FAA saves money with Red Hat

The Federal Aviation Administration has moved its airline traffic management and real-time tracking systems from a Unix platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The estimate to upgrade the existing Unix data centers came in at $25 million with an implementation time of 18 months. But the switch and upgrade to Red Hat Linux Enterprise cost less than $10 million and took a third of the time to implement, according to an FAA statement.

The system-wide upgrade was first rolled out at the FAA's central processing facility and then at its workstations, servers and hub. On-site instruction for the new infrastructure was given to FAA engineers and developers through the Red Hat Certified Engineer training program. According to Red Hat, the switch provided the FAA with a "tenfold increase in processing capacity and 30 percent more in operational efficiency." Dell and Hewlett Packard provided the hardware used.