Dubai, U.A.E. – – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Emirates Group IT, operating under the brand name Mercator, a global provider of business technology solutions, delivering business transformation, process improvement and return on investment to more than 100 customers in over five continents, has standardized its IT operations on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware after a three month pilot program..

In an effort to simplify its datacenter and reduce the total cost of operations for web server technologies, the Emirates Group migrated approximately 80% of its comparable servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat’s middleware solution portfolio offers a certified and supported platform for other open source technologies, a critical factor for the Emirates Group when deciding to standardise on open source technologies.

“Migrating to a new standard can be highly complex in an organisation the size of the Emirates Group/Mercator,” said Patrick Naef, Divisional Senior Vice President, Emirates Group IT and head of Mercator said. “Change management and confidence in vendor support are critical factors to successfully adopt a new standard- this is why we chose Red Hat.”

The Emirates Group IT/Mercator supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies.

The Emirates Group IT / Mercator strategy to migrate to JBoss was to first divert new applications for deployment on this platform. This allowed Emirates Group IT to quickly build capability, before applications were promoted to the production environment. The migration occurred seamlessly with Red Hat providing training and support to the Emirates Group IT department to ensure a more gradual adoption process.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Emirates Group IT / Mercator
Emirates Group IT supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies. The IT infrastructure supports a diverse and complex business from the Airline, to Cargo Handling, Hotels, Travel Agents, Tours and Catering.

© 2009 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the Shadowman logo and JBoss are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: India

Challenge: To reduce dependence on UNIX systems, improve cost-efficiency ratio, simplify systems management, and improve scalability for business growth

Migration Path: HP UX/UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle DB

Hardware: Dell 2950 PowerEdge server, Intel Quad Core Xeon-based E5410 x 2 (Dual CPU) Processors

Benefits: Eliminated vendor lock-in, doubled system performance, slashed costs by one-tenth translating into cost savings of over Rs. 40 lakh (USD $83,333), and gained the ability to independently manage systems

“Today, I have complete peace of mind because Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server has delivered stability, performance gains, and cost savings while providing the ability to scale to the rapidly growing demands of our organization.”
–Pertish Mankotia, head of IT, Sheela Foam

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
A US 200 million group and an ISO 9001:2000 company, Sheela Foam is the largest manufacturer of flexible Polyurethane Foam (PU) in India. The company ranks among the top five PU foam manufacturing companies in the Asia-Pacific region. In India, the firm has ten manufacturing units, supported through a distribution network of over 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers. The firm also has a presence in Australia, with five manufacturing units located in five major cities. A combination of manufacturing excellence and distribution network has enabled the company to capture over 40 percent of the Indian PU foam market share.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Sheela Foam had previously developed its own custom Enterprise Resource Planning application (ERP), Greatplus, based on Oracle and HP-UX to automate its entire production process, from procurement to production. The custom-built ERP is integrated into Sheela Foam’s distribution network of 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers and the firm also used an innovative SMS-based tracking system that helps the company to accurately track and maintain inventory at the location of its distributors and dealers. With every dispatch made by the company to the dealer, an SMS message is sent to the distributor about the stock dispatched to him.

In this process, every transaction made by the more than 1,500 users worldwide each day was recorded by the ERP system. While the self-constructed ERP system helped Sheela Foam to boost customer confidence, it also meant that the costly system had to be available 24×7.In an effort to improve its cost-value ratio, lower costs, and reduce vendor lock-in, Sheela Foam decided to evaluate a number of platforms, including those based on open source technology.

“As a company, we wanted to maximize the value gained from the support provided, as the support costs were too high and prevented us from scaling effectively,” said Pertish Mankotia, head of IT, Sheela Foam.

Sheela Foam’s HP-UX system, forced it to depend on a proprietary vendor to test and implement improvements, which made the process less effective and expensive to maintain.

Sheela Foam decided to adopt an open source solution after the company’s HP-UX system went down and took more than 16 hours to recover. As a mission-critical system, any system downtime directly impacted the reputation of the company and in turn, sales and profits. The incident provided Sheela Foam the impetus to migrate to an open source solution that could be independently maintained by its own IT team.

