Boscov's Department Stores, the largest family-owned department store chain in the country with $1 billion in annual sales, began experiencing unexpectedly high costs associated with ongoing maintenance of its client/server environment a couple of years ago. For every 10-12 servers it installed, an additional technician was needed to help with management of databases, upgrades, and software issues; and providing disaster recovery for the growing client/server environment was complex and costly.

That prompted Harry Roberts, CIO and senior vice president at Boscov's, to consider Linux as an alternative. It was not love at first sight. Roberts wasn't sure how Linux would translate into a large enterprise system.

Less than 24 months later, Linux provides the 90-year-old retail business cost savings, reliability, and scalability, and is an important part of its long-term IT infrastructure strategy.

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Boscov's Department Stores, the largest family-owned department store chain in the country with $1 billion in annual sales, began experiencing unexpectedly high costs associated with ongoing maintenance of its client/server environment a couple of years ago. For every 10-12 servers it installed, an additional technician was needed to help with management of databases, upgrades, and software issues; and providing disaster recovery for the growing client/server environment was complex and costly.

That prompted Harry Roberts, CIO and senior vice president at Boscov's, to consider Linux as an alternative. It was not love at first sight. Roberts wasn't sure how Linux would translate into a large enterprise system.

Less than 24 months later, Linux provides the 90-year-old retail business cost savings, reliability, and scalability, and is an important part of its long-term IT infrastructure strategy.

NT out, Linux in
Boscov's, with 36 locations in six states in the mid-Atlantic region, scrapped its client/server architecture and is in the process of consolidating 70 IBM NetFinity 8500 and 500 servers running Windows NT 4.0, on a recently purchased IBM zSeries 900 mainframe running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 as a virtual machine. Boscov's is moving its invoice processing, gift registry, and an assortment of other file and database services from the NetFinity servers to Linux. Down the road, Boscov's hopes to move additional applications, including PeopleSoft and a suite of e-commerce products.

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