For the past seven years, the Nuhr Medical Center in the Austrian town of Senftenberg has been relying on open source servers for its email, file and print services. The main reasons are better security and lower costs, explains the open source IT service provider, Siedl.
The health centre renewed its Linux servers last year and is now using Zarafa for email and collaboration and Linux Univention Server for managing user rights, access to files and security policies (directory services).
The centre also relies on a mix of open source and proprietary tools to monitor the network security, filter spam and scan for viruses and malware, in this way managing in total a little over forty desktop PCs. For this Siedl has built its own server, Watchbox, based on open source components that include Debian Linux and two systems for monitoring hosts and networks, Icinga and Nagios.
On the desktop PCs, the open source web browser Firefox is the default web browser.
"The centre really appreciates how using open source helps to keep the IT infrastructure more secure", says Robert Siedl, founder of the eponymous IT service company. "They understand how open source performs really well here."
The second motive is the lower costs of the open source solutions. "The open source mail server is about 25 percent the price of the proprietary solution that it replaces."
The centre started out in 2005 with Scalix and Suse Linux servers.
More information
Statement by Siedl (17 January 2012, in German)