With projects such as Linux, Apache and Samba leading the way, there can be very few businesses in the UK that do not have some form of open source software running in their data centres.

There is a big difference between a business making use of open source software and taking a strategic decision to run specific systems or applications on open source.

The strategic use of open source is still at such a low level that any project could be considered 'innovative' in being a different way of doing things. However, for the use of technology to be considered innovative it should not just be different, it should add value.

CBR has chosen a number of open source deployments that have delivered specific value to the end user organisation, whether that is reducing costs, increasing business flexibility, participating in the creation of trusted systems, or delivering results that would have been impractical with proprietary software.

Going all the way

As previously mentioned, most businesses in the UK will have some open source software within their data centres. Few, however, have had the opportunity or the will to move their entire server-side infrastructure to open source software.

One company that has done just that is ESR Technology, an organisation that specialises in providing risk assessment services to the aviation, utilities, space, defence and petrochemical industries.

The company was previously part of AEA Technology (which itself was formerly the UK Atomic Energy Authority) but was acquired by private equity firm Coller Capital in late 2005. The divestment provided ESR's IT department with a unique opportunity: it had six months to identify, design, cost, construct and deploy a new server-side infrastructure to support 100 users over six locations.

According to the company's network administrator and software development manager, Sean Harmer, the company weighed up the costs of potential solutions and quickly decided that Windows would be prohibitively expensive.

That assessment, combined with in-house Unix and Linux skills, led the company to bring in a number of potential solutions providers for discussions. Open source support and services firm Sirius emerged as the partner of choice.

The company's main site in Warrington was previously supported via servers in its Abingdon office via a 1MB link supported by an outsourcing contract, an arrangement Harmer describes as "a nightmare". Having decided to locate its data centre in Warrington the company sourced new IBM servers via Sirius and turned to NTL for a 4MB IPsec VPN between the two offices.

For the server software architecture, ESR and Sirius have pieced together a 100% open source stack that includes the Debian operating system, Apache, MySQL and PHP, the CUPS Common Unix Printing System, Samba for integration with its Windows desktops, OpenLDAP, BIND, OpenVPN, iptables and Sendmail.

The company is also making use of the Subversion version control system, Bugzilla bug tracking software, and Jabber for instant messaging, and is preparing to roll out SugarCRM for customer relationship management and phpBB bulletin board software.

So what has the move to open source delivered in terms of value? A previous annual outsourcing cost of £384,000 has been reduced to total first year costs of £199,500 and ongoing annual costs of £86,000. The company estimated that a move to Windows would have added annual expenses of £27,000 in licensing costs alone.

Improving the link between the company's offices has also improved performance and productivity, Harmer says, while the investment has also improved flexibility and productivity for remote workers.

"One thing we wanted to be good at was enabling people to have remote access via IPsec and OpenVPN. We want to make it as flexible as we can for our staff as they could be on a customer site anywhere in the world," Harmer says.

The company has a fixed-price consultancy contract with Sirius but supports 85% of the infrastructure itself with just two staff, according to Harmer, both of which have other consultancy project duties.

Despite the mix of different sources for its open source infrastructure stack, Harmer insists there is not a significant support overhead on the company. "The servers pretty much look after themselves," he says, "it's only security patches we have to apply and most of them come via the main Debian repository.

"The client side is the bigger headache. We've found recently that some the patches haven't been tested that well," he adds, insisting that despite the mix of technologies involved, this is not an issue it has experienced on the server side.

While ESR briefly considered migrating its desktop systems to open source as well, the company has a large proportion of client-side applications that are dependent on Windows, although some users are dual-booting into Linux, and the open source operating system is being adopted as the development platform for the company's in-house developed applications.

Should have gone to Linux

So few businesses have made the move to open source on the desktop that special mention must be made of car giant PSA Peugeot Citroen, which announced earlier this year that it is migrating no fewer than 20,000 desktops to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktops, as well as moving 2,500 servers to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The company chose Novell for one of the largest desktop Linux deployments in history after trialling the software and finding it worked alongside its existing Windows infrastructure. It found Novell's collaboration with its existing hardware and application providers would help it reduce costs while migrating to a new architecture.

Another company to move to Linux in a big way is Specsavers opticians, which has moved to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its European servers, desktops and till systems as part of a complete IT infrastructure refresh.