SOLUTION
After evaluating a host of options, Sheela Foam consulted Red Hat Enterprise Linux partner Keen & Able Computers. Convinced about the value offered, the firm trusted the market leader, Red Hat, and chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on an Intel Xeon processor-based Dell PowerEdge server. The preloaded Dell 2950 PowerEdge server made the migration and installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux quick and easy. This meant that the system was ready to be tested and could be deployed immediately.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on an Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server has enabled the firm to deploy its ERP on a single server, compared to the two previously required servers, doubling system performance with no downtime. The Red Hat solution has also reduced the amount of time required for processing heavy reports by 25 percent. The reduction in servers and associated maintenance costs has translated to cost savings of over Rs. 40 lakh (USD83,333). The firm now spends only Rs. 4 lakh (USD 8333) per year compared to the more than Rs. 44 lakh (USD 91,667) on its previous UNIX system.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon-based processors has doubled Sheela Foam’s performance levels, significantly lowered costs, and has given it the ability to independently manage its systems. Today, Sheela Foam’s IT team is able to make improvements rapidly with ease.

“Today, I have complete peace of mind because the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell PowerEdge server system is known for its stability and is well-designed to scale to the rapidly growing demands of our organization. My only regret is that I did not start this earlier,” said Mankotia.

The trusted Red Hat solution has given the Sheela Foam IT team the ability to focus on more strategic issues that can boost the competitiveness of the company.

FAST FACTS:

Company: Guangdong Telecom: BizNavigator

Geography: APAC: China

Industry: Telecom

Business Challenge: With continuous development of the BizNavigator platform, Guangdong Telecom needed to expand the capacity of the Internet Data Center (IDC) deployed in Guangdong, so that it would support more than 10 function modules, including Office Automation, Inventory Management, Network-based Anti-virus System and Enterprise Messaging

Solution: Guangdong Telecom deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform on Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5400 series

Benefits: Reduced the probability of single point of failure, and improved the availability and manageability of the entire cluster system; saved even greater energy consumptions, and hence would reduce operational cost.

Download the Full Case Study at Intel.com

Background:
As an important component of the Digital Guangdong campaign that promotes computerization in the enterprises, the Guangdong Telecom established an enterprise computerization solution service platform for small to medium enterprises, namely BizNavigator, and tried to provide the software and hardware application systems and IT environment in a one-stop computerization construction for enterprises.

Business Challenge:
By using the network, operation and professional human resources of the Guangdong Telecom, customers can customize their products according to different needs, so as to effectively control their enterprise management cost and speed up the computerization of the enterprises.

With continuous development of the platform functionality, Guangdong Telecom urgently needs to expand the capacity of the Internet Data Center (IDC) deployed in Guangdong, so that it would support more than 10 function modules, including Office Automation, Inventory Management, Network-based Anti-virus System and Enterprise Messaging.

Solution:
In January 2008, after careful comparisons and studies, Guangdong Telecom chose to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 AP (Red Hat EL) on Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-Core Intelо Xeonо 5400 series processors.

Hardware Platform with High Performance and Efficiency:
System security and stability are crucial in building such a large data center. Malfunctioning of any single system may cause the services to halt on the entire application platform, which would affect the business operations of tens of thousands of enterprises, and brings immeasurable damage to the reputation of Guangdong Telecom. Therefore, Guangdong Telecom requires the system vendor to provide a highly efficient and robust platform and multiple layers of security assurance for BizNavigator

Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5400 series , which built with 45-nm enhanced Intel CoreTM microarchitecture, brought higher performance and multi-task processing power for the core platform of BizNavigator.

Comparing with previous generation of Intel Xeon processors, the brand new 5400 series of Quad-core Intel Xeon processors with 45nm high-k technology further enhanced the system performance, and greatly reduced energy consumption, and the performance to energy consumption ratio was increased by 38%;

The Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers with Quad-core Intel Xeon processors were configured with two power supplies, two network cards, and RAID1 hard disk array, which greatly reduced the probability of single point of failure and improved the availability and manageability of the entire cluster system;

Benefits:
The Quad-core Intel Xeon processors were capable of multi-task processing, which ensured the reliability and high speed of the access and module functions of BizNavigator, and ensured the orderly processing of electronic businesses of enterprises;

The Quad-core Intel Xeon processors built with 45nm technology would save even greater energy consumptions, and hence would reduce operational cost.

Under the support of Dell and Red Hat, 73 Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers provided a reliable and efficient running platform for all the major modules of BizNavigator though grouping and clustering.

