The FAA Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Linux

Neopallium writes "Red Hat has announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third of the original scheduled time and with 30 percent more operational efficiency than the previous system."

Not a surprise...

[tyler_larson]

..not a surprise that they'd move to Linux, given their recent bad experience [slashdot.org] with Windows.

Re:careful of the source

[gdek]

There's nothing disingenuous about this. We released it as a press release on our own site:

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2006/fa a.html [redhat.com]

Everything about it shouts "press release", including the SEC warnings at the bottom and the press contact information. As is typical with press releases, it was picked up and run all over the place. That's what press releases are for. Anything that comes from Business Wire is a press release.

If you think it's dishonestly masquerading as "real news," that's your mistake.

Migrating from ...

[rtaylor]

By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its workstations, servers and at the hub site, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems, while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment today and for the future.

Quite possibly this is from IBM (Aix) to IBM (Redhat). More likely is that it is another kick in the crotch for Sun.

Re:to RedHat, but what FROM?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

From TFA:

By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its workstations, servers and at the hub site, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems, while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment today and for the future.

So, pick one: Solaris, HPUX or AIX.

Re:to RedHat, but what FROM?

[zenhkim]

> They probably migrated from a unix.

Correct, as TFA *does* state:

> By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its workstations, servers and at the hub site, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems, while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment today and for the future.

The only question is, *which* UNIX did the FAA drop? Though I suppose it doesn't matter that much now....

AIX is my guess

[Anonymous Coward]

So, pick one: Solaris, HPUX or AIX.

It's pretty well known amongst the compugeek-pilot community that the FAA had a boatload of stuff running on some pretty old RS6000 iron, with quite a bit of it still running on AIX 3.2.5 which was end-of-lifed by IBM like sometime last century.

So, from your three guesses... I'd have to say that the first two don't count ;-)

This is mostly for their "business" systems, not the national airspace operations (the flightplan and radar systems) which are being migrated to a Linux-compatible realtime operating system.

ETMS System

[apfistler]

For all of those who are curious as to what was there before. I worked on this project and was incharge of automating the installation process on the integration side and was part of the integration team for this project. The old system were old HP C360's running HPUX 10.20. The whole TFMI system has been ported and updated since the early 90's. Before they were running on the 360s the system was running on Apollo's before. Of course this refresh was way cheaper in '05 than the earlier refresh because in the '98 refresh they had to swap out thinnet for CAT 5. And if you ever seen some of the cable trays at some of these TRACONS on Towers.... some aren't pretty, espically at BWI. Since the CAT 5 was in place it was as simple as swapping out the machines and putting in the new routers when we got on site. And yes for a govement project this went realitivly smoothly. Once I set up the kickstart server and scripted the install for the ETMS software, intergrating the HP XW8000 workstations was as easy as just hitting F12, so even our warehouse logistic's person could integrate the machines.

Re:Really OOOOOLD systems

[gregarican]

Here is a link to a story [pbs.org] regarding antiquated air traffic control systems. It is more than just a few years old. Eleven in fact. But nevertheless I doubt that things are much more advanced even eleven years later. Maybe the FAA in the /. story could have invested in some of the $150 Chinese peecees?

They had nowhere to go but up

[Anonymous Coward]

The FAA has a long history IT disasters, dating back to the early 1980's. Whatever happened to the Advanced Automation System,
originally contracted to IBM and EDS in 1981 and still not deployed? Taxpayers have spent about $40 billion on that one, with still
very little to show for it.

A brief history of FAA competence. Not the best source, but then the government isn't good about revealing its failures.

http://www.baselinemag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a =25163,00.asp [baselinemag.com]

Re:More of these types of success stories

[njcoder]

"vendor unspecified"

Well that rules out a migration from Solaris since RedHat would have had no problem naming Sun as the vendor they replaced.

HP-UX they might be a bit quiet about since their close to HP and definately if it was AIX RedHat wouldn't want to antagonize IBM.

It looks like it was HP-UX ased on this snippet from http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:9WrQ3EspDRwJ:w ww.academy.faa.gov/ama200/S20Catalog.doc+faa+%22tr affic+flow+management+infrastructure%22+ibm&hl=en& gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 [72.14.203.104]

47415 Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure (TFMI)

S20V5 This course provides training for technicians, engineers, and FAA Technical Center personnel on ETMS Model HP-C360 equipment. The course is 20 hours self-study text with 20 hours computer-based exercises (CBE). Self-study subjects include system overview, workstation user environment, UNIX, monitor, keyboard, trackball, tape drive, troubleshooting, and fault isolation procedures. CBE subjects include login, files and directories, basic commands, HP tools, workstation/file-server basics, addresses, diagnostic commands, troubleshooting, and fault isolation.

It always makes me laugh when people say they upgraded a system for less money and more power. Every time I upgrade my computer it's cheaper and I get a lot more power. That's just the way computers work.

I emailed Caroline Kazmierski [e-mail]

[erroneus]

According to her, the migration from was from Unix to Linux. The assumption (or wish?) would have been that the migration was away from Microsoft. In the absense of any such information, I asked.

That said, it's still not a migration from Unix to Microsoft, but still...

Re:FAA Windows Machine "Nearly Perfect"

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes big news that the FAA either can't write a program to save their lives or contracted out to a low/shitty bidder? 49.7, that means that they decided to rely on a simple tickcount, an unsigned 32-bit value representing the number of milliseconds passed since the system had started. On any OS (2^32)-1 milliseconds is 49.7 days.

Windows has a lot of other timer mechanisms built into it. The performance counters in particular have a significantly higher degree of fidelity, generally in the tens of microseconds, and with a datatype large enough to track for over 50,000 years.

This is like blaming the OS for (x/0)!=0, which is what the tards did when the USS Yorktown went kablamo.

FAA should've switched to Windows

[mi]

Yeah, I'm trolling. But admit it, when you read "migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux" in the summary, you too thought: "from Windows". In fact, FAA switched from the "proprietory Unix platform"...

Re:careful of the source

[Jetson]

The article paints a rosy success story, but consider the source. This is a Red Hat press release.

I don't know about the numbers (and the news story was cut off when I tried to access it), but the migration is real and the numbers don't seem unrealistic. They replaced a bunch of HP C360 machines running HP/UX with Intel-based RHEL boxes. This reduced the per-seat license costs while upgrading hardware to support more users.

This system in question runs Volpe's Enhanced Traffic Management System (aka "flow control") and is commonly seen on news stories about ATC as it has a very public-friendly display with national/state borders and little airplane symbols. For example, all the news stories on 9/11 that showed the aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean being rerouted were filming ETMS displays.

Re:careful of the source

[somersault]

Just a note to the others on slashdot, who I've seen do this before - it's "hear hear", as in, what you do with your ears.

And also, when you don't care about something, you don't give a rat's ass about it, otherwise you'd care enough to go and find a rat, rip off its ass, and give it to the thing you 'dont care' about.[/end 'well known phrases' rant]