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Linux Business

Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX 360

Posted by Zonk from the hope-that-penguin-has-a-parachute dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's No. 1 airline Qantas will shift their underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's AIX next month as part of a wide-ranging technology transformation project. 'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment — we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation. The decision was made last year, as part of the planning for the rollout."
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Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX More

Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX

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  • The declaration by Quanta's officers sounds quite strange.
    Instability can be brought up by inconsistent system management, like using different software version (either library, applications or operating systems, it doesn't matter).
    If they plan to solve those issues with AIX (or any other operating system, even Windows) with no system management change, they are very likely to reproduce the very same stability issues.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For the record it is spelt Q without the U, QANTAS is an acronym for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services."

  • IBM business plan at work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ntufar ( 712060 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @02:38AM (#18924519) Homepage Journal
    It is a good example showing why IBM supports Linux:

    1. Hook up customers on a cheaply solution based on Linux and MySQL.
    2. As customer's data and number of clients grow they will start experiencing scalability problems.
    3. Propose much more scalable, reliable, dependable (and much more expensive) solution on AIX, AS/400, Mainframe.
    4. Profit!

    • Re:IBM business plan at work (Score:5, Interesting)

      by snero3 ( 610114 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:05AM (#18924673) Homepage

      You are not too far from the truth there.

      We started our relationshop with IBM on their intel and Linux X series servers and as we grew they moved us to P series servers running AIX which happens to run all linux binaries just fine and even has the same command set.

      The "Upgrade" path was easy and plainless and the cost was spread out over years so it kept management and the accountants happy.

      Personally I see it as a winning solution for both Linux and IBM.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by misleb ( 129952 )

      . Hook up customers on a cheaply solution based on Linux and MySQL.

      There's nothing cheap about any IBM solution.. particularly the kind of solution where AIX is an option. As for the MySQL comment, they are runnign Oracle according to this article: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Qantas-w allet-takes-ICT-hit/0,130061733,339273523,00.htm [zdnet.com.au]

      As customer's data and number of clients grow they will start experiencing scalability problems.

      How many airlines these days are actually growing?

      Propose much mo

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Bearhouse ( 1034238 )
      Shame the article does not state what 'brand' of Linux, although Oracle is mentioned a lot, so could be their's / RH.

      You could be on the right lines with the IBM master plan. This in another article linked in the parent:

      "In addition, Qantas was still experiencing increased infrastructure costs from an October 2005 datacentre migration, which saw its mainframe environment moved from a Sydney CBD facility to an IBM centre..."

      In other words, Blue Blue's got 'em by the balls.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Would MySQL ever seriously be considered for managing a payroll?

    • you forgot one (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ushering05401 ( 1086795 )
      4. Bundle the fastest service response time w/said expensive solution.
      5. Profit!

      IBM made their rep w/me late one night in rural Vermont. I was troubleshooting my client's sole server (an ancient AIX rig) and shit started coming up wonky (hardware!?!?). This wasn't the sort of operation that had spare parts sitting around.

      Worse yet, the client had all 14 of their locations (all running dumb terminals) running through this one server and their inventory and POS systems were going to be offline in the mornin

  • not really news (Score:5, Funny)

    by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposerNO@SPAMalum.mit.edu> on Monday April 30, 2007 @02:41AM (#18924543) Homepage

    Moving from one Unix to another isn't really news. Moving to Vista would be news.

  • They're just fishing (Score:5, Funny)

    by jamesh ( 87723 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @02:42AM (#18924545)
    C'mon, we've seen this so many times. They're only making that announcement so that Linus will come to the party and offer them a fantastic price cut on Linux.

    It's worked for just about every large company that's threatened to abandon Microsoft.

  • The technical term... (Score:5, Funny)

    by nixkuroi ( 569546 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:20AM (#18924733)
    Would that be called "Expenguination" ?