FAST FACTS

Company: Victoria University of Wellington

Industry: Higher Education

Geography New Zealand

Business Challenge: Replacing an end-of-life proprietary system with a stable and reliable platform that would facilitate lower-cost hardware and ongoing savings on platform maintenance

Migration Path: From Sun Solaris SPARC to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon Processor-based Dell servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Banner (student administration application by Sungard Higher Education)

Hardware: 4 x Dell 2850 servers with Intel Xeon processors

Benefits: Reduced annual maintenance fees, realized cost savings of 75 percent related to hardware, increased application performance, improved security, stability, and reliability

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Situated in the 25,000-strong community of Victoria, for over a century the Victoria University of Wellington has developed a tradition of strong international links in teaching and research, and programmes of national significance and international quality.

With more than 21,380 students and some 2,000 full time staff, the University is committed to providing students with opportunities to acquire, understand, and apply disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, as well as related skills and attitudes, and to enhance their personal development.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
or five years, the Victoria University of Wellington had been successfully running its student administration system, including its primary Banner software application, on a Sun Solaris platform. However, as the infrastructure hardware approached its ‘end of life,’ system administrators were becoming concerned about the ongoing operating costs of the existing system, and the hardware replacement costs that were imminent.

According to Andrew Matthews, Applications Development and Support manager for Central Student Administration, Victoria University of Wellington, as the University approached the replacement phase of the hardware lifecycle, it began to seriously investigate alternative options.

“We were conscious of the high costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of our Sun Solaris platform, and like any organisation, we were keen to reduce expenditure on new hardware,” said Matthews.

“In the interest of finding a viable solution and with enterprise-ready open source solutions available, for the first time we really opened our eyes to possibilities beyond the proprietary world,” he said.

The Victoria University of Wellington was also looking for a solution that would enable it to build more redundancy into the system without requiring additional physical boxes, which were simply too expensive.

SOLUTION
The University’s selection process initially focused on the replacement of the expensive proprietary hardware, and once a decision was made to standardise on the server infrastructure on commodity based servers from Dell. The strong relationship between Dell and Red Hat led the university to evaluate and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its critical applications.

In 2002, the University began the process of migrating its student administration systems from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new platform enabled the University to save money by standardising on four Dell 2850 servers, which run the Banner student administration system and a number of bespoke internal applications that the University developed for its enrollment management systems.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the obvious choice when it came to finding a platform that would meet our requirements for immediate hardware savings and long-term maintenance savings,” said Matthews.

“We knew that Red Hat Enterprise Linux could support our core Banner application, but we were also impressed by Red Hat’s security credentials, given that our system handles a high volume of student records and we have strict auditing guidelines, and it had a proven track record when it came to its support capabilities.”

With the initial migration complete, the University will continue to extend Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a further 13 Dell 1850 application and web servers as they approach end of life in 2010.

BENEFITS
Since putting Red Hat Enterprise Linux into production at the University, Matthews and his team have recognised a number of benefits across the board.

The Victoria University of Wellington’s move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Dell servers has saved the University more than NZ$16,000 (approx. USD$10,330) per annum in support costs for student administration systems, alone.

“In addition to the support costs savings year-on-year, we estimate that we saved approximately 75 per cent in upfront hardware costs,” said Matthews.

With these substantial cost savings, the University could also afford to implement the redundancy system it had hoped to create.

Additionally, in the long term the University has peace of mind when it comes to future hardware replacement cycles. With hardware typically becoming redundant every five years, the University can now realistically afford to manage this ideal lifecycle span.

The performance of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform has also impressed the University.

“Our previous Solaris system delivered a high standard of performance, so when it came to evaluating our new platform the bar was set quite high. We’re very pleased that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform has more than proven itself on the performance front,” said Matthews.

“A solid and reliable operating system is like a silent partner – it’s a critical supporting layer of the IT infrastructure that should just do its job without any hiccups or complaints. As a manager of a number of systems, I am very comfortable with how our Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform runs because it performs well and isn’t a burden on me or the University in any way,” said Matthews.

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Queensland Motorways

Industry:Travel & Transportation

Geography:Australia

Business need: Heavy traffic on Brisbane’s motorways was creating congestion, lengthening journey times for motorists and reducing travel reliability for local businesses. Toll plazas added to the problem, creating a choke point for motorists slowing to pay tolls. The Queensland Government, in conjunction with Queensland Motorways, which manages and operates the Gateway Bridge, Gateway Extension and Logan Motorways, decided to embark on a major upgrade project to enable traffic to flow more freely.

Solution:To support the Gateway Upgrade Project, Queensland Motorways wanted to implement free-flow tolling on its motorways. IBM Global Business Services was contracted to design, build, test, and deploy the intelligent free-flow tolling central system solution based on technology from IBM, SAP, Dacolian, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The SAP applications, identification, rating and interoperability applications, Internet Web portal and Oracle databases run on an IBM Power 570 server with 16 IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used as the operating system for the entire environment.

