The city of Largo is one of the earliest high-profile cases of a government administration migrating over to Linux. The IT system of this small city in the state of Florida, USA, supports 800 city workers, including local safety and health services. Implementation began in 2000 and their experience with Linux in the years since then have been nothing but positive.
Motivation for migrating to Linux
In 2000, the IT department of Largo was evaluating upgrade options as problems were being encountered with existing OpenServer and UnixWare products from the Santa Cruz Operation. Various options were evaluated, including Microsoft Windows on personal computers. However, since they were already on a Unix-based thin-client infrastructure, the combination of hardware and software costs involved in such a migration was deemed prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the IT team did not want to be locked into a 2-3-year upgrade cycle, where they would be forced to pay upgrade costs even when upgrades were not necessary. Ultimately, the decision was made to keep the existing thin-client infrastructure but migrate systems to a Linux system based on Red Hat's distribution.
Implementation
A solution was tested and implemented starting in 2000 and completed by mid-2001. Two powerful (for that time) dual-processor Compaq servers delivered the services needed by most users. A variety of FOSS and non-FOSS applications were combined, including Netscape (web browser), Evolution (email client) and WordPerfect 8 (word processor). Heavy-duty database needs were run on a proprietary Oracle database while Microsoft's Excel and PowerPoint were made available to Linux users via a combination of Windows NT and the Citrix Metaframe server. In total, there were about 20 different servers working together, running a mix of Linux, Windows and Unix operating systems. On the desktop side, things were simpler. The thin-client model requires only the barest minimum from desktop units. Hence, desktop units could be obtained at a relatively low cost. In some cases, the IT team managed to obtain desktop systems for as little as US$5 per unit. With 10-year lifespans and few moving parts, these desktop units rarely broke down and had a longer useful lifespan than normal PC desktops.
Results
The migration to Linux was estimated to have saved the city as much as US$1 million in the first year alone. Largo currently has an IT budget that is only about 40 percent the size of comparable cities. Where cities of a comparable size normally spend 3-4 percent of their city budget on IT, the Largo team gets along quite comfortably with only 1.3 percent of the city budget. The efficiency with which Linux uses hardware has also reaped enormous savings. The IT team estimates that they will not need to upgrade their desktops until 2007. The reduction in number of personnel required is also significant. The end-user help desk requires only two to three people to support a user base of 800 workers. This low ratio is attributed to the reliability, stability and predictability of the system. The remaining staff members of the city's 10-member IT department are then freed for other tasks, including making additional improvements to the IT infrastructure.