Linux cuts costs for finance firm

CITY firm Close Premium Finance has migrated its main transactional systems to Linux-based commodity hardware, cutting £100,000 a year from its IT costs.

Since completing the switch in November, the company has recorded just two minutes of downtime, and says the new systems are performing about twice as fast as the high-end HP Alpha servers that used to power its back-end system.

Jonathan Cattle, Close director for technology and planning, says the switch to Intel-based hardware and Linux has also increased scalability as new databases and servers are added.

'These are commodity items, so we can just add a server if one had to go down, whereas the Alphas had a four-hour service level agreement with HP,' he said.

Cattle says the firm operates five core systems, which are accessed by more than 8,000 insurance brokers and 200 internal staff - handling about 750,000 queries per day.

The transactions range from brokers logging in to input new deals and check their portfolios, to the calculation of daily interest rates.

The switch to Linux has helped contribute to cuts in licences and maintenance fees, while the low-cost commodity hardware from suppliers such as Dell and EMC has resulted in lower depreciation costs.

'There's a lot of hype surrounding Linux, but the reality behind the myth is that there are numerous issues related to deploying the technology, which require considerable expertise and effort,' said Cattle.

'Lots of people use Linux, but not many are using clustering and so on. You're more likely to see single-server environments.

'As a result, figuring out how to do what we wanted was quite tough, as it was often new territory for both us and the vendors.'

To help deal with this challenge, IT services company CSF was contracted to provide help with the migration to the new platform.

The project was started in November 2003 and took a year to complete.

What do you think? Email feedback@computing.co.uk

If you want to be first with the news, visit Computing every day.