The company has migrated its in-house developed SOCRATES 7 Java-based store application from Windows 2000 to Red Hat and is replacing all the desktops and servers in its stores in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain with Red Hat.

"With our new store system, every single business-critical application is running on Red Hat, from the till to the test-room hardware. We were convinced that Linux would have a major positive impact on our business and Red Hat has delivered exactly what it promised," says Nigel Spain, Specsavers' global architecture manager.

The company already has a history of using open source software, including Apache and the JBoss jBPM process management engine, as well as an open source ERP system for its wholesale business in Australia and Hong Kong.

Ensuring integration with existing technologies is an essential part of any deployment. Usually for an end user that means relying on your key suppliers to ensure they work together. Earlier this year the Countryside Council for Wales proved that does not have to be the case when it comes to open source.

The agency is the UK government's wildlife conservation authority for Wales. It wanted to ensure that the OpenBSD operating system it used for firewall and Internet systems would work with Cisco's IOS network switch and router software.

Rather than sit back and wait for Cisco or the OpenBSD community to do something about it, the Countryside Council for Wales came up with an innovative response; it hired Sirius to do the work for it and ensure that the integration will be included in future versions of OpenBSD.

The value from taking the approach of engaging with the open source community is clear: integration between two critical components of the agency's infrastructure where there might otherwise not have been any.

Cost savings are commonly cited as a measure of value, but improving business productivity and flexibility can be just as valuable. Such were the benefits accrued by UK stock brokerage firm Redmayne-Bentley, when it migrated its core platform from Unix to Linux running on Unisys ES7000/one servers.

Based on Financial Service Authority rules, the company was under pressure to maintain its system uptime and processing performance, not to mention failover to allow for system failure or a major disaster.

With its ageing Unix system no longer able to be supported, the company turned to long-term hardware partner Unisys for advice and accepted the company's recommendation that it move its core application, MinWin, to three ES7000/one servers running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, with two servers at its headquarters in Leeds and another in Kent for disaster recovery purposes.

The project has proven its worth in terms of productivity and processing, according to Michael Wheeler, finance partner. "Users are already noticing the benefits from a near 10-fold increase in processing power, especially in the performance of MinWin and the new utilities available," he says.

"For example, overnight processing has reduced from 13 hours to around 1.5 hours, with valuations being available at the start of business. This time saving provides us with the opportunity to load more data into MinWin: the strategic enabler for future enhancements to provide more efficient reporting and operations".

People power

One of the benefits of open source is that is empowers individual developers to do more with less, utilising their own skills to develop systems and applications that would be prohibitively expensive with traditionally licensed software.

An example comes in the form of the Perception Panel, a feature of the BBC's Daily Politics show that enables viewers to record their sentiment towards speakers during a live debate, for example, and users to analyse responses based on metrics such as age, location and voting preference.

The entire system was developed in three months by developer Richard Livingstone, of Banana Software Systems, and is based on openSUSE, MySQL and Apache Tomcat. The software replaced an existing version built at the BBC using proprietary tools that seemed unlikely to provide the performance required for a wide-scale deployment.

With more depth of information than phone or digital voting, the secret sauce of the Perception Panel software is that it acts as a high-volume RTP application to gather the data and automatically re-weights samples to normalise the results against the general population.

The result is an instant picture of potential national voting sentiment that can provide a politician with instant feedback on a speech or researchers with customisable reports for ongoing analysis. The BBC has also made results available as an Excel spreadsheet for viewers to run their own analysis.

Now licensed to Clickvision, the Perception Panel software has also been used by Sky News. Livingstone is also expecting to see it utilised outside politics, for example, alongside major sporting events to rate the performance of participants.

As Livingstone explains, while the BBC were agnostic about what technologies were used to develop the project, based on his experience with open source software and the likely licensing costs of proprietary alternatives, he decided to go the open source route.

"The open source side of it, the fact that its licence is free, is great because the types of tools you would use are very expensive," he says, estimating that the cost of proprietary tools would be between £10,000 and £20,000.

"For a large organisation to do it the cost side is not significant, but to use the open source tools effectively you do have to have the experience. I decided that for this project it would be better to go open source based on my experience but also the licence fees."

© 2007 Computer Business Review. Original article

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