Software: Business Integration, Energy Efficiency, Enterprise Resource Planning, IT/infrastructure, Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Service Oriented Architecture, Smarter Planet, Transforming IT, SAP

Hardware: BladeCenter H Chassis, BladeCenter HS21, Storage: DS8000, System p: Power 570.

Benefits:
The solution allows Queensland Motorways to combine its knowledge of commuters’ travel patterns with real-time data on traffic conditions to recommend fastest routes and avoid congestion. This helps to speed journeys, reduce congestion, and cut exhaust emissions. Drivers no longer have to stop to pay tolls, which reduces congestion, increases safety and enhances network reliability.

Download the PDF case study

Background
Snaking its way from the southern approaches to Brisbane city to the north of the city, the multi-lane Gateway Motorway, the most significant part of Queensland Motorways’ network and the city’s road infrastructure, bypasses the central business district to provide easy access to Brisbane’s sea- and airports and the cities of north-eastern Australia. Half-way along the route, it crosses the Brisbane River at the iconic Gateway Bridge.

“Improving traffic flow on the Gateway Motorway, and particularly on the Gateway Bridge, is key to ensuring effective network management in Brisbane,” says Phil Mumford, CEO of Queensland Motorways, the company responsible for managing and operating this road infrastructure. “Any congestion or issues on the bridge ultimately affect the whole network: people start to divert to other roads which are already carrying high traffic volumes and soon enough, everyone’s journey is negatively impacted.

“The physical upgrade is vitally necessary, but we can’t keep building multi-billion dollar infrastructure. The pattern we see is that every time a new road is built, utilization increases and congestion comes back again. We realized that to have a long-term impact on the problem, we needed to be smarter about how we manage our traffic flow.”

To tackle this problem, in early 2007 Queensland Motorways embarked on the largest bridge and road upgrade in Queensland’s history. The Gateway Upgrade Project, which will cost AU$1.88 billion (US$1.45 billion), will see the creation of a second Gateway Bridge, doubling capacity to twelve lanes, a new 7km section of motorway north of the bridges, and upgrades to 12km of motorway south of the bridges.

Improving traffic flow
While investigating ways to transform traffic management processes, the Queensland Government, together with Queensland Motorways, identified the toll plazas on the Gateway and Logan motorways as a major pinch point. The need to have vehicles either slow as they passed through the toll plazas using electronic tolling or to stop and pay with cash at a toll booth was significantly slowing the speed of traffic.

“Free-flow tolling was seen as beneficial for two reasons,” explains Phil Mumford. “First, if we could automate the tolling process and eliminate the need for drivers to stop, it would immediately increase the average speed of traffic flow, improve safety and the traveling experience of motorists. Secondly, the solution would allow us to digitally capture and analyze information about the vehicles that use our roads, which would help us make dramatic improvements to traffic management in the future.”

Leveraging IBM industry expertise
Queensland Motorways began looking for a partner that could help to design and implement such a solution, and after a series of site visits and a tender process, drew up a shortlist of three business and IT consulting companies for the delivery of the central system.

“IBM Global Business Services is one of the few companies in the world that has proven expertise in delivering successful free-flow tolling projects, and we were very impressed with their work on congestion charging in Stockholm,” says Phil Mumford. “The ability to provide an end-to-end solution including hardware, software and services – and to work effectively with other key partners such as SAP and Thales – was a key factor in our favoring the IBM proposal.

“IBM focused on aligning the business and IT resources during the project, which led to its success. What you get is a more efficient process. The business knows what they want to achieve – it just needs help to define what is required and to come up with some innovative solutions along the way. A common understanding of requirements is critical, because it means that processes that would normally consume a lot of resources become streamlined, simple and easy to understand.”

The roadside solution replaces the traditional toll booths with a Thales/Vitronic road-side gantry that utilizes video cameras and dedicated short-range communication technologies to capture information on passing vehicles. Vehicles are identified either by an in-vehicle tag or by analyzing footage of their number plates using two optical character recognition (OCR) engines, one at the roadside and a Dacolian engine at the central system.

The vehicle data is then matched to the appropriate customer account, and an IBM-developed rating engine assesses how much money is owed. The billing information is passed to back-end SAP ERP Financials and SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, which either deduct the total from a prepaid customer account, or generate an invoice. Business reporting is handled by SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and integration by SAP NetWeaver Process Integration.

