Indian bank branches out to Linux

India's Canara Bank has opted for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the platform to automate more than 1,000 branches of the bank across the country, according to Red Hat Inc.

Over 500 branches of the bank have already transitioned to RHEL, with another 500 branches likely to move to RHEL, according to Red Hat, of Raleigh, North Carolina..

Canara Bank in Bangalore is implementing RHEL over 1000 servers and 10,000 desktops, as part of its total branch computerization project.

Canara is one of India's large majority government-owned banks, The Indian government has so far declined to take a stand in favor of either open-source or proprietary software.

The Canara Bank branches moving to Linux were until now running its in-house developed branch automation software on DOS and Novell's NetWare, according to a source at the bank who asked not to be named because of internal rules regarding media interactions.

The DOS and NetWare environment had its limitations so the bank decided to migrate the software to another platform, the source said. "We decided to use Linux as it was more cost effective, its performance was good, and the software was open source," the source added.

The Canara Bank win is the largest for the company in the banking and financial services sector in India, according to Red Hat.

Some 200 branches of Canara Bank still use a Unix-based total branch automation application offered by Infosys Technologies Ltd in Bangalore. "There are no plans to migrate this application to Linux at this point," the source said. Other operations of the bank also use a mix of proprietary and open source applications and platforms, he added.