VeriSign Migrating 2,000 Unix Servers to Red Hat Linux

In the latest big win for Linux and open source, infrastructure service provider VeriSign has decided to migrate 2,000 of its high-performance Unix servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel in a move the company says will help reduce its operating expenses.

The 2,000 servers to be migrated operate across all of VeriSigns business units. The migration to Linux has already started with VeriSigns Naming and Directory Services business unit and with the deployment of Oracle on Linux for several corporate applications. The balance of the migration will take place over the next 18 months, which should lend another doubling of processing power, Dave Pool, vice president of infrastructure engineering at VeriSign, said on Tuesday.

Through its Naming and Directory Services business, VeriSign is responsible for ensuring that the information and communications of the Internet are delivered promptly and to the right addresses. As an increasing number of businesses and enterprises move their business functions to the Internet, VeriSign must maintain near total accuracy and load balancing for the billions of daily DNS queries, he said.

Pool also laid to rest the criticism that Linux is not ready for prime time and mission-critical applications, particularly at the back end. “VeriSign is migrating several significant databases to Linux, including Siebel Sales Force Automation, Clarify sales support, and business intelligence and decision support applications from Informatica and Primus,” he said.

Pool said he was surprised by the new pricing model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when it was launched as he had initially compared it to the cost of in-house development of a distribution. “Because we run dozens of independent applications, we quickly realized that conformance to Enterprise Linux standards would be critical to gain third-party software support,” he said.

While VeriSign has a corporate strategy of keeping multiple vendors for all items, it has decided to make Red Hat its sole Linux supplier. “We have five server vendors, just to get aggressive pricing, but only Red Hat for Linux,” Pool said.

This latest Linux win comes as The SCO Group demands that Linux users pay it for a license that indemnifies them from litigation for use of its alleged proprietary Unix code that is found in Linux. SCO has said that license is now available for purchase and has also begun sending those businesses running Linux servers invoices.

The complete case study on the migration of VeriSigns architecture to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available at Red Hats Web site.