“The whole process is automated and instantaneous, and there is no need for drivers to stop to pay their toll,” explains Phil Mumford. “Moreover, except in certain cases where a vehicle cannot be identified by OCR, there is no need for manual intervention by our staff. This not only improves traffic flow – it also cuts down the cost per transaction, which will help us offer better value to our customers.”

Transforming customer service
More importantly, the introduction of the SAP CRM application is leading to a fundamental change in the way Queensland Motorways interacts with its customers. Now it can see what vehicles are using the roads and how often and at what times they use the roads. In the future, Queensland Motorways will be able to tailor its services to individual drivers – with a profound effect on both customer experience and traffic management.

“With SAP CRM, we have achieved a better understanding of who our customers are,” says Phil Mumford. “In the future we’ll be able to offer customers useful information about the transport network. For example, a customer making regular trips to the airport on a Monday morning may want to receive congestion reports direct to their phones. The whole experience has the potential to be much more personalized.

“The idea is to have ‘a motorway that thinks’ – a more intelligent solution that will give our customers a better range of options for their journeys.”

Some of these ideas are still on the drawing board, but with the launch of the free-flow tolling system, motorists, the paying customers, now have access to a wide range of information and features via a Web portal and SMS.

This enables them to review usage information, pay bills and top up credit online. Similarly, business users are able to obtain information on all the vehicles in their fleet, and pay for the total road usage from a single account.

Exploring the technical architecture
The infrastructure of the solution is split across three locations: the road-side systems, the primary data center, and a disaster recovery site.

At the road-side, all sensor equipment with integrated pre-processing systems – vehicle classification, vehicle imaging, DSRC beacons and the detection and tracking unit – are installed on a single accessible gantry with no in-road installation.

Data from each of the roadside subsystems is passed to a Toll Management Unit housed in a roadside shelter where it is combined to form individual passage reports which are then passed via IBM WebSphere MQ to an enterprise service bus (ESB) based on WebSphere Message Broker and SAP NetWeaver Process Integration.

The passage report is then passed to the identification and rating engine, which uses OCR technology from Dacolian to identify the vehicle and to verify the OCR result achieved by the roadside system.

Images which cannot be analyzed automatically with the required confidence level are manually processed in a manual image review application. From there, billing information is passed via the ESB into the SAP CRM and SAP ERP systems. The free-flow tolling system adheres to the latest Australian interoperability standards, and data is automatically exchanged with other operators.

The solution also includes an intranet portal built on SAP NetWeaver Portal, which is accessed by internal users. IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On provides secure, convenient access to the portal and to other resources: a single password is used to access all services, and users only need to sign in once. This helps Queensland Motorways safeguard sensitive customer and business data, without introducing a complex security infrastructure and reducing usability.

A self-service Web portal has been developed to provide access for Queensland Motorways’ customers to payment options, account status and other important information. IBM WebSphere Application Server provides the platform for the delivery of this portal.

Service-oriented architecture
IBM Global Business Services has designed and built the solution in accordance with the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Individual systems communicate via the ESB rather than specialized point-to-point interfaces. As a result, any component can be replaced or upgraded without affecting other systems, and components can be orchestrated in different ways to provide new services without the need for significant custom development effort.

“We know that our needs will change over time,” says Phil Mumford. “The beauty of the SOA solution is that we can change our components as needed, seamlessly. It might be about introducing a new piece of technology; it might be a business process or a whole new business model. It changes the way we think about our technology lifecycles.”

Central system servers and storage
The Dacolian servers, Web servers, and various other systems such as IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On, run on 25 Intel Xeon processor-based IBM HS21 blade servers in two IBM BladeCenter chassis.

Meanwhile, the SAP applications, identification, rating and interoperability applications, Internet Web portal and Oracle databases run on an IBM Power 570 server with 16 IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used as the operating system for the entire environment.

A storage area network, based on IBM System Storage DS8000 hardware, provides high-speed access to data. By using a combination of Fibre Channel and FATA disks, the company can obtain the most effective balance between high-performance and cost-effective storage.
The complete production infrastructure is mirrored with identical hardware at the disaster recovery site, which is used to run development, test and staging environments during normal operations. IBM Global Technology Services was responsible for designing, implementing and testing the entire infrastructure at both the primary and disaster recovery sites.

PowerVM and BladeCenter
The Power 570 servers leverage IBM PowerVM technologies to provide an autonomic, virtualized server environment. The SAP applications and databases run in separate logical partitions (LPARs) that dynamically allocate available processor resources to maximize overall system throughput and enable load balancing and peak load compensation.

