FedEx Freight recently installed 15 Red Hat Linux 7.2 and 7.3 servers running Apache web server to act as a front end to its customer service application,
used by businesses that hire Freight to deliver multi-truckload shipments of goods across the country.
"We've been looking toward the Linux platform for some time" as an alternative operating system, said John Boreni, managing director of computer services for the large-volume trucking division of FedEx.
The servers replaced a dozen Windows NT machines running Microsoft Internet Information Server as a Web server application, according to Network World.
The advantages of the move include improved security and lower cost of software licensing, Boreni said. "We've observed that, out of the box, the Linux servers have [a high level] of security . . . with things like built-in firewall capabilities," he said.
"Since we installed the Linux servers" in June, Boreni said, "we've had only two failures, and neither of them was related to the operating system."
Porting the Java-based applications used by the web servers to make database calls to back-end systems was painless when the Linux swap was done, Boreni said. FedEx Freight loaded the Linux servers with a version of the Tomcat Java application server, which runs on top of Red Hat Linux. By installing the Tomcat application server, FedEx Freight was able to support the Java-based applications it had been running on the Windows web servers - now replaced with Linux servers - without having to rewrite its applications.
Boreni adds that the move to Linux would have been more complex, and possibly cost-prohibitive, if it had been necessary to convert his applications from Windows to Linux.
"Java made that an easy transition," he said, considering the applications run exactly the same on any platform with Java application server support.
"Today, we have about 5% of our Intel servers on Linux," Boreni said. "I'd expect in six to 12 months to have that number in the 15% to 20% range."