Taking advantage of the fast linux OS - linux and java

Question

Hello Java Experts;
I read a very interesting article in the news this week about the linux advantage.
A german bank had 32 unix servers. Each at a cost of $50,000 dollars.Together these servers took 17 hours to crunch a calculation.
That bank replaced those 32 unix servers with 40 linux servers at a cost of $3,000 dollars per server. The calculations were done in 11 minutes instead. They were therefore able to move around 10s of millions of dollars that much faster as a result. - basically it allowed them to take 10s of millions of dollars out of reserves that much faster.
Now , does anyone know that story ?
And does anyone know how the linux server cost that much ?
I'm under the impression it is simply because a less expensive piece of hard ware was required -- does anyone know what that hardware was? I believe SUn boxes were running unix previously.
I hear these kinds of stories all time time. I heard that a mainframe running linux is as fast as 10 mainframes. and ibm uses that advantage to sell to clients.
Anyhow -- does anyone have a similar story about running java code on linux as opposed to unix ? or is this type of performance boost limited to certain types of applications.
stephen

Answer 1

     This likely has nothing to do with the Linux operating system being any faster than the Unix operating system. I actually read the same article in the paper, and it simply means that by migrating to a free OS that runs on standard PCs, they saw a great performance benefit at a minimal price. I think this is simply attributed to their installing Linux on brand new 2ghz PCs, and their old Unix systems likely being confined to a Sun Solaris box, or another proprietary computer systems. PCs have grown by leaps and bounds, and likely their servers were quite old and had much less processing power than the standard desktop PCs linux allowed them to port to. I personally use RedHat linux 7.3 as my operating system of choice, however it's not because it has any speed benefits over windows.
-Jason Thomas.