A CASE STUDY IN SYSTEM MIGRATION TO LINUX IN A DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT

by Hanna, Nathan A

This case study describes the process the planning, the implementation, the testing, the migration, and the evaluation that took place in the migration of the main departmental server for the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This system is responsible for departmental mail and web services, as well as functioning as a developmental and research system for the faculty, staff, and students within the school’s programs.

The paper discusses the process of migration, from evaluating the new architecture to the final testing and modification following the implementation of the new system. The migration was from Sun Solaris on Sparc hardware to Linux running on Intel. The migration migrated 86 Gb worth of data and 800 users with at most 25 minutes of downtime for the critical applications.