Order out of Chaos

interesting story with ROI:
Order out of chaos
Technique | Hill Air Force Base streamlines systems and improves aircraft maintenance

"By consolidating and standardizing on less expensive x86, 64-bit architecture and consolidating on the Red Hat Linux platform, the Air Force saved more than $5 million. To sustain the existing environment would have cost Hill $5 million per year. The Linux system cost $100,000.

The base supports 22,000 on-site users and 3,000 more at remote sites. For some applications, Project Bonfire required a conversion from client-server to the Web, which took some user training. But for the most part it was a transparent conversion for users and required no training at all. “One day, they were on the old system, then one day on the new system,” Babb said.

With 25,000 users, the cost of training them all on a new system “would have been beyond belief,” he said.

One of the reasons the project was called Project Bonfire is that “it was a sort of celebration,” Babb said. “We consolidated servers, but also storage. We worked on [uninterruptible power sources] and cooling.