One of India's biggest media firms has switched from Novell's NetWare to Red Hat Linux 5.

According to a press release, Red Hat claims it has saved the Indian Express Group a lot of money on its It infrastructure.

Indian Express Group’s network was based around a backbone of Novell Netware 3.12 LAN servers.  The main reason for changing was because the company could not extend the ancient license. It also needed some complex and expensive maintenance to keep running.

The plan was to run SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with the idea of speeding up  business processes, and enable easier systems management.

Tridib Bordoloi, CIO, Indian Express Group said it was important to ensure uniformity, standardisation and compatibility of operations, while building the IT foundation for us to accelerate quickly in the future without any limits – either imposed by technology or the vendor. All this had to be done without any downtime. He said that Red Hat Enterprise Linux had been running its file and print servers for some time, so the company was familiar with it.

The group uses Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 10g as its database, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as the platform.

Bordoloi added that the total cost of setting up the system was low, especially compared to Netware. X