As Published In July/August 2003

Enterprises Putting Linux to Work

By David A. Kelly

Mobliss
In the 1970s, the premium programming and special shows on cable channels such as HBO and Showtime were among the hottest things on TV. Fast-forward to 2003, and Brian Hill likes to think that the hottest things around will be interactive programming for wireless devices. Think of the screens of wireless phones like color TV sets, and think of Mobliss as a premium channel like HBO.

The company wants to bring the programming to the masses. Imagine being at a baseball game and using your phone to respond to an instant MVP survey on the JumboTron monitor, or instantly responding to a poll on the evening news. With over 140 million cell phones in North America, and close to 70 million that can send or receive text messaging, there's a huge market of consumers who could potentially use these interactive services. But handling that kind of "spiky" volume of transactions could easily swamp even the most responsive IT systems.

That's why Mobliss has converted its back-office servers that manage the collection of data from different wireless carriers from a Microsoft Windows platform to Oracle9i Database Standard Edition running on Linux and HP/Compaq high-availability blade and database servers. "When we reached the point where we needed high availability and the ability to administer the systems more effectively, Oracle on Linux was the clear choice," states Brian Hill, chief operating officer at Mobliss, Inc., in Seattle.

Mobliss is now certified to handle several thousand transactions per second through its Linux-based systems—two or three times the volume of calls that its carriers can throw at it simultaneously. From a technology perspective, the benefits are concrete—Hill cites the reliability and high transaction throughput as the key benefits of using Oracle, and the cost-effectiveness and streamlined administration of using Linux. "Everything is run on Linux, so it makes it very, very easy for administration," says Hernan Alvarez, vice president of infrastructure at Mobliss. "The cost of administering the boxes is significantly lower with a single platform as well."

Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program and the combination of Oracle and Red Hat Linux has paid off at Mobliss. "We had a cross-vendor support issue related to swap files on the Red Hat Advanced Server, and the support from Oracle on that issue was excellent," says Alvarez. "We received the fix from Oracle sooner than from anyone else."

As Mobliss continues to grow, it expects to add Oracle9i RAC to distribute processing across a cluster. Not only will this give it significantly more horsepower and an easy way to scale the architecture for the huge spikes it needs to manage, but it also makes ongoing management easier. "Unlike using a single, large-scale UNIX box, with Oracle9i RAC you can schedule downtime to fix critical issues or simply do system mainte- nance," says Alvarez. "We can maintain the boxes as needed instead of as emergency dictates."

Even Mobliss's customers are satisfied. Mobliss has had multiple outside technology reviews of its infrastructure, including security, and no one has raised any concerns about its Linux or Oracle implementation. Like sweeps week on television, Mobliss is ready for every one of those 70 million cell phone users to pick up their phones and vote. "We needed a system that was going to perform flawlessly and guarantee us that we were going to pull off these projects without any problems, and Oracle allowed us to do that," says Hill.

New South Wales OSR
As CIO for the New South Wales Office of State Revenue (OSR), Mike Kennedy is responsible for the IT systems that monitor and collect taxes, for example on regulated transactions such as land purchases, security and stock sales, and duties on goods sold. Over the past three years the OSR has been able to automate 30 percent of its business duties by using Oracle9i Application Server (running on Linux) for its e-commerce implementation. The OSR has also lowered its cost for collecting money to less than 6 cents per AUS$100, which is the most efficient of all state offices. Transaction times have also been cut to less than 10 seconds for approximately 96 percent of its transactions.

Perhaps it's the heady feeling of handling all that money that makes one bold, but when the OSR decided to migrate to Linux, it didn't waste any time doing departmental or pilot applications. "We went straight in for a core business application that's critical to our business—e-commerce—and now Oracle9iAS is supporting the system that collects AUS$11 billion," says Kennedy. "We're not just stomping around on the edges." With the new system, e-commerce transactions have gone from zero to 30 percent in two years and have doubled in the last six months. Originally OSR was running its Oracle8i database and some PHP on Linux, and then about two years ago it installed the Oracle9i Application Server running on Linux, along with J2EE programs and XML e-commerce connections. It's all been remarkably stable. "We've been running all that Web infrastructure very successfully," says Kennedy. "We run five operating systems—everything from Linux to NT to Solaris to NetWare—and Linux has probably been more stable than the other four." And, OSR is currently implementing Oracle9i RAC on Red Hat Linux to further improve the reliability of its services.

Not only has moving to Linux dramatically cut the OSR's processing time and cost, but it's also a considerably cheaper platform than traditional alternatives. "The capital cost savings are significant. The big capital item is the hardware itself, and the ability to buy Dell boxes or any old Intel boxes compared to buying high-end UNIX boxes is the real benefit," says Kennedy. "They're basically about a quarter of the price."

