In October, TRW announced a three-year contract extension with Dell Inc. to replace its Unix servers from IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and other vendors with Dell servers running Linux. Drouin declined to discuss the financial terms of the deal, which covers a mix of hardware and software, including 24,000 Dell OptiPlex desktops, Latitude laptops and Precision workstations; hundreds of Dell PowerEdge servers; and dozens of Dell/EMC storage systems.

"Implementation has been going really well -- the initial implementation I would call an uncategorical success," Drouin said. "We've been kind of slowly and methodically migrating applications and environments as we can onto the Dell/Linux platform. So far, the only area where we haven't pushed really hard is with our SAP implementation. About half our factories in TRW are running on SAP -- it's a huge scale, the implementation. We haven't even put our toes in the water. But so far just about everything else we've pursued has gone off well."

Drouin said that since the initial implementation with Red Hat Linux, TRW has partnered with Novell Inc., which is working with TRW to certify applications on Novell's implementation of Linux on the Dell platforms.

"Novell is working through issues and bugs and all the hiccups that might come up, and with their support we've been able to push it a little more aggressively than we might have," he said. "We've now focused down to four data centers, one in each of our major regions: North America, Europe, South America and Malaysia. Within those data centers, we're trying to reduce the number of different proprietary Unix platforms and put in ... standardized racks of Dell servers running either Linux or Windows."

Drouin said TRW saved half of what it would have spent on an equivalent proprietary Unix environment -- money it has used to install redundant servers at a second site for disaster recovery.