  • Segfault? (Score:5, Funny)

    by the_womble ( 580291 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:24AM (#18924749) Homepage Journal

    we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation

    Surrely, if they are having problem's with Linux stability, it must be the general manager for segmentation's fault?

  • Linux never crash (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheScream ( 147369 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:36AM (#18924807)
    <voice style="Raymond Babbitt">Qantas never crash... on linux</voice>

  • And where's the story? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dysfunct ( 940221 ) * on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:39AM (#18924817)
    The article seems to lack any details about the switch, except for the quote in the summary and the information that it's currently in the final planning stage and that a local poultry farmed switched to Oracle on Linux from Tru64 (which was misspelled).

    In the end, we have no way to determine whether this move made any sense or was FUD by IBM as some other poster implied. AIX on a cheap x86 cluster? Possibly a bad idea. AIX on their IBM mainframe? Possibly a better choice than Linux.

    As much as I love Linux it's - as we all should already know - not always the best choice as it's only one of many tools that must fit the general architecture and requirements.

  • Sounds about right (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:42AM (#18924841) Homepage Journal
    I've been pretty happy with Linux in general, but I'm not thrilled with its network file system support. In particular, NFS has been prone to occasionally leave a particular file in a state where any process that tries to access it hangs in the kernel, and only a system reboot (!) fixes the problem. I'm hoping this was fixed between 2.6.10 and 2.6.20, which I've just upgraded our systems to.

    Xen is also less solid than I'd like, at least on the dual Xeon server board I'm running it on. I've had a couple of bizarre issues with Xen 3.0 now that make me wonder if I should go back (again - I tried an older 3.0 before and rolled back due to network bugs) to 2.0 .

    Overall Linux is pretty damn good as a server OS, but I can certainly imagine someone finding and moving to a more stable system - though it'd probably be at the cost of ease of administration, speed of deploying services, etc.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by straponego ( 521991 )
      I don't know if you've tried this stuff already, but you might look at setting the NFS mount options on the client to include "hard,intr". This should make it possible to interrupt the program accessing the file if there is a hang. Other options which might help are forcing the nfs version (I've had the best luck with version 3), and sync vs. async (though that would mostly be for performance).

      NFS is not really a high point of Linux. I think the protocol itself probably isn't that suitable for modern n

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sique ( 173459 )
        Hm. The only quirks I had with Linux and NFS (Server on Solaris) was that from time to time the statd on the Solaris machine hung, with the effect that flock() on any file mounted via NFS hung also. Restarting the statd got it right again.

  • I'll betcha (Score:2, Funny)

    by iminplaya ( 723125 )
    they got a notice from SCO
  • At least it fixes the problem until the migration is over, then all bets are off.

    In this day and age, if your root cause analysis comes up with "Linux is unstable" then something is screwed up with your analysis. Still this doesn't affect me, so good luck with that. :) AIX is a wonderful OS from what I hear.

  • Can't say I blame them (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Darth Liberus ( 874275 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:48AM (#18924863)
    My project has been migrating our 300+ machines from Solaris to Red Hat over the past couple of years. We were all excited at first, now we all miss Solaris.

    Why? Because for all the wonderful things we can do with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days.

    Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. A lot. It's done many wonderful things for UNIX and the IT industry as a whole and will continue to do so. But it's not ZOMG TEH BEST OS EVAR! for every project, and I don't think Linus ever intended it to be :)

    • Re:Can't say I blame them (Score:5, Informative)

      by straponego ( 521991 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @05:26AM (#18925339)
      I don't know what you've tried, so don't take offense... and I'm not trying to justify these shortcomings, because I agree they're not acceptable, but on the off-chance I can help you, or someone else... In my experience, that kind of instability is really unusual unless you've come across a combination of elements which just doesn't work well together, or simply includes one bad element. If these crashing systems are all on the same platform, it might be fairly easy to isolate the problem.