Hays Medical Center
You might not expect doctors to be the target market for Linux, but Hays Medical Center (HMC), in Hays, Kansas, does. That's because HMC has recently migrated a series of applications from its AS/400, Lotus Notes, and Windows systems to a variety of Oracle products running on Linux servers. "We want the system to be an integral part of everyone's daily life," says Alan Wamser, a systems analyst at HMC. "That's how they will do business through our Oracle Portal, including calendar, e-mail, scheduling, and many HR applications." Overall, approximately 1,000 people—everyone from doctors to maintenance staff—will be using the portal. Although implementation is still in process, HMC deployed its Web site and the Oracle database on Linux in January and is currently migrating its Lotus Notes applications to Oracle Collaboration Suite.

By using Oracle's Collaboration Suite; Oracle9i Database; Oracle9iAS; and, in the future, Oracle9i RAC (all running on Linux), HMC is able to meet the hospital's needs for information sharing, internal communications, and healthcare patient-information support without having to spend additional money on legacy systems and managing multiple platforms. Its previous IT architecture had a variety of systems and operating systems: Web applications running on Lotus Notes, NT servers doing ASP, and more. "One of our goals was to consolidate this into one platform and one architecture so we didn't have to manage multiple development environments and maintain different types of systems," says Wamser.

HMC needed a system that would be very scalable and reliable. Being a core system in a healthcare environment means no downtime. "With Red Hat and Oracle's initiative with Unbreakable Linux and its scalability, we don't have to purchase more expensive hardware," says Wamser. "We can just plug in more boxes with Oracle9i RAC. Because of Oracle's clustering technology, it made a great deal of sense to us that Linux was probably the way to go for scalability."

To start off its migration, HMC replaced some of the DNS servers around the hospital with Linux, adding more Linux servers as they went along. To take the next step, though, HMC needs to work with the CFO to justify all the costs and compare them to HMC's existing RS6000 systems and Lotus Notes system on the AS/400. For example, the difference in yearly maintenance costs on an RS6000 or AS/400 versus an enterprise Linux box is considerable. "Part of the justification we've made is that Intel is cheaper than our existing systems. But we also needed high availability, which is why we felt that Linux, rather than NT, was the way to go," says Wamser.

Golden Gate University
Like many organizations migrating to Linux, the differential in the cost of hardware was an important factor for Golden Gate University (GGU), in San Francisco. The 100-year-old accredited university specializes in business and law education for professionals who live remotely or attend school part-time. When it came time to develop a new intranet to support GGU's 1,000 faculty distributed throughout the U.S., money caused the university to seriously consider migrating to Linux. "The total cost of acquisition and support and everything else was about 30 to 40 percent lower with Linux on Dell than it was for used high-end UNIX boxes," says Sanjeev Mohan, enterprise database architect at GGU. "Comparing Dell and Linux to top-of-the-line UNIX boxes, it was closer to 60 percent cheaper for the Dell hardware."

Originally, GGU's applications were running on Sun boxes. But as Mohan's team evaluated technology needs going forward and looked at what it needed to support application growth and data-center needs, it decided to start testing existing applications on Red Hat Linux on Dell hardware. "From that point forward, we came to the realization that the cost of deploying Dell and Red Hat Linux was significantly lower than running the similar configurations on Sun," says Keith Rajecki, GGU's IT infrastructure manager.

The decision to move forward with Linux took time, though. After considering it on and off for a year, it was Oracle's announcement of Unbreakable Linux that clinched the decision. "When Red Hat and Dell came out with their partnership where they provided integrated support for Linux on the Dell platform, and then when Oracle joined Red Hat and Dell and provided three-way integrated support servers and certified all of its Oracle9i products on Linux, that's really the industry support we were looking for to move ahead with it," says Anthony Hill, GGU's CTO. The university is now running Oracle9i Database on a highly available Linux cluster, as well as Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and the Oracle9i technology stack on Linux servers.

Although GGU could have used Oracle9i RAC or advanced replication in order to ensure high availability, GGU decided that a logical Data Guard would be the best solution. It set up a primary database that the applications point to, as well as a logical database running on a second Linux server. In the case of failure of the primary database, GGU can switch or fail over to the standby database, with minimal downtime. GGU has configured Oracle Data Guard so that no data is lost. The whole system is monitored through Oracle Enterprise Manager, which can page people on a cell phone in the case of an error.

Although the current Oracle on Linux systems support GGU's intranet, the university is also actively building a new Web site with Oracle and Linux that will support between 50,000 and 100,000 registered users. Based on GGU's experience, Oracle on Linux is a solid and reliable choice. "Compared to Oracle9 on Windows, our Oracle on Linux implementation is much more reliable," says Mohan. "We've closely monitored things such as block corruption, and hardware failure, and find that the combination of Dell hardware and Red Hat Linux makes Oracle very reliable—which is a major testament to the ability of the platform."

David A. Kelly ( davekelly@attbi.com) is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.