The 1300 servers that manage the US Postal Service’s package tracking system will now run on Linux. The original system code was written in Cobol, and it has taken the better part of a year for the code to be updated for the Linux environment. It was less expensive for the Postal Service to convert the code than rewrite the application altogether.

The goal of the US Postal Service was to reduce costs and was part of a larger plan to make open source a standard for the agency. The updated system will also be able to handle more daily transactions.

The 1300 servers were originally Sun Solaris midrange servers but will now become a Hewlett-Packard Linux environment–running Novell’s SUSE Linux.