      Since you say the machines are locking up, I'm assuming it's not an application thing. I'm talking about things that cause kernel panics or worse, here. I'm also assuming the hardware is not defective, RAM is good, etc.

      Easiest things first: Whenever I find a Linux install is unstable on hardware that I haven't used before, there are a few kernel commandline options I like to try. "noapic" solves a ton of interrupt/SMP issues, "noacpi" can also help stability, and "nomce" fixes (well, ignores) a lot of bogus MCE errors-- errors that always came up on hardware that was otherwise totally stable. MCE support seems to be much more accurate with recent kernels and hardware, though. Bonus option, "nommconf" can help if a PCI device, say a Myrinet card or RAID controller, isn't seen by the kernel, even as an unknown device in lspci.

      Also, since you mention Redhat, I've found situations in which last couple of RHEL4 kernels tend to crash within a few days (maxing load on 4 cores, disk, and network the whole time). I don't know if installing a non-RHEL kernel is an option for your company. If you're running RHEL3, a vanilla kernel.org kernel might be pretty painful due to some things like SELinux. On RHEL4, kernel.org kernels are very easy to install in practical terms but may not be allowed by policy. If it's an option, I've been having no problems with 2.6.19.5. That's probably rather new for a company wide deployment, but if your crashes are repeatable/testable, and that does fix it, it could at least point the way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )
      "But it's not ZOMG TEH BEST OS EVAR!"

      Yeah I know, that's AmigaOS, right? =P
      Thought it might have it's flaws as server os or in a multiuser environment ;)

    • RedHat support .. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rs232 ( 849320 )
      'with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days'

      What ever has the Redhat support process come to?

      What was their response to your support request?

      What exactly was the problem with the machines locking up?

  • Why the surpise? Linux IS NOT the most stable Unix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by keepper ( 24317 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:56AM (#18924893) Homepage
    Ok, put it as experience.. Put it as bias...

    But in my experience and that of many others. linux is flexible... fast.. versatile.. but the most stable it isnt.. its part of its design goal. A stable OS, has stable developement practices.. Linux's goal is not to have a stable dev practice. ( see the whole spew about bin drivers.. :( )

    Why do you guys think redhat has RHEL... to stabilize linux. go to any other distrib, and well.. things change often.

    Fast change does not bode well with stability. Stability comes with time.

    You want fast and cheap, go linux.

    You want stable, you go commercial unix ( Solaris,AiX these days)

    You want a good middle ground.. you go *BSD ;)

    ( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )

  • AIX C compiler (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 12357bd ( 686909 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @04:15AM (#18924969)

    My first experience with AIX was auditing some large set of application C code. It was shocking, lots of uninitialized local vars, code assuming it to be 0, and it worked!
    I suppouse someone at IBM decided to systematically clear stack var area at function entry... better that than to fix the broken code!.

    • They might have made a systemic decision that a) handing with random stuff from one process to another is a security hole and b) if customers' applications can be made more reliable and repeatable then that is a good thing and not something to be ashamed of!

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They might have made a systemic decision that a) handing with random stuff from one process to another is a security hole

        Different problem. The grandparent's talking about the compiler generating code that guarantees local variables are initialized to 0 on every function entry. The previous owner of that memory typically was some other function call within the same process, and there's clearly no security value in that case.

        In fact, there's no security value if this is the first time the stack has grown

  • Not that I could not see good reasons for dumping Linux, but the whole story to me sounds a bit like hastedly buying and setting up x86 hardware, throw Linux at it, and hoping for the best ... .
    Oh, yes, disregarding application quality and support.

    Suddenly, you find that the method above is flaky and flimsy ? Fork out real money for real hardware, and be surprised to see it doing real work. To me, I wouldn't be surprised.

    Had they asked me as a consultant, I might have suggested SUN and Solaris.
    And to sack t

  • You mean Linus didn't invent UNIX??? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Old.UNIX.Nut ( 306040 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @05:39AM (#18925385)
    How can AIX be "obsolete" and Linux be leading edge?

