http://www.cio.com/article/426363/An...axonomyId=3000

Hope this time nobody need to be registred to view this article ...

Regards,
--
Jean-Pierre Zuate
La Fage Conseil
+33(0)6 11 40 11 09
jean-pierre.zuate (AT) lafageconseil (DOT) fr
http://lafageconseil.fr/

On Dec 15 2009, 3:59*am, "Jean-Pierre Zuate, La Fage Conseil" <jean-
pierre.zu... (AT) lafageconseil (DOT) fr> wrote:
Viewable by unregistered. Snippets:

The [German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources
(BGR)], an official primary seismic monitoring station for the
[Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty] CTBTO, oversees the activities
of four seismic monitoring stations (of about 50), keeping track of
all kinds of seismic activity and interpreting the results. The BGR
stores the data in a database used by CTBTO member nations to
determine compliance with the terms of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The BGR also monitors natural seismic activity that occurs in
conjunction with earthquakes, including the recent 7.9-magnitude quake
that rocked China's Sichuan Province in May.
....
The BGR had been running the Ingres database for more than 20 years,
Dohmann said, and the institute was happy with its performance. A
highly reliable, stable database is crucial to the BGR. Its
contractual obligation to the CTBTO includes a minimum of 98 percent
data availability and uptime, and Dohmann said Ingres worked just fine
in that role. When Ingres released its database as open-source
software in 2004, Dohmann started thinking about the potential
benefits of a switch to open source, not only for BGR's applications,
but also for its entire infrastructure.
....
"An open-source solution offers advantages like flexible installation
without being tied down to licenses," Dohmann said, as well as the
ability to commoditize the infrastructure on less-expensive x86
hardware. After comparing the Ingres open-source database with several
other products, including Oracle's well-known proprietary database,
Dohmann was persuaded. "They all involved higher conversion costs and
greater administrative complexity, especially since we needed to
convert every single application that accessed the database," he
said.

The result: In 2007, BGR undertook a massive migration from a Sun
SPARC infrastructure to Linux and Solaris x86 on commodity hardware.
Additionally, BGR moved from Ingres's proprietary database to its open-
source product.