The Open Learning Centre

The eBay owned, on-line payment processing company PayPal, has released information about how it builds out it's massive data centres; it uses Linux, and in a big way too.

According to this article on Techworld, PayPal estimated to save itself millions of dollars by using the Open Source Linux operating system.

"When you're buying lots of big iron, as I did in other places I've worked, your upgrade path is $2 million, $3 million at a clip. You just had to buy big chunks of stuff to scale," he says. "Here at PayPal, our upgrade path is 10 $1,000 no-name servers, slapped into the mid-tier of the platform. And we just keep scaling it that way. It's unbelievably cost-effective."

Their system is also extremely reliable...

"Rather than have a monolithic box, or an impenetrable fortress that never breaks, we just have so many [nodes] that the breakages are irrelevant," Mengerink says. Using a proprietary operating system to build out a system with a thousand points of failure would not be an option, he says. "This distributed, highly redundant system we have is predicated on the cost model of Linux and Intel,"