We have all heard the horror stories about military over spending on projects that far exceed the original cost. But every once in awhile a story surfaces which actually shows how some administrators in the military are actually saving us taxpayers some big bucks. One such story is coming out of Hill Air Force base located in Utah. Crippled with an array of different opearting systems, servers and complicated applications, the system suffered from a severe case of downtown. Since Hill Air Force Base is charged with providing maintenance to some of the Air Forces fighting machines, the downtime was costing the base some $1 million per incident.

The choice was actually easy:

Choosing a new direction for the base’s system proved to be fairly easy. “The only vendor out there that had gone through National Security Agency security was Red Hat,” Babb said. “That narrowed down our choices pretty well.”

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Project Bonfire employs grid computing, linking servers to boost performance. Babb described the back of one of the servers on the grid as “like veins on a body. It’s very complex and interconnects with everything.”

The Hill group also liked the fact that open systems such as Linux have a lower cost of ownership.

What was also discovered was in order to maintain the old system it would have cost $5 million a year. For the new Red Hat system that has dropped down to $100,000 a year. This project was so successful that other armed forces branches are looking at the system and may also switch over.

Full story is here.

Comments are welcome.

[tags]red hat, military, linux, air force, [/tags]