As a result, Queensland Motorways has enough flexibility in its infrastructure to ensure its tolling service runs 24×7x365. Even when server maintenance is necessary at the main data center, workload can be moved to a standby server at the disaster recovery site until the production machine is back online.

This flexibility is complemented by the highly scalable IBM BladeCenter platform, which allows Queensland Motorways to upgrade its processing capabilities simply by plugging additional blade servers into the chassis. For example, if the company decides to extend the free-flow tolling solution, and this requires more Dacolian OCR servers to be installed, the BladeCenter infrastructure will enable rapid expansion at minimal cost.

This dynamic infrastructure gives Queensland Motorways the flexibility to extend and grow the solution to meet the changing demands of the business.

Looking to the future
The free-flow tolling solution is on course to deliver rapid benefits for both Queensland Motorways and the motorists of south-east Queensland – increasing the reliability and safety of travel on its motorways, and significantly improving operational efficiency, which should help the company to deliver improved services and better value.

Looking at the big picture, Phil Mumford believes that the best is still to come: “Under our old systems, we didn’t have the flexibility to obtain some of the data that will greatly assist us make better business decisions. We now also have a system that will enable us to offer tailor-made solutions to our customers – total flexibility, total mobility.”

“Moving forward our customers will have access to information such as projected travel times, and our systems will help them to make informed travel decisions.”

Australian Insurance Company Saves $500,000 by Migrating from Windows and WebSphere to Red Hat Platform and JBoss Middleware Solutions, Gains Increased Flexibility, Scalability and Freedom

COMPANY:Allianz Australia Insurance Limited (Allianz)

CATEGORY: Carved Out Costs

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: Australia

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Rebuild Allianz’s IT infrastructure based on a flexible and scalable platform that could leverage new virtualisation technology to generate hardware and support savings, and reduce its underlying software and operations costs for several strategic business application projects

MIGRATION PATH: Windows and Intel-based infrastructure to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 mainframe and from Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Middleware on Intel processor based HP ProLiant servers.

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: IBM System z10 mainframe, HP ProLiant servers

BENEFITS: Significant reduction in middleware software and support costs, reallocation of IT budget from software licensing to staff and resources, resolution of data centre power limitations with new capacity for growth, superior workload management and operational efficiency, reduced carbon footprint, increased flexibility, scalability, and freedom from vendor lock-in

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Operating across Australia and New Zealand with approximately 3,300 staff, Allianz offers a wide range of insurance and risk management products and services, including personal insurance, industrial and commercial insurance, corporate insurance, public and products liability and workers’ compensation insurance.

Allianz is Australia’s fourth largest general insurer with over two million policyholders. It also provides some form of insurance cover for more than half of Australia’s top 50 BRW-listed companies (2005).

The organisation has been a member of the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Challenge Plus program and the wider Global Allianz Group has a target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2012.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

In 2007, Allianz Australia’s IT department reached a crossroads as it faced a data centre that was at capacity and network equipment that was at end of life. As a long-standing Windows shop, Allianz saw the situation as an opportunity to build a completely new infrastructure from the network right down to the back-up devices.

“After running WebSphere applications on an Intel platform using Windows for some time, we realised we couldn’t go any further with the current set-up,” said Peter Rowe Head of Infrastructure and Operations, Allianz Australia Limited.

In addition, Allianz had also reached the limitations of its Windows based operating platform.

“We needed a platform that could give us the flexibility and scalability to enable us to grow and expand for the future,” said Rowe.

In line with Allianz’s goal to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2012, the IT department was also interested in examining how it could take advantage of new virtualisation technology to save on power usage.

SOLUTION
After comprehensive analysis, Allianz concluded that the most viable option for the business going forward would be to:

- combine the performance and reliability of the IBM System z10 mainframe with the flexibility and efficiency of Red Hat Enterprise Linux; and

- deploy JBoss Enterprise Middleware on the Intel platform – implementing a common system across diverse hardware

In September 2008, Allianz received project approval to commence both infrastructure refreshes concurrently. “IBM System z10 mainframe running Red Hat Enterprise Linux was undoubtedly the best fit-for-purpose solution for us,” said Rowe.

“The mainframe offered us the best option for consolidation – Our business took the view that the mainframe was essentially another commodotised piece of hardware and for us, the value really lies in the interface between the server and the applications. Our target was to employ a Red Hat Enterprise Linux based platform that could combine agility with low support costs.

