Posted on 4-12-2003

Auckland Linux Centre
By Adam Gifford, NZ Herald

IBM has established a Linux centre of competency in Auckland on the back of
work it is doing to shift many of Air New Zealand's core applications to
the open-source environment.

Centre head Chris Phillips said the 10-strong team had built tools and
processes to simplify deployment of Linux in large- or medium-sized
organisations.

"We have built an enterprise infrastructure, a cookie-cutter machine which
can deploy Linux guests across the enterprise. Whether it be on mainframe
or midrange server, it does not matter, nor does it matter what type of
Linux it is," Phillips said.

"We see Linux as a key enabler for customers. Lots of companies have
infrastructure they have built up year on year on proprietary systems,
where they have been told, 'You need this type of machine to put this
application on.'

"Linux has the ability to change all that. We can take that equipment,
centralise and downsize, and lower the total cost of ownership by
double-digit figures."

Phillips said Linux was particularly suitable for web infrastructure.

"A lot of people have multiple servers across the shop floor all running
Windows, with all their web infrastructure hooked up. Well, why would you?

"Let's get rid of all those servers, put in machines where we can LPar
[logical partition] them up to create virtual servers, cut 150 servers to
20, so cut down all those machines you are paying for, all the Windows
licences on those platforms."

Phillips said his team was building a new web infrastructure for Air New
Zealand. "The infrastructure will be live in February, and we will be
porting applications to it through to June."

That includes a project to move the airline's SAP system to Linux.

Phillips said Air New Zealand might split the application so the parts
which involve mainly input/output processing could be done on a Linux
partition on a mainframe, while more processor-intensive parts could be
done on midrange servers; or it could run the whole application on midrange
servers on Linux.

The application is currently run a large Sun server using Sun's proprietary
Solaris Unix operating system.

"We are looking at all those options with Air New Zealand because they are
looking at dropping their cost of ownership," Philips said.

He said big corporates were reluctant to move to Linux despite perceived
cost advantages because they were worried about the support.

"The last thing you want as a corporate is to put your financial system up
on Linux and then have it all fall over, and have to open yourself up to
asking for help from the open-source community.

"The difference here is IBM will do this for you and stand behind it. We
will sign the service-level agreements and provide first, second and third
level support, we will represent you to the open-source community if
required."

Phillips said he had sheaves of resumes from people who wanted to be
involved with the competency centre, which would also service clients in
Australia and Asia.

Among those hired so far is Andreas Girardet, who founded Yoper (Your
Operating System), a desktop Linux which monitoring DistroWatch said was
the fifth most downloaded distribution over the past 12 months.