Adopting a Linux strategy allows Boscov's Department Store to avert disaster in more ways than one: it relieves the company's IT department of the increasing burden of supporting a client/server environment and, by consolidating servers on an IBM zSeries 900 running Linux as a virtual machine, the company simplifies and reduces the cost of disaster recovery.
"Disaster recovery for client/server is a nightmare," says Harry Roberts, CIO and senior vice president at Reading, Pa.-based Boscov's, noting that there's no guarantee that the disaster site will have comparable systems to those used by Boscov's. By contrast, providing disaster recovery for a single mainframe is easy, since it represents one point of load and one box. "By consolidating our servers on the z900 we will greatly reduce the complexity of disaster recovery," he says.
The department store saw its disaster recovery costs nearly double in the past 12-18 months as it migrated transaction processing for retail, purchase order management, gift registry, and price management from an OS/390 mainframe to a client/server architecture. Roberts expects to see a 25%-30% reduction in disaster recovery costs, or tens of thousands of dollars, with the move to the mainframe/Linux environment.
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