Migration news: Windows to Linux, and vice versa

These days, the "revolution" is all about Linux. The word alone has become a catchcry for everything anti-establishment, anti-Bill, and anti-licensing fees. If you listen to the hype, it's being used everywhere, in businesses of all sizes, to do everything but make the coffee.

Just because everybody's using Linux, however, doesn't mean everybody's happy for that fact to be known, as I found recently while looking for potential candidates for this special report about companies that had made the switch from Windows and Linux, and vice versa.

Based on the ongoing enthusiasm about Linux, I presumed it would be simple to find companies just busting to tell how they'd ditched their Microsoft server software and moved onto Linux servers. Everybody's doing it, after all, aren't they?

Unfortunately, only Wotif.com -- a last-minute accommodation Web site due to be listed this year -- was willing to tell its story.

Wotif CIO Paul Young told ZDNet Australia he had concerns about Microsoft SQL Server's ability to scale.

"I was feeling constrained [by the Microsoft path] and one of the large issues I had at the time was SQL Server being able to keep up with the performance that we required out of it.

"Coping with sustained, ongoing growth of the level that we have is no small issue. It's significant, substantial, ongoing growth, and it hasn't changed for five years," Young said.

In terms of migrating from Linux to Windows, we feature two organisations -- national radio broadcaster Austereo, famous for its stations such as 2Day FM, FoxFM, and Triple M, and Coffey International, which provides academic and professional expertise to support environmental and infrastructure projects.

Austereo doesn't need much introduction but in case Coffey doesn't ring a bell, here are some figures to chew on -- last year, Coffey registered a profit of $10 million on the back of $170 million in revenue.

The full story on why these companies chose to migrate, and the business benefits achieved, can be accessed via the tabs above.

In future, we'd like to assess the impact and future of Solaris. If you're in the midst of migrating from Solaris to Linux, or from Solaris to Windows, drop us an e-mail and let us know. We'd love to hear from you for upcoming case studies.