14 DAY TRIAL // In a move certain to annoy some Novell execs and probably provoke more hysterics in Steve Ballmer, the US Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has switched some of its systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
"By switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we were able to spend less than $10 million and accomplish a major system modernization in one third of that time. Red Hat Enterprise Linux fixed our problems of reliability and scalability, and gives us the support we need to reduce our risk," gushed Joshua Gustin, TFM-modernization manager - FAA.
The agency first deployed RHEL to its remote locations and later made the switch at its central processing facility while significantly cutting from the estimated $25 million bill and 18 months.
RHEL is to be used as part of the FAA's Traffic Flow Management (TFM) infrastructure and the real-time Enhanced Traffic management System.
"There are scores of agencies across the entire federal government, as well as state and local governments in all 50 states that are moving Unix-like capabilities to Linux on commodity hardware," commented Paul Smith, VP, Red Hat, in between gratuitous plugs for the company.
Despite my earlier comment on Ballmer, the FAA was previously using "a costly UNIX platform" (*cough* Solaris - if a simple Google search is to be trusted), not a Windows solution. The Microsoft reference still holds, though, the company being notoriously hungry for government contracts.