Technology: Case studies

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

Jorge Villagran supervises one of the most important and sensitive projects in Guatemalan history: preserving and digitizing a massive trove of documents from the National Police files so that the country can gather evidence about human-rights abuses and bury the last vestiges of a brutal civil war.

Repeated efforts at Nationwide Mutual Insurance to try Linux on the mainframe faced opposition, some of it from IT employees worried that a mainframe-server consolidation would be a threat to their jobs. But their resistance offered James Vincent, a mainframe systems engineering consultant at Nationwide, a lesson that he put into use after the project was approved.

The city of Munich got more media attention than respect after it decided on a migration to Linux and open source software on the desktop. After a careful and deliberately open movement towards deciding its IT future, Munich was slammed in the media, then became a target for Microsoft negotiators and a project at risk from a proposed European move to U.S.-style software patents.