    /.ers never cease to amaze me with their ignorance of computer history.

    1) Linux is just another flavor of UNIX.
    2) it is NOT the most stable flavor of UNIX.
    3) it is NOT to most feature packed flavor of UNIX.
    4) it is far from being the most scaleable flavor of UNIX.
    5) it does have some of the most lacking documentation I've seen since Microport UNIX.

    This has NOT stopped me from using Slackware since 1994.

    /.ers need to get used to the idea that Linus reverse engineered UNIX to create Linux - he did NOT invent a new OS. Linus is walking in the shoes of K&R and many other UNIX pioneers.

  • Best tool for the job, people, best tool for the job.

    If you're really want to help, invest time and effort in improving Linux, and stay away from flamewars :)

  • And so it starts (Score:5, Informative)

    by Builder ( 103701 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @06:06AM (#18925475)
    10 years ago, I jumped onto the Linux bandwagon. Last year, I started brushing up my Solaris skills and I'm now working to add some Sun certs to my RHCE.

    Linux just is NOT ready for the enterprise. Red Hat, the 'biggest' Linux company out there just hasn't learnt to run with the big dogs yet.

    Technical issues about the OS aside, Red Hat just don't present as a professional company. After dealing with Sun and MS for years, dealing with RH is a bit of a joke. £300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling. Trial versions of the software to keep your skills up to date ? Don't be silly - you have to use CentOS for the free tools and you're SOL for their closed source tools like Satellite or RHN Proxy.

    Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.

    At a technical level, Linux is NOT keeping up and is barely fit for datacentre purposes. Only recently has the LVM stuff got to a useful level where we can do multipathing (with IO on both paths) without needing third party software. It's not great yet, and the tools to maintain it are badly documented, but since we just can't get Veritas for 64bit RHEL4 (or couldn't when I checked a few months back), it's the only choice we have.

    The constant changes to the API and ABI are a total PITA for ISVs. You can either go with RHEL / SLES (or CentOS if you're broke like me :)) and forsake many useful updates and features in tools like Samba and then you'll get your stable API / ABI. Or you can go with a bleeding edge distro and never have ISV support for your products. Neither of these is a great choice for us, we'd like something in the middle, but I can't find a commercial vendor providing this today.

    Lastly, the tools. I'd really rather not get started on the issues with the tools that RH provides to manage systems. Suffice to say, not being able to do LVM setup using the text installer came as a bit of a shock. And when confronting RH on the severe deficiencies in their text-based admin tools, I was just told to spend 8k on a closed source RH product to resolve these... How much MORE like MS can you be? Yeah, we know the base product is a bit broken, but that part isn't really our focus - here, try this expensive fix.
    Documentation is in a similar state with some stuff being very well documented and other stuff, poorly if at all.

    In the end, Sun still have a better understanding of what the enterprise needs, both from a support and an OS point of view.
    • '£300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling'

      OK, I can see a theme emerging here in this thread. I like Linux except a) no support ) no software c) company used cardboard. This is meant to be a joke isn't it?

      'Subscriptions take the pain out of purchasing software [redhat.com] because they provide everything needed in one all-inclusive price'

      was: And so it starts (Score

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Builder ( 103701 )
        The company using cardboard to prop up a project is an example of the 'small business mentality' that they use. Slick, well organised presentation rooms are an important issue when selling to enterprises. Hell, so is coffee and biscuits delivered to the room every couple of hours on a full day visit, instead of walking your visitors to the vending machine :)

        At the time of this visit, I'd been using Linux in businesses for about 8 years. I was trying to sell a bank on Linux, and my boss was a typical head of
  • I have no problem running linux at home, I reboot every 2 month usually for hardware upgrades...

    However the company we worked for bought a SUSE raid pc for us. And the hardware incl. Raid 5 was not stable. I basically won't blame the kernel, but distributions for packaging and vendors for their hardware.

