LinuxUser: Smooth iron

“For ISPs, time is money. Considering how competitive
the market is, the need to be fast, flexible and reliable is of
paramount importance. Back in December, when Telia Net, the Danish
subsidiary of Scandinavia’s largest ISP and telco operator Telia
Networks, embarked on its search for a new hosting system at its
data centre, time to market, stability and reliability were the
overriding prerequisites.

Telia Net’s previous deployment was a server farm consisting of
around 70 Unix servers from vendors such as Sun, Digital and HP.
The reason to change the system was to consolidate and stabilise
without losing any flexibility. But there were many other factors
to take into consideration. Telia Net hosts over 20,000 websites
and the system in place needed to be able to cope with over 10
incoming emails a second. The Unix server farm was proving to be
expensive, time consuming and difficult to manage.

Reliability was also important to Telia Net when searching for a
replacement solution – any downtime on its hosting system meant a
loss not only of money but also of reputation. ‘We asked a lot of
vendors, one of which was of course IBM, how to consolidate all of
this, how to bring out the flexibility of Linux but with the very
stable production platform underneath,’ says Henrik Wulff Riedl,
CFO of Telia Net. ‘So that’s why we came out of the discussions
with IBM and decided to go with Linux running on the
mainframe.'”

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