When the application testing is completed by the end of January, Brown plans to port 40 NetFinity servers to the z900, over a 45- to 90-day period. The remaining servers will be consolidated on the z900 as application vendors make their software available on Linux. He is already in discussions with PeopleSoft and Sybase, for example, and expects to continue his consolidation effort later in the year.

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Boscov's also plans to move its e-commerce server, a Microsoft Site Server running SQL Server, to the new platform. "We'll run WebSphere and DB2 under Linux on the z900," he says. Because traffic on the company's e-commerce site is growing at a rate of 150% per annum, Roberts is concerned about scalability, but he says the z900 can be expanded easily as needed. That's because when the device is delivered, IBM ships it with spare engines in place that can be turned on via a phone call. At that point, Roberts can decide how to dedicate the additional processing power.

The company had also been running an IBM S/390 mainframe in conjunction with its client/server environment, which, in fact, processed 65% to 75% of the company's transactions, including sales, financials, inventory, and other general raw data processing. All that processing was migrated from the S/390 to the zSeries mainframe.

Boscov's plans to update its point-of-sale (POS) system, which includes 3,000 terminals, sometime in 2003. "Today we run NCR 7052s on DOS and POS processing software from Cornell-Mayo Associates for checkout and sales processing. However, we're going it to replace it with Linux," says Roberts. The POS application would cost about $200 per terminal to upgrade in the Windows environment. Roberts expects to save 10% to 25% on the initial investment in the POS setup, which will include upgraded hardware. He anticipates that ongoing costs will be less than half what it would cost to support a Windows environment.

Lynn Haber reports on technology and business issues from Norwell, Mass.

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