Management
Technology
- Applications
- Business Intelligence
- Development
- Hardware
- Mobile & Wireless
- Networking
- Internet
- Operating Systems
- Security Products
- Servers & Datacentre
- Storage
Toolbox
Training
Books
White Papers
Webcast
Resource Centre
September 05, 2007
French education ministry completes migration to Red Hat
Selects open source solutions to avoid vendor lock-in
By Computerworld UK reporter
France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in.
Advert
The ministry said that in order to avoid the growing costs associated with proprietary licences and forced upgrade cycles it was migrating to open standards-based software and hardware solutions, ensuring interoperability and vendor independence for its IT systems.
"Having first abandoned GECOS 7 and DPS 7, and gradually the AIX system, the ministry determined that since 2000 it would drastically lower its costs by definitively decoupling the operating system supplier from the hardware supplier," said Michel Affre, the ministry’s IT systems manager.
"In doing so, we have standardised the information system architecture of each local education authority by running its application servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating on standard servers."
Affre said more than 3,000 servers - which represent 80 to 120 servers per local education authority - now operate on Linux, with 80% of them running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
"All of our applications, whether financial applications or tools for managing exams, staff, students or everyday administrative activities, are now supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our applications suppliers, internal developers and external partners now develop on open standards to ensure compatibility with Linux.”
Affre said moving towards standards-based infrastructure was a strategic decision that was being enthusiastically received by the young recruits in its IT departments.
"In 2004, over 95%of the servers ran on Linux. Today we are close to 100%, since we withdrew the last AIX servers at the end of 2006.”
Now read:
Follow highlights from ComputerworldUK on Twitter
Sign up for our Daily Newsletter
The UK IT News widget Get it for your site!
« prev article | more government & law news | next article »
Advert
Email this article to a friend or colleague:
PLEASE NOTE: Your name is used only to let the recipient know who sent the story, and in case of transmission error. Both your name and the recipient's name and address will not be used for any other purpose.
- This article is now being printed.
What are your views on this subject? Use the form below to post a comment on this article up to 1000 characters.
Click below to add 'French education ministry completes migration to Red Hat - Public sector organisations - ComputerworldUK' to your blog.
If you do not have a ComputerworldUK Account and would like to use this feature, please Register.
If you are a registered, logged-in user, this will post the title and first paragraph of this story to your blog to share with your readers.
Advert
Newsletters
Your daily injection of CW news and expert analysis: we’ll bring the news to you.
WHITE PAPERS
-
Legal risks: Employee use of the internet and email
Exploring the challenges facing IT Mangers today and vital steps to ensure safe internet an email use by employees. -
Phishing for victims
This White Paper examines the phenomenon of phishing. It explains the potentially catastrophic threat it presents to all kinds of organisation. Exploding some widespread myths, it lights up the murky waters where phishing first emerged and where it continues to evolve. But it also highlights what your business can do to blunt the threat.
Comments received
Rich said on Thursday, 06 September 2007
Finally, someone what got balls to carry out the plan. I guess that's the end of the French jokes.
adoption said on Friday, 07 September 2007
This is the primarily concern why we should choose open source over the proprietary.
For the proprietary software supporter, you should be happy too because of open source. Due to the open source buzz, the proprietary software company such as microsoft finally made their way to open standard such as microsoft office latest format. This won't happen without the help of open source.
sd said on Saturday, 08 September 2007
"Due to the open source buzz, the proprietary software company such as Microsoft finally made their way to open standard such as Microsoft office latest format." adoption, this statement is completely wrong, OOXML (Office Open XML, Microsoft's newest format) is not open source, it just claims to be. What's funny/ ironic about the name is XML was already an open format, and Microsoft's isn't. Microsoft already made it an ECMA standard, but no one cares about ecma.