Page II: Find out why Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, is moving its servers to Linux.
Presumably the replacement of 100 Window applications servers with 20 Blade servers is the area where you'll reap the most benefit in terms of cost and convenience?
I am not sure yet where the main cost savings will be: we have done a couple of pilot studies with a couple of pilot schools, but we haven't done the main project so we still don't know all the costs.
There are several different areas of cost reduction: we reduce the number of servers, which in itself is quite major, we centralise the management from 100 locations down to two boxes in a data centre, and of course there are reduced costs for server OS licences.
We have achieved reduced cost for our support contracts, we expect to have a thorough evaluation in the autumn, when we will compute all the different aspects. On paper the savings are considerable, but we don't want to give away numbers.
What sort of ROI over what period are you looking at?
Due to the great reduction in complexity, I would expect the server investment to have quite a short-term payoff, but we are also replacing 2,000 to 3,000 PCs, which is a major cost in all of this. But then teachers and students get much better services. For example, each class has had only one shared e-mail address in common -- but now each student will get an individual address that they can keep for the 10 years that they're in school.
Were you concerned about service and support?
It's important to get it, but we weren't in any doubt that we could get support, as we have already made agreements through several of the companies delivering us servers, and there are also several companies specialising in servers in general and Linux in particular.
Was your existing infrastructure giving you reliability problems?
The educational network had lots of troubles -- our database servers weren't unreliable, but they were quite old, the HP 3000 running older version of the HP UX, and we had several servers that had reached the end of life. After five years, hardware support costs rise. It's important you have full support for databases.
Has anything about the process surprised you?
We haven't had any unpleasant surprises, other than the press coverage. Despite some press reports in the Norwegian papers, we are not chucking out Windows. For our employees used to working on Windows and Office, to open the paper and see incorrect reports saying that we were terminating use of Windows caused quite a bit of discussion.
We have already paid for Windows, so it would not be a good economic decision to jump about. Sooner or later, our Office platform will reach the end of its life, and we will re-evaluate what we do. We will look at a Linux desktop next year, but we have to test it, and it would mean that the teachers would have to use both the pupil's Linux desktop and their own Windows desktops, which might make life hard for them. Sooner or later we will review that, but there are no decisions there as yet.
ZDNet UK's Michael Parsons reported from London. For more coverage on ZDNet UK Insight, click here.
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