The Health & Safety Authority was one of the first companies in Ireland to migrate its core business applications to run on Linux servers more than two years ago.
The Authority’s key application is a custom-built program called SAF written in Oracle Forms to run on a standard Oracle database. The Authority has been using the SAF program since 1993 and it traditionally ran on an Intel server under SCO Unix.
SAF is used to assist the Authority’s personnel in many of the routine duties they have to perform, such as recording details of accidents, scheduling visits of inspectors to sites and planning reports. According to Andrew Allen, the Authority’s IT manager, there are about 100 people who use the application regularly with about 80 being what he described as ‘heavy users.’ It is a standard ‘fat’ client/server type configuration with users accessing it from their PCs while the core of the application runs on a standard Intel server.
Allen says that the Authority was forced to look for an alternative system a few years ago when it was announced that Oracle would no longer be supported on SCO. ‘We had to make a decision at the time,’ he said, ‘and we thought: “Why not do it on Linux?”. We had a good Unix consultant available to us called Niall Brosnan and the migration over went quite smoothly.’
The hardware required for the migration was simply a dual-processor Intel server on which was installed a copy of Red Hat Linux 6.2. An instance of Oracle 8i version 8.1.6 was installed for Linux and the data from the previous database was ported across. This was the part of the operation that required most work, according to Allen. ‘We had to export the tables from the earlier version of the database,’ he said, ‘but the applications themselves were fine and ported across without needing to be modified.’
He pointed out that there are some issues with regard to Oracle 9i installations on Linux which make it a good idea to have somebody well versed in Unix or Linux available when attempting a migration of this kind. However, he points out, that the operating system itself is so stable that if you get the initial configuration right it requires little or no on-going maintenance.
Allen now pronounces himself to be ‘a real Linux convert’ largely due to the lack of problems encountered with the operation of the MAF application. ‘In the two years that we’ve been running MAF under Linux it has held up very well,’ he said, ‘even thought the server gets hit very heavily at certain times, especially coming up to planning meetings.’ He says he is examining the possibility of extending the use of Linux throughout the organisation, although there are a number of possible avenues to explore. ‘A lot of our inspectors access the MAF application from notebooks in the field,’ he said, ‘so we might look to install a thin-client version using Citrix. We might also look to using Linux clients in the future.’
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