    Some kernel modules are of course not too stable. Personally I had problems with software raid once, but somehow it's mostly hardware related in the end. The scheduling and the internals are very stable and

  • People forget, AIX is a complete package (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @06:23AM (#18925535) Journal

    When you buy AIX you don't just buy an OS, you buy the hardware as well. As Apple fanboys know, it is MUCH easier to get stable software if you know exactly what kind of hardware you are going to run on.

    YES it is possible to run linux on this hardware too, this is IBM after all, BUT even then you are running an OS that is designed to run on much more. AIX isn't.

    Isn't linux on PC hardware stable? Nope.

    And yes, I do run linux on my desktop and it is pretty damn stable, BUT I have had crashes and freezes over the last couple of years. Even one on a light server that only runs apache.

    No, nothing like the famed windows crashes and forced reboots every single day BUT if you run a major company and a computer hiccups once every 3 years that still can mean a significant amount of downtime over all your machines combined.

    Saying AIX is more stable then Linux is roughly like claiming a diesel truck is more reliable then a pretrol powered van. It is not really a slam against van's, just that trucks are in a different class entirely.

  • That's how you need to read a headline like that. Some random company, no matter how large, switching some services (I doubt they're switching everything, I doubt they even know what everything they're running on Linux is) from one version of UNIX to another shouldn't be a big deal. Whether it's switching from Solaris to AIX, Solaris to Linux, Solaris to FreeBSD, AIX to Linux, SCO to FreeBSD, HPUX to AIX, SCO to OSX, HPUX to Linux, or Linux to AIX.

    The whole POINT to open systems is that you CAN make these kinds of changes without them being disruptive. Nobody should be surprised by them.
  • My work has around 500 *nix servers with Solaris, HP (paRISC and Itanium), Linux and AIX. I support Oracle on HP, Solaris and AIX (4.3 and 5L). I don't think any of the platforms have much difference in stability issues. We have been consolodating the Oracle environment on AIX and although Oracle has been pushing Linux/x86 there is the issue of endian byte order in going to a non-RISC cpu. The environment is large and a complete changeover would be difficult and a mixed RISC/Intel environment is more difficult with physical database migration and transportable tablespaces. The Power5 is a good design, AIX 5L is reasonably stable and the Power6 coming out this summer is supposed to be clocked up to 5GHz, which is a big deal when you are licensing Oracle by the CPU.


    Linux/x86 has forced IBM, Sun and HP to be competitive with much cheaper hardware and support and when pricing servers with 32GB+ of ram, there isn't much difference between Linux/x86/support and AIX/HPUX/Solaris and when you do TCO analysis, they are all very similar.

    There has been a major drop in the high end *nix distributed computing environment pricing brought on by Linux, to the point where it isn't that much of a cost savings switching between Linux and HPUX/AIX/Solaris (or the other way). I don't agree that AIX is more stable than Linux, but AIX isn't that much more expensive anymore.

  • what were the stability issues? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bl8n8r ( 649187 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @07:22AM (#18925819)
    Was it an Oracle+Linux stability issue?

    "Qantas's original plans called for a totally Oracle-based solution, but
      that was subsequently shifted to a multi-vendor approach to better match
      Qantas's specific needs, according to Young."

  • Astute(and correct) observations (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30, 2007 @08:03AM (#18926065)
    Ok, so here goes.

    Big Freaking Disclaimer, I work for IBM in support...

    That being said, I use Linux as my primary desktop both at work(thank you IBM) and at home. Debian on both, though I do have to say, I just built a MythTV box and used Ubuntu(faster updates/multimedia/interface acceptable to the female counterpart) and I am VERY impressed with Fiesty Fawn 7.0.4. I have been running Linux since the pre-1.0 kernels and it has been my desktop of choice since 98 and my ./ account number is 5 digits(as well as my ICN number, yeah who cares). I am also in school working with HPC(High performance computing) building, programming and maintaining beowulf clusters. My point is this, I have more experience with Linux than most.

