What they think of "Linux Crapware" at Sabre, Travelocity

<Quote>
Can you give me a sense of the scale of your operation?
Robert Wiseman: We have about 5,000 servers across the world, probably
two-thirds running open source. Close to 100% of our requests go
through a server using open source technology at some point, primarily
Linux.

Do you use other, non-open source operating systems?
RW: We've standardized on Red Hat Linux, but our mainframe runs a
mainframe operating system, and we have some legacy Unix systems
running various proprietary operating systems, but we're starting to
phase those out as we move to a standard Linux environment....

What are the key benefits?
RW: Certainly cost is an attractive aspect, which is probably one of
the first reasons that everyone starts to look at open source. Another
is the ability to have access to the code, to have control of your own
destiny. At Sabre we're a 24/7 environment, and we run 32,000
transactions per second across our systems at peak. We can never
afford to be down because we support airlines and travel agencies
across the world and, as we say internally, it's always peak hour
somewhere. If we run into problems -- which thankfully is very rare --
we have the ability to go in and take a look at the code ourselves and
make fixes if necessary. With a commercial, off-the-shelf solution,
you're pretty much dead in the water. You have to fall back [to a
previous revision], if that's even feasible, or wait for a vendor
release.
</Quote>

[url]http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/111008-your-take-sabre-wiseman-bomar.html?fsrc=rss-linux[/url]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:25:05 -0800 (PST), [email]nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu[/email]
wrote:
[color=blue]
> Do you use other, non-open source operating systems?
> RW: We've standardized on Red Hat Linux, but our mainframe runs a
> mainframe operating system, and we have some legacy Unix systems
> running various proprietary operating systems, but we're starting to
> phase those out as we move to a standard Linux environment....[/color]


In other words, they were already a Unix shop, and they've switched to
Linux to cut costs.

Whoop de doo.
[color=blue]
> With a commercial, off-the-shelf solution,
> you're pretty much dead in the water. You have to fall back [to a
> previous revision], if that's even feasible, or wait for a vendor
> release.[/color]

That's a bit disingenuous. It makes it seem like they have to wait weeks
for a vendor patch. Any company like that would have on-site staff of the
vendor, or have a dedicated vendor team that would address the problem just
as quickly as they could themselves.

I've worked for several shops significantly smaller than Sabre that had
such on-site vendor staff (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, etc..)

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:02:59 -0500, Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:25:05 -0800 (PST), [email]nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu[/email]
> wrote:
>[color=green]
>> Do you use other, non-open source operating systems? RW: We've
>> standardized on Red Hat Linux, but our mainframe runs a mainframe
>> operating system, and we have some legacy Unix systems running various
>> proprietary operating systems, but we're starting to phase those out as
>> we move to a standard Linux environment....[/color]
>
>
> In other words, they were already a Unix shop, and they've switched to
> Linux to cut costs.[/color]


The sure didn't switch to Windows to cut costs.
[color=blue]
>
> Whoop de doo.[/color]

Not for Wintrolls like you it isn't.





--
If we wish to reduce our ignorance, there are people we will
indeed listen to. Trolls are not among those people, as trolls, more or
less by definition, *promote* ignorance.
Kelsey Bjarnason, C.O.L.A. 2008

Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> With a commercial, off-the-shelf solution,
>> you're pretty much dead in the water. You have to fall back [to a
>> previous revision], if that's even feasible, or wait for a vendor
>> release.[/color]
>
> That's a bit disingenuous. Â*It makes it seem like they have to wait weeks
> for a vendor patch. Â*Any company like that would have on-site staff of the
> vendor, or have a dedicated vendor team that would address the problem
> just as quickly as they could themselves.
>[/color]

It looks like all you can do is follow the party line. On the other hand, we
had a problem with the pipes in Windows 2003. Microsoft had no interest in
fixing the problem. If we had had the sources, we could have debugged into
the OS and fixed the problem. Instead, we had to spend a fortune working
around a problem in the OS.

The vendor's priorities are quite often different than yours. That is the
reality of working with some closed source OS like Windows.

Ian