by ADAM GIFFORD
The Government's rental housing agency, Housing New Zealand, is about to shift one of its core financial applications to run on the open source Linux operating system.
The change will bring possible savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
IT development and operations manager Rob Herries said the agency
was also assessing open source alternatives to Microsoft for its desktop applications, the basic word processing and productivity programs.
On the short list are Star Office from Sun, Gnome Workshop and Evolution, which all run in a Linux environment.
Housing New Zealand's embrace of open source software, the first government agency to do so, follows a trial at its Mt Albert branch.
"Mt Albert has proven to us the Oracle 8 database will fit Linux," said Mr Herries.
He has worked with auditors PriceWaterhouseCoopers to address any concerns over the reliability and support of open source software.
"We have got audit backing to use this in a production environment."
Mr Herries has also done performance tests with core applications, which currently run on Hewlett Packard servers using the HPUX version of the Unix operating system.
"We've found those applications run on Linux on Intel [chip-based] servers substantially faster than on proprietary hardware," he said.
"We have taken a nationwide application that has quite high processing requirements. Running on Intel-based hardware, we can get double the performance of a $200,000 Hewlett Packard 9000 server."
He said the alternative server, with all the necessary disk arrays, costs about $50,000.
"It's not the purchase cost but the overhead. Hardware maintenance costs another 12 to 15 per cent a year.
"It also gives us flexibility. If we switch to Intel servers it means we can run Linux or Microsoft on those servers."
Mr Herries said the application was a financial analysis tool used to keep track of the agency's 60,000 properties and to model the financial performance of different properties when making investment decisions.
It included huge amounts of data on valuation and maintenance.
"It's about trying to be competitive and breaking new ground. Everyone is asked to provide better service for lower cost."
Linux is a Unix-like operating system developed voluntarily by thousands of programmers across the internet, building on the kernel developed by Finnish student Linus Torvalds and on utilities developed under the Free Software Foundations GNU project.
Under its "copyleft" licence, there are no licence fees.
Licence fees for NT servers cost Housing New Zealand about $1000 a user, as well as higher maintenance costs.
by ADAM GIFFORD
The Government's rental housing agency, Housing New Zealand, is about to shift one of its core financial applications to run on the open source Linux operating system.
The change will bring possible savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
IT development and operations manager Rob Herries said the agency
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