[ Thanks to Greta
Durr/LinuxMall.com for this link. ]
“Hurricane season is coming, and weather.com, a.k.a. the Weather
Channel’s online counterpart, has its hatches battened down with
Big Blue Linux. The deployment of Netfinity running Linux occurred
last week, said Mark Ryan, weather.com’s CTO, and is part of a
multifunction server that continues to run many of its functions on
Sun. The images, maps and advertising, however, have been ported to
Red Hat Enterprise Edition Linux on IBM’s Netfinity.”
“The importance of the images and maps is not lost on Ryan.
“Every page that we serve has some sort of an image on it, and the
image is probably the largest volume contributor on a page as far
as bits and bytes go,” he said. “Obviously it had to be fast,” Ryan
continued. “Maps tend to be a flat-file type of environment, so it
had to be a platform that served up flat-file function very
fast.”
“…in the Atlanta area, Sun Solaris skills are very hard to
find,” he explained. “So we went back and said, `what are they
teaching at the colleges,’ and `what is the next-generation
workforce coming out with a skill-set in?’ And it turned out to be
Linux.”