The Industrial Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has decided to switch its servers to the Linux operating system after signing an agreement with Turbolinux.

The deal marks the largest Linux deployment in China; ICBC has $640bn in total assets and over 20,000 branch offices across the country.

Claude Zhou, general manager for Turbolinux China, said that stability, security and flexibility were key factors in the bank's choice.

The open source operating system will be deployed across the bank's offices over the next three years.

ICBC currently runs SCO Unix, but decided that a migration to Linux would be easier than switching to Microsoft Windows.

Turbolinux is headquartered in Japan and is the largest Linux vendor in China.

Linux is rapidly gaining in popularity on the Chinese mainland. Last week Novell signed a deal with China Standard Sotware to promote the development and adoption of open source in the region.