"We never really had a hot-site fail-over for disaster recovery, because the expense of having a big, high-end Unix machine just sitting somewhere unused as an insurance policy was too great for us," Drouin said. "But now that we've built up this lower-cost environment, we've been able to invest in having a hot-site standby, so we can fail that system over if there was a disaster in the data center or just a problem with the hardware environment."

Drouin said TRW has been running Linux for two years and has continued to consolidate its ERP operations around that environment. Last weekend, TRW migrated one of its facilities in the Detroit area -- one of the last to have its own ERP server at the factory -- off of a proprietary Unix platform, he said.

"The reports I got [Monday] morning are that things are going noticeably faster than they were on the Unix platform," Drouin said.