Well it would be more secure,wouldn't it?
NEW YORK -- After years of running a complex tangle of Unix operating
systems in its global IT server operations, consumer products company The
Unilever Group is committing its technological future to Linux.
The company, which sells food products including Ragu spaghetti sauce,
Hellman's mayonnaise and Bertolli olive oil as well as personal hygiene
brands such as Dove soaps and skin creams, plans to adopt Linux for its IT
systems in all 80 countries where it operates. The company made the
announcement here at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo yesterday in the
Jacob Javits Convention Center.
"We believe ... that it will deliver all of our computing needs in the
eight- to 10-year time frame," said Colin Hope-Murray, chief technology
officer at Unilever, which is based in London and Rotterdam, Netherlands.
"We want to be able to cookie-cut our systems and deliver them around the
world" without having to worry about operating system compatibility issues,
he said. The company today runs systems with the HP-UX, AIX and Tru64
versions of Unix.
Hope-Murray said Unilever will make the migration from Unix to Linux to
simplify and standardize its IT architecture as well as to duplicate the
lower operational costs and increased performance the company has already
seen using Linux for Web servers, e-mail servers, proxy servers and
firewall applications. So far, the company has no cost-savings numbers to
release, but anecdotal evidence bolsters its expectations, he said.
"We've got an awful lot of proof points," he said, including firewall
servers that run three times faster under Linux, with cost savings of up to
40%. "Every time we put in Linux, we are amazed and surprised at its speed
and the reliability with which we can run it."
Why make the move now? Because the cost savings and performance gains
answered any concerns about whether the operating system could help
business, Hope-Murray said. In addition, the expected release later this
year of the Linux 2.6 kernel will introduce new features, including
real-time threading and improved journaling, that offer the tools needed
for the transition.
Unilever is making its move in a very vocal way, he said, to encourage
independent software vendors to bring out needed enterprise business
applications for Linux.
"It's not really a leap of faith," Hope-Murray said, noting that Unilever's
two largest IT suppliers, Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM, are committed to
Linux and are ready to help with the project. "If our partners weren't
committed to it, we wouldn't be doing it."
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http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/linux/story/0,10801,77816,00.html
I just bought a second hand (RAID?) 10 gig HDD to dub the Dell from the
police,when the case,book,film and tv series are over I plan to switch to
open bsd or Suse with full encryption.Small (and open source) is beautiful
for a nomadic war machinehead.