“When assessing operating systems for the IBM System z10, Allianz found that open source based Linux would deliver the best outcome and as a result, selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to host all Internet-facing applications, including home and motor insurance quoting, broker and agency pages, premium funding pages, and other broker tools for policy servicing.

“A major part of the decision to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its tight integration with the IBM platform and its impressive support structure,” said Rowe, “Red Hat’s relationship with IBM meant that if we were going to have any issues, Red Hat could essentially replicate the scenario on their own IBM z10.” For ongoing, centralised systems management, Allianz also implemented Red Hat Network Satellite to complement the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and minimise daily administrative demands.

As a centralised tool, Red Hat Network Satellite can help boost productivity by creating a single template for managing multiple servers more efficiently. It creates a system for grouping machines together and mapping out how to manage them. Having this template also means that one administrator can run the same updates on a greater number of systems simultaneously, and can build a new and completely configured machine within a couple of minutes.

In addition, it has the capability to manage virtualised instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux through the same interface regardless of underlying hardware platform. Red Hat Network Satellite manages Red Hat on the mainframe in the same manner and interface as Red Hat on a distributed machine.

As an alternative to WebSphere, which Allianz had been using as part of its existing framework, the organisation implemented JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for content management, document management, business process automation, and client portals, along with JBoss Operations Network Management to reduce systems management and resource costs.

“We had three new workloads – BPM, content management, and print services – that had begun on the old system, and which had to be redeployed in order for us to achieve the projected capacity needed for these workloads over the next two to three years,” said Rowe.

“JBoss has enabled us to cost-effectively leverage the recent advancement in Intel chipsets in HP hardware, without the costs traditionally associated with multi-core software licensing models,” said Rowe.

Allianz enlisted Red Hat and JBoss Consulting services to assist in building automated provisioning of new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployments through Red Hat Network Satellite and JBoss Operations Network in a matter of minutes rather than days.

BENEFITS
Commencing production in late April 2009, Allianz has already observed a number of solution benefits during the testing phase.

“The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Operations Network was, and will continue to be, valuable for Allianz, as the solutions enabled the organisation to streamline operations and free up resources for allocation to other high-value tasks,” said Rowe.

Allianz will save more than $500,000 in middleware licensing costs, as it deploys JBoss Enterprise Middleware on the Intel platform.

Plus, by using Red Hat and JBoss Consulting and Training, the Allianz team has been able to get up-to-speed in a very short period of time, once again freeing up funds to invest in areas such as staff development, rather than expensive proprietary infrastructure software.

“We were looking for an operating system that we could simply drop down into the network, that was independent of the hardware, and provided a higher level of service with centralised management for patching,” said Rowe.

“So far with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we’ve begun to significantly reduce day-to-day security administration and now have more strings in our bow in terms of virtualisation and what we can do to minimise both the investment in hardware and ongoing production costs – particularly those associated with escalating licensing and support costs,” said Rowe.

Allianz believes this is just the beginning, with expectations that the move from a Windows-based environment to a virtualised Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, together with the JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployment will save the organisation over one million dollars a year in hardware and support costs.

In addition to resolving data centre capacity issues, the new system is expected to accommodate significant future growth whilst enabling superior workload management and operational efficiencies, and helping to reduce the organisation’s carbon footprint.

Allianz also believes it will continue to benefit from the fact that Red Hat has more applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux than any other open source operating system platform.

Once the production system is up and running, Allianz will shift its focus toward the continued reduction of proprietary software in favour of more widespread use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

FAST FACTS:

Company: ANSYS Japn K.K.

Industry: Software: CAE

Business Challenge:Provide support for complex analytical simulations: address customer requirements for more advanced CAE technologies, investigate emerging processor technologies, increase productivity

Solution: Deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and selected AMD Opteron™ processors, which are scalable up to 8-processors/32-cores and widely employed in the CAE

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL785 G5, 8-processor, 32-core, Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, 256GB DRR2 memory

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ANSYS, Fluent and other CAE software solutions from ANSYS, Inc.

Benefits: The server runs continuously and stably under high loads. Found a highly manageable way of leveraging the power of the new server, like a cluster in a single box. Achieved a significant reduction in power consumption, making it possible to add additional servers. Provides customers with simulation results more rapidly, addresses customer challenges more flexibly, contributes to higher IT ROI

Overview: US-based ANSYS Inc. has taken a global leadership role in the field of CAE software, an integral and indispensable part of many manufacturing processes. ANSYS Japan K.K., the Japanese arm of ANSYS Inc., has deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux to keep pace with customer demand for complex engineering simulations. The company appreciates the benefits of the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including its stability under high loads and significantly reduced power consumption.

