The road less traveled: Unix to Linux
Robert Westervelt June 2004

[...]

"Last year, we knew we were at a point for a hardware upgrade," Brough
said. "We kind of just chanced it and decided to jump into Linux head
first." [Rick Brough Western Gas Resources Inc]

[...]

At one-fifth the cost of buying a new Unix server, Western Gas switched
to Linux, Brough said.

The company chose to use a Network Appliance clustered storage system.
The project involved moving data onto Dell Intel servers running Red Hat
Enterprise Linux.

"We were one of the first ones to make the jump, and our biggest concern
was which vendor was going to be responsible if something went wrong,"
Brough said.

So far, the company has experienced very few problems with Linux and has
ironed out support agreements with Red Hat and Oracle to address
problems quickly, Brough said.

[...]

For Western Gas, the job of exporting the data from the HP Unix server
to Dell's Intel servers running Linux was easier then expected,
according to Brough. The only hurdles the company faced were Linux
kernel parameters that had to be "tweaked," Brough said.

"At the time, there wasn't a whole lot of documentation," Brough said.
"Once we got the parameters straightened out with Oracle, we haven't had
a problem since."

A Linux administrator on the staff was helpful during the changeover.
Moving from Unix to Linux also made life easier for the project team,
Brough said.

"I can't think of any problems we've had," Brough said. "We've never
lost any mission critical data and so far everything is working just fine."

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