Q&A: Why Union Bank scrapped AIX for Red Hat

Web infrastructure upgrade led to financial institution’s broad-scale Linux commitment

As Linux establishes itself as a mainstream operating system, and open source tools and applications prove their enterprise readiness, a growing number of organizations are talking publicly about their open source deployments and direction. Recently, Mok Choe, CTO at Union Bank in Monterrey Park, Calif., spoke with Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears about the financial institution’s decision to scrap proprietary Unix systems for commodity servers running Red Hat Linux. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation:

Give me some background on your move to Linux and open source.

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As Linux establishes itself as a mainstream operating system, and open source tools and applications prove their enterprise readiness, a growing number of organizations are talking publicly about their open source deployments and direction. Recently, Mok Choe, CTO at Union Bank in Monterrey Park, Calif., spoke with Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears about the financial institution’s decision to scrap proprietary Unix systems for commodity servers running Red Hat Linux. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation:

Give me some background on your move to Linux and open source.

We were faced with having to do an upgrade of our Web infrastructure last year, which gave us an opportunity to really look at our architectural direction. We decided to head in the direction of horizontal scaling using commodity hardware and open source tools. There are multiple drivers behind this thing. Cost is clearly one of them. First and foremost always is the reliability and performance. The second thing is we wanted to be able to scale much easier than we do today. Since we run on big boxes, at some point to scale you have to buy another big box. Instead of that, we wanted to be able to rapidly manage capacity by adding or subtracting commodity hardware.

Had you been using any open source software previously?

On a smaller scale, a Linux deployment did exist, but in very small, departmental solutions.

How did you decide that it was time to look at a broader deployment of Linux and open source?

That was part of the overall architectural direction that we decided upon for our Web applications. From the enterprise perspective, it was a big decision. Going with the commodity hardware was a big decision. Going with open source was a big decision.

So you determined that open source had reached a point that you felt comfortable bringing it into larger production environments?

Yes, we have a number of people who have had experience with Linux, including myself in my previous job, so we were rather comfortable going with that decision. We did make sure that we are meeting all the compliance requirements, so both internal and external regulatory bodies were consulted.

How did you go about that?

Since we are going the open source route, everything must be open, so to speak. All the documentation that’s required has been satisfied, and we have an internal arm auditing our use of open source tools.