Linux Migration

             Finding a successful solution to Acme's scaling problems will provide two empirical benefits. One is a fiscally responsible architecture that will eventually create an increased return on investment and lower total cost of ownership. The other being an immediate gain realized through the increased ease of asset distribution and geographic redundancy created by horizontal scaling methods. A small initial investment in software porting efforts will be quickly offset by the lowered total cost of ownership.
             The proposed solution is to meet Acme's growing web site traffic demands and remain aligned strategically with the corporate fiscal objectives. The core of the proposed solution consists of the evaluation, analysis and deployment of low-cost, Intel-based servers running the Linux operating system. A horizontal scaling approach facilitated by deploying these low-cost servers will provide a financially attractive method of quickly meeting projected growth demands. .
             The project plan calls for a migration from Acme's current front-end web servers to low-cost Intel-based servers running Linux. The migration will be performed in phases over a three-month period. The expected performance of the new environment will be measured in financial savings and load-bearing capacity. Initial analysis indicates that it will take 60 2-way servers to replace the current 30 enterprise-class Sun servers. Despite the doubling of units and the increased power and space requirements, the financial burden is still reduced by a factor of ten. .
             Several in-house developed CGI applications will require rework to function in the new environment. An initial analysis of these modifications revealed a minimal level of effort would be required to implement the necessary changes. It is estimated that 40 man-hours of software development time would be required to effect the necessary changes. A majority of the required changes are centered around the conversion from a "big-endian" byte order to the "little-endian" byte order found on Intel-class servers.