    Being that I work at IBM, I also have alot of experience with AIX. While personally, I hate AIX(any UNIX that cannot be administered via vi is shit in my book, take that any way you like), AIX is EXTREMELY stable, and IBM makes sure of it. I have seen the testing they do to both the hardware and software(OS level at least) and it is centered around stability/reliability first and foremost, followed closely by serviceability(tracing facilities, error reporting/recording), performance and then ease of use. Now, this order is not true of all commercial UNIXs, Solaris is used more in scientific applications/number crunching and tends to focus a bit more on performance over serviceability(surely) and possibly even stability. I have seen more Solaris machines bite it than AIX machines, but this is more likely hardware related that OS related. In either case, they are inherently more stable than Linux.

    Yeah, I said it, and its true. While Linux is a WONDERFUL and EXCITING desktop OS, and makes a damn fine department server, the OS itself, and not even so much the OS, the kernel is pretty darn stable(dont believe me, boot up a Linux machine and dont do anything, it will run until something harware/power related dies). It is the surrounding libraries and applications that are not quite up to snuff. We in support see this a number of times. Here is an example:

    Currently today, right now, PDKSH that is available on http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/ [cs.mun.ca] is completely broken when it comes to job control. Now most of you have no clue what I mean by that, but a quick explanation is placing jobs into the background with a '&' at the end of the command line. Now programmatically, there are a number of way to do this from the shell and on PDKSH, they are completely broken. I tracked this down back in 2002 and a bug report was submitted to the developer of PDKSH. Every major Linux disribution shipped this binary in 2002, so we actually had to package and ship our own version of pdksh to make things work. Redhat later switched to AT&T's ksh, because pdksh was too broken to fix for the most part. Roll forward to 2004, we ran into a really strange problem with one of the products I support(Tivoli) and worked it for 2 months, tracing calls/checking stack traces/and general debugging and in the end, it worked right back around to this bug in pdksh. The customer had installed our pdksh, but later, had replaced it with SuSE's, which at that time was still broken. A colleague of mine finally sat down, on IBM's dime mind you, and took the time to report this bug to all the major distributions, here is the one from Debian:

    http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists .debian.org/msg17434.html [mail-archive.com]

    This is just one package. There are a thousand stories out there that are the same. I know we regularly submit libc patches as well because we find stuff that is borked in there.

    So all in all, its not really the kernel, so much as it is the rest of the building blocks that one must use within Linux. You could use your own compiler and libraries, but then are you really using

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 )
      I still don't get why people keep using ksh (or derivatives).

      BASH gives you everything -- backwards compatibility with all those dusty (and perfectly serviceable) sh scripts, history support that works like csh (history functionality in csh is superior to ksh's imho), and nice things like arrays etc that you would expect to find in a regular programming language.

  • Wow! 138 Comments So Far... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by filesiteguy ( 695431 ) <perfectreign@gmail.com> on Monday April 30, 2007 @10:09AM (#18927235)
    I find it actually funny that this is even really newsworthy. I'm sure the pointy-haired bosses at Quantas figured they'd save either time, money or staffing hours dealing with one vendor. Obviously they didn't want to go with MS in their server room, but they went from one *nix to another.

    If you look a little further, you'll notice that the issue was with Financial operations. A few minutes with my good friend, google, turned up some tasty bits. For example here: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/casestudies/WWW2_cas estudy_Qantas.html

    It says, "So when Qantas, Australia's largest airline, merged their international operation with a domestic airline and found themselves wrestling information among multiple data systems, something had to be done. The existing architecture was complex, slow, costly to operate and not very reliable. The response was IRIS, the Integrated Revenue Information Solution."

    Guess what platform Fujitsu (the vendor) runs IRIS on...?

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