The Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux vendor announced yesterday that Italian bank BPU Banca, is migrating all of its 8,000 Sun Microsystems Unix workstation clients to Red Hat Desktop, while also migrating its servers to the open source operating system.
Red Hat earlier announced that German insurance firm LVM Versicherungun had signed a contract to migrate 8,500 clients to Red Hat desktop from a self-configured Linux platform that the company has used since 2000.
Under the terms of the deal, LVM is deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Desktop on network computers and laptops at its headquarters in Munster, as well as agencies across Germany.
The LVM desktops will use a mail client, image viewer, and a browser, as well as LVM’s own Java-based application system, which provides word processing, customer relationship management, claims settlement, and contract preparation applications. The desktops will be managed via the Red Hat Network management server.
BPU Banca, which is the parent company of Banche Popolari Unite, will also use Red Hat Network for the maintenance, asset management, and security management of its Linux deployments, and is expected to complete its move from Unix to Linux by the end of the year, to be followed by the migration of its server infrastructure from Unix to Linux.
Red Hat also announced a new customer for its Enterprise Linux server operating system earlier this week; with Norwegian oil company Statoil in the process of migrating its IT environment from Unix to Enterprise Linux.
The oil firm has already moved 70% of its exploration and production applications to Enterprise Linux and cut the number of Unix variants across the company from seven to four.
The company expects to realize cost savings of 50% related to the move to Linux, as it reduces the administration costs related to multiple Linux variants, and reduces server hardware costs.
