Linux Is Ready

Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today that Banca IFIS (ISIN IT0003188064, Bloomberg ticker IF MI, Reuters ticker IF MI) has adopted Ingres Database, the leading open source database that helps organizations develop and manage business critical applications at an affordable cost. Ingres Database allows Banca IFIS to effectively manage the sensitive financial information resulting from the large number of financial transactions its customers make on a daily basis.

Banca IFIS is the only independent Italian bank specializing in financing enterprises. Committed to the development of new services for lending financial support and managing working capital, the bank helps thousands of enterprises every year find the appropriate solution to their financial needs. Banca IFIS implemented Ingres Icebreaker, which allows a low cost, simplified installation of Ingres Database. It is the first fully integrated enterprise-class database and Linux operating system with an intelligent online patching mechanism. In addition, administrative tasks are simplified with an easy-to-use consolidated management portal.

Banca IFIS also chose to take advantage of an operational services engagement with Ingres. This provides a proactive 24 hour support service to ensure optimal performance of this mission critical installation.

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.

The platform itself is built primarily on Linux, but Solaris and Cisco networking also play important roles. The back-end database engine is based on Oracle. The LSE expects to see transaction speeds drop from a claimed best speed of 2.7 milliseconds — which was rarely, if ever, seen under TradElect — to the Linux solution’s claimed 0.4 millisecond speed.

It wasn’t just raw speed though that brought the LSE to Linux. Linux is cheaper, a lot cheaper, for high-end servers.

According to an IBSJ report, David Lester, director of information and technology at LSE, said that compared to the annual bill of $65 million for TradElect, MillenniumIT was a bargain at a purchase price of $30 million. The LSE predicts that moving to Linux will give the company an annual cost savings of at least £10 million ($14.7 million) from 2011-12. In addition, “The new technology is a lot lighter, nimbler and easier to install” and will also enable faster releases.

The LSE hopes to close the deal this month. The transition from TradElect to the MillenniumIT is expected to take up to 18 months. Lester hopes to get it completed faster than that.

In the end, the LSE and its traders will profit from this move. As Steve George, director of corporate services at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) told me when we talked about the deal. “When performance and stability matters, as they do in business, Linux is the positive choice. This move will be good both for the LSE and its customers and to the wider family of Linux.”

Quick thinking open sourcerers might have saved an Australian power supply system after its electrical grid control room network got infected with a virus.

A Windows virus hit the networks of Integral Energy and, according to a submission to Slashdot, the virus managed to spread to the operator display consoles in the control room.

Quick thinking techies in the control systems department of the utility swapped the infected Windows boxes for machines running Linux that they were using for development.

The move prevented the virus from taking over all the operator displays in the control room.