The French Ministry for Education has migrated 2,500
servers across its 30 local education authorities toRed Hat Enterprise Linux.
The move is part of the ministry's strategy to invest in
open source and avoid proprietary software lock-ins.
Michel Affre, IT systems manager at the French Ministry for
Education, said, "Having first abandoned GECOS 7 and DPS 7, and
gradually the AIX system, the ministry decided from 2000 that it
would drastically lower its costs by definitively decoupling the
operating system supplier from the hardware supplier."
He said, "In doing so, the ministry has standardised the
information system architecture of each local education authority
by running its application servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
operating on standard servers."
Affre said that more than 3,000 servers - which represent 80 to
120 servers per local education authority - now operate on Linux,
with 80% of them running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The Linux servers support financial applications or tools for
managing exams, staff, students or everyday administrative
activities.
The ministry's applications suppliers, internal developers and
external partners now develop on open standards to ensure
compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other versions of
the Linux OS the ministry uses.
The ministry said it was generally satisfied with the systems
provided by its previous IT suppliers, but that it was hampered by
the high costs of software licences, hardware, support and business
applications development.