Bank group takes Linux migration a step at a time

By Tina Gasperson on February 20, 2008 (9:00:02 PM)

Metropolitan Bank Group is a large conglomerate in Illinois,
comprising 10 banks and $3 billion in assets. As Metropolitan acquired
more banking interests, IT Director Tom Johnson needed to find a way
to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the face of the company's
rapid growth. The solution was a migration from Windows to Linux.

Because Metropolitan was growing via acquisitions, Johnson found his
IT staff spending large amounts of time bringing remote locations into
the company infrastructure and working in the field to provide
technical support and troubleshooting. It was expensive to add remote
network administration capabilities in Windows, so Johnson decided to
move from Microsoft to Novell and SUSE Linux. "We liked the idea of
having an open enterprise," Johnson says, "and an infrastructure able
to support anything."

Once Metropolitan began the switch to Linux, Johnson says he saw
immediate increases in stability and efficiency, with lower
expenditures. "The remote control functionality of ZENworks is
probably giving us the biggest bang for the buck," he says. "Keeping
our staff at their desks allows us to be more responsive to our
users."

Metropolitan's infrastructure is almost entirely on Linux now, and it
continues to migrate many of its applications, including an IT
ticketing system that used to run on SQL Server and Windows but now
uses MySQL, a move that saved Metropolitan over $17,000 a year. "The
cost savings from moving our Windows applications to Linux seems
almost ridiculous, but it's true," Johnson says.

Johnson says the biggest challenge of switching server software has
been "managing the risks associated with deploying an open source
platform like Linux." The biggest question for a bank with highly
critical operations was the support question. "But Novell stepped up
to the plate and it wasn't a fear anymore."

Johnson had seen pushback in the past when it came to adopting open
source software, and "didn't want it to get to that point. So first,
we migrated a lot of our non-mission-critical programs as a proof of
concept to test the reliability of Linux." At the beginning of the
migration, he says, Novell was only a year into its "SUSE Linux
support realm. You have a company that's only done this for a year --
do they have everything worked out?"

Now that it has been a couple of years since the migration, the bigger
issue for Johnson is finding qualified technicians. "There's a stigma
with some of the hotshots in Linux," he says. "They're young and
renegade. That might have been a deterrent for some businesses that
don't want to migrate to Linux because of that. The majority of
applicants that come in to interview are really young and they're not
business-savvy. You can tell they don't have the business side in
mind. They're just looking to make money or to prove themselves."

Johnson advises other IT managers to take a migration to Linux slowly.
"Work on proofs of concept. That way, if something blows up, it's not
huge. It's called a migration for a reason."

--
gao stone
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