.
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