MIS: The Tortoise and the Hare

“Linux has long been seen as the IT industry’s country cousin:
good enough to drive low-end PCs and web servers but not
sophisticated enough to support high-end enterprise systems.
However, the open source operating system has come a long way, and
a growing number of IT directors are finding a role for Linux in
the back office.

“Decision-support tool TradeSignal, for example, uses Linux to
support its real-time financial information service, which
distributes 400 million stock prices in real time to futures
brokers in the US and Europe. The cost of late or corrupt data
could run into billions and systems reliability is vital to the
company, says technical director Stephen Egan. Red Hat Linux offers
TradeSignal that reliability, in addition to a 60 per cent cost
saving over the previous Sun/Solaris environment.’I don’t have
anything against Microsoft or Sun but with figures like that, it
was a pretty simple decision,’ Egan says…”

Complete Story