Burton Cuts Costs With New Servers

ADMIN

• September 29 2009
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While servers may not be the sexiest aspect of running the world’s largest snowboard company, they are a vital and costly enterprise that can take up a huge part of your IT budget. Burton has been taking a hard look at these costs and has partnered with Novell to switch its “mission-critical” applications from UNIX* to Novell’s SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server, a move that Novell estimates will save Burton 80 percent on its server costs.

Here’s the nitty-gritty from Novell’s release:

“It was important for us to have a SAP-certified Linux platform, which was one of the compelling factors that led us to choose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,” said Bill York, senior Linux administrator at Burton. “While snowboarders are not averse to risk, as a business, we can’t afford to take risks when it comes to our business-critical systems that need to be available at all times. Since moving to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, our uptime has been insane.”

By moving from HP-UX* and proprietary hardware to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server running on commodity hardware, Burton has greatly reduced its server-related costs which it can now re-invest in other parts of the business. The ability to leverage open source applications is helping the company to further reduce software costs.

Moving its mission-critical SAP and Oracle environments to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has helped Burton reduce overall server-related costs by over 80 percent compared to its previous proprietary solution. The ability to use commodity servers has not only significantly reduced the company’s hardware costs, but also reduced its power consumption by 30 percent.

In addition, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has helped the global company reduce administrative time and costs by 40 percent. Simplified administration and consistent uptime has also lowered the time spent supporting users by 25 percent. While downtime was common with Burton’s previous ERP environment, the new implementation consistently hits the company’s goal of 99.999 percent uptime.

You can see the full press release at Novell.com