Cost savings with Linux: An NUS case study

Posted on by Ruiwen

Would you like to save SGD 100,000 in software licensing costs, reduce operational IT costs by about SGD 60,000 and cut your IT administration headcount by three?

Not possible, you say? Well, just ask the folks at the NUS Office of Estate and Development then.

NUS’ parking permit management facilities were once run off a *Microsoft *Windows NT-based application. Unfortunately, as this system was not fully integrated into the University’s backend database, a lot of the processing of parking permit applications still had to be done manually. However, to enable automation and integration in the existing application would have been "prohibitively expensive, with additional user licence fees adding significant costs to the department".

Eventually, a new parking system was developed that ran off  *SUSE Linux Enterprise Server virtualised on top of *VMWare Server . Virtualisation was used in order to run separate application environments on the same physical server, thus enabling further cost saving. Said Toh Yong Soon, of the Office of Estate and Development, "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides NUS with a highly reliable and scalable environment capable of managing the very high demands placed on it. … Deploying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server virtualised on VMWare Server has saved NUS some SGD100,000 in fees that would otherwise have been required for proprietary operating systems and user licences."

[Download the PDF version of the report. ]

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This post was written as a purely journalistic article and was in no way sponsored by any vendor.

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