Retail systems are a strange lot of machines that include everything from fast food cash registers, to in-store servers, to mainframes. While UNIX, Windows, and DOS have traditionally powered your local department or hardware store, there’s more than a handful of companies turning to the Penguin to cash-in on the many benefits of Linux. Cha-ching!
Harry Roberts can see the future and, for him, it’s black and white: penguin colors. Roberts, a self-proclaimed “old mainframe guy” and Chief Information Officer of Pennsylvania-based retailer Boscov’s, found himself on the open source road to Damascus when he had his staff create a Y2K disaster recovery plan. Reviewing the plan, he discovered that his Windows NT server farm, which ran everything from file and print services to the company’s gift registry, would take a serious amount of time to restore in the event of a disaster. “We were looking at weeks, instead of hours or days,” recalls Roberts.
Before long, a small-scale effort to improve disaster recovery time had snowballed into a full-scale Linux conversion. Now, four years later, Roberts has moved half of his back-end Windows applications to Linux, and, as far as he’s concerned, that’s just the beginning. Using Linux and Star Office, he’s already begun piloting an effort that he hopes will replace Microsoft software on 2,000 of Boscov’s 2,500 desktops. And Roberts doesn’t want to stop there. He hopes to inject Linux all the way through Boscov’s 39 department stores, from the point-of-sale (POS) cash registers, all the way to his zSeries mainframe running in the corporate data center.
Cha-Ching!
Retail systems are a strange lot. They can include anything from fast food retail cash registers, to in-store servers, to server farms and mainframe computers in the head office. And the people who use retail systems are the very…
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