Red Hat Linux and the StarOffice Office Suite make up the
backbone of the new Jan III Sobieski Hotel computer
system.
By Michal Pik
(Translated into English and reprinted by
permission from the April 25, 1999 Polish edition of
Computerworld.)
The Jan III Sobieski Hotel in Warsaw is one of the few Polish
companies that have decided to base their computer systems on the
free Linux platform. Servers and workstations alike running on Red
Hat Linux have replaced HP-UX (on the server) and Novell with
Windows 3.1 (on workstations).
“The first Linux system was set up in the hotel about 18 months
ago. It is still handling the e-mail router and server. Recently,
we decided to move our hotel and restaurant application over to the
system as well,” said Pawel Moszumanski, Senior Computer System
Specialist at Jan III Sobieski.
First Came Linux
“All of the hotels critical applications had previously run under
HP-UX on an HP F/20 series 800 server. Until recently, the old
applications Hogatex for hotel management and Micros 4700 for
restaurant management had worked without a hitch. But, it turned
out that the hotel application would not stand up to Y2K, while
Micros 4700 stopped meeting our needs,” said Moszumanski.
As a result, the hotel decided to replace these applications. It
began by considering whether or not to replace them with new
versions of the same software. However, it turned out that the new
version of the hotel application, supplied by a German vendor,
would not work on the Polish market. The new restaurant application
with customer service components was also not all that interesting.
The hotel was also looking for a less expensive alternative to the
HP-UX system. That is when Sobieski began to consider running the
new applications under Windows NT, NetWare, or Linux.
“We did not want to install any Windows NT applications because
of the costs associated with purchasing and administering them. On
the other hand, we would have to spend too much on the workstations
if we went with NetWare in order to provide access to hotel
applications on servers,” said Moszumanski.
In the end, Linux was chosen, as it was the least expensive of
the three options. Another reason for choosing the system was the
fact that HS Partner, a company that maintained earlier version of
the restaurant application at the hotel and maintained a similar
hotel application in similar companies, promised to develop a
parallel system for Linux.
Linux in a Restaurant
The system was installed on a dual processor server equipped with
two Pentium II 350 MHz processors (the server will run both
critical applications — hotel and restaurant). One hundred
workstations will be connected to it. Most of them (POS) are
terminals without a hard disk. They have a touch screen, a Pentium
233 MMX processor and 32Mb RAM (the manufacturer only supplies POS
with Intel processors). The system boots the operating system
straight off the server (bootp, nfsroot).
All of the new stations are made up of AMD K6-2 computers that
run very well under Linux. The system’s users can access the
restaurant and hotel applications in order to manage all customer
service activities: organize banquets, print orders, print bills,
etc. The applications service 410 guestrooms, the hotel staff,
three restaurants, two bars, a guarage, a business center, and
banquet rooms.
“We took a risk and made Linux our main platform. If something
goes awry, HS Partners software can be quickly recompiled for the
HP-UX platform and installed on the old HP server, which now runs
our bookkeeping software, making the stations just Linux
terminals,” said Moszumañski.
“The system administrator can control applications running on
the server and workstations from any location without the use of
any specialized administrative tools. We really dont have to come
to work because we can remotely administer the whole system,” says
Moszumanski with pride. “A similar Windows NT application would
cost a lot and would give us less flexibility,” he adds.
Whats Next?
The hotel wants to install its hotel application. We did not want
to start by installing the two most critical applications at once.
If there were any problems, we would not be able to service our
guests properly and we simply can’t have that,” says
Moszumanski>
Because Sobieski converted to Linux, it is not running Microsoft
Office as its main office suite any more. The hotel now uses a much
less expensive package – StarOffice – offered by German Star
Division. “We paid around $14,000 USD for a 75-user license,
implementation, and employee training. We would have had to pay
around 6 times that for Microsoft. Its only drawback is that it
boots up too slowly, which is quite nerve racking when working over
NFS but is acceptable when working off a local hard drive. There is
still no Polish language version but our employees do not have a
problem with that. We also wanted everything to run on one
platform,” says Pawel Moszumanski.
On the other hand StarOffice has its advantages, like the fact
that it runs in a more integrated environment than Microsoft Office
does. The individual user version is also free-of-charge.
Therefore, every employee can install it at home without breaking
the law.
“As of May, all key hotel applications will run on Linux. We’ll
only leave Windows NT in the electronic services center for our
clients, but we also intend to install Linux machines running
StarOffice there as well,” says Moszumañski.
The Project:
Implementation: Installing Linux as the main system platform at the
Jan III Sobieski Hotel in Warsaw
Goal: Transfer the hotel and restaurant applications over to
Linux and install an inexpensive office suite on workstations
Technology: Hotel and restaurant applications by HS partner;
StarOffice by Star Division; Linux Red Hat 5.2
Labor: HS Partner, PBiWH Next and Polskie Konsorcjum Firm
Linuxowych
Timeframe: 6 months
Supervisor: Pawel Moszumanski, Senior Computer System Specialist
at Jan III Sobieski