Eye catching title huh? In my previous post (Open Source? Yeah, we’ve heard of it...) I talked in brief about how we were using Open Source and how it was saving the Council significant amounts of money.
We have now calculated that we are directly saving the council £204k over an initial 5 year period and are going to save a further £228,905 every five years thereafter.
How are we saving this money?
We built a search engine framework to replace two third-party products. A website search engine and an address search system. These systems were costly and becoming more expensive as additional functionality was required.
So we decided that we’d build our own search engine to cover the needs of these two products as well as providing additional features for other products.
Our search framework consists of a set of J2EE applications written in-house and running under a clustered pair of Apache Tomcat application servers. The search indexes are all stored on a pair of load balanced and clustered PostgreSQL servers, and all these servers are running Linux as their operating system.
Quick cost breakdown
The costs of the existing search systems added up to a total of £228,905 over a five year period.
We spent £24,635.92 on hardware to allows us to get the maximum performance and stability, and this hardware is also being used to power quite a number of other systems too. So after our initial outlay of hardware, we were left with £204,269.08 for our first five years.
Conclusion
The system that we built and delivered is saving us much more than the amount we've calculated above, but working out those true costs would be time-consuming and offer no real benefit.
Open Source works for us and it works for us well, and we have proven that you can significantly reduce costs when using it with no feature or performance degradation.