Case Study: Raymond's migration from UNIX to Linux

The textile division of Raymond is situated in Chhnidwara near Nagpur and has more than 3500 employees. The major products are suitings, furnishing and auto-furnishing fabrics. The suiting manufacturing systems ran on centralized SAP servers co-located in Mumbai, while the other business critical apps like production planning ran on two HP UNIX servers. These servers were

aging and had a very high maintenance cost. The AMC charges of these HP UNIX servers were about one lakh rupees annually. To save on these exorbitant expenses and also to replace the aging UNIX servers, the company decided to switch to new servers.

From UNIX to Linux

For the hassles involved in the licensing and maintenance of UNIX servers, the company decided to opt for Linux-based servers to migrate. This decision turned out to be beneficial as it was able to convert the costs involved in AMC of UNIX servers into costs involved in purchase of server h/w to run a Linux server. From the amount saved from AMCs the company decided to procure new hardware for Linux. Not only that, now Raymonds is able to maintain 100% server backup with those savings by purchasing another server to act as backup. Now the maintenance of Linux servers is not much of a hassle and the cost of the AMC has been brought down to ten thousand rupees per annum.

Application porting issues

The main challenge during the migration was portability of legacy applications. As the database in Sybase was on HP UNIX APT-based frontend applications, the database migration from UNIX to Linux wasn't a big challenge. The main concern was the APT-based frontend applications which were designed for UNIX environment and couldn't be ported directly onto Linux.

It was evident that the application interface would have to be developed again for all legacy applications to be able to run on the Linux systems. As the APT-based interface of the applications was character-based and not user friendly, it was decided to have a GUI for all those applications. The IT department's development team was entrusted to develop the application interface for legacy systems on Java, as it was open source and didn't have compatibility issues with a Linux upgrade, which was the case with UNIX servers. With each UNIX upgrade, the corresponding Sybase and APT software also had to be upgraded to avoid compatibility issues following the upgrade. Therefore by choosing Sybase with Java-based applications, the company is able to take advantage of this in Linux environment and freed themselves from the hassles that were involved with each UNIX upgrade cycle.

Benefits

The company has been able to reap benefits by opting for open source Linux server and application development by saving on costs involved with licensing and also in lowering the maintenance costs as compared to humungous costs that were there with UNIX systems. Besides, the company is able to get service support easily as compared to UNIX systems.