Download the Full Case Study at HP.com

FAST FACTS

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: Needed a solution to enable them to proactively monitor, track and respond in terms of bed usage and associated resources

Migration Path: Paper-based system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Red Hat Alliance Partner: Y3 Technologies Pte Ltd

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: IBM PowerSeries 2 P6-570 virutalized server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Bed management solution improved bed turnaround, and thus staff productivity; real-time information enables staff to provide improved patient care

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, together with Y3, offered a unique solution that met our needs and exceeded our expectations.”
– Fong Yong Choi, MIS manager at MAH

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Mount Alvernia Hospital (MAH) began as a 60-bed private hospital in Singapore in 1961, and has since grown to a 303-bed general hospital. The hospital provides services to local medical, surgical, pediatric, and maternity patients, and offers a comprehensive range of specialities. In addition, MAH has two medical centres, which are occupied by consultants who provide a wide range of medical and surgical specialist services.

MAH ensures that its facilities are constantly upgraded to keep abreast of advancements in medical technology and techniques.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As MAH operates round the clock, patients can be admitted at any point in time. The hospital relied heavily on telephone, email or fax coordination with different departments to ensure that patients are assigned the correct beds.

Bed information gathered was consolidated on paper, which was used by the night manager to verify bed status when performing the hospital round from room to room.

Recognizing that MAH was faced with these challenges, Y3 Technologies, a Red Hat Alliance Partner, proposed an open source Bed Efficiency and Management (BEAM) system which would allow the hospital to better manage admissions, and track bed usage with the use of wireless and mobile technologies. BEAM should provide visibility on the hospital’s bed capacity, bed demand forecast and status of pending discharges for resource planning.

While other vendors also proposed solutions for MAH, the hospital chose Y3 Technologies’ BEAM solution for its rich interface architecture and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabled framework based on Red Hat and Oracle technologies.

BEAM was evaluated on the following criteria: ease of integration with existing IT infrastructure and resources, reliability, performance and availability of technology, cost-effectiveness, and vendor independence. In addition, MAH wanted a provider that had experience in implementing the proposed solution in a hospital.

“Open source is known to be cost effective and we are finding value as the technology is now stable, mature and of low risk to us. Furthermore, open source is well supported by major vendors such as IBM and Oracle, thus the time is right for Mount Alvernia to embark on this journey to use the technology to improve and enhance the current operations,” explained Fong Yong Choi, MIS Manager at MAH, on why he chose to adopt open source and Red Hat.

SOLUTION
The solution comprised Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle databases, and Java Platform Enterprise Edition 2, running on a virtualized IBM PowerSeries 2 P6-570 server. Red Hat Enterprise Linux sits on top of the enterprise backup software, with the systems management server as gateway. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform supports the hospital’s mission-critical applications, one of which is BEAM. JBoss Hibernate forms part of the object relational mapping (ORM) for the application framework.

BEAM was implemented in all wards that run 24 hours a day, and other departments such as front office, admission, housekeeping, nurse, and nurse wards.

With the successful deployment of BEAM, MAH plans to explore the feasibility and benefits of extending the open source platform to other systems within the hospital.

“We are more than satisfied with the overall performance of the system and the underlying system software running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. From the solution point of view, we are happy that it has achieved the objectives that were set up. Our expectations have been met with outcome of the project” said Yong Choi.

The collaborative project among MAH, Y3 and Red Hat has broken new grounds in terms of information technology strategy and business operation.

BENEFITS
Following its successful deployment, BEAM has brought about many unforeseen benefits.

Employee productivity has increased as a result of an online, electronic whiteboard that minimizes bed location confusion.

As the system proactively notifies the housekeeping department on pending discharges and discharges for the day through the use of mobile devices, dependence on the nursing department is reduced. The housekeeping department no longer has to perform room-to-room checks for vacated beds prior to cleaning.

MAH’s booking department has also benefitted as bed status is available in real-time. Booking staff can now make more informed decisions and quickly locate and assign available beds for urgent admissions. These assignments can be made any time and at any location using wireless mobile devices.

The MAH management team is also positioned to make better decisions, as key performance indicators are readily available from the management dashboard. These indicators include cutting bed turnaround time to less than 30 minutes, and quality monitoring of housekeeping now achieves excellent or good rating. It used to take around 40 minutes to turn a bed around.

By creating a paperless environment, BEAM has enabled the hospital to support the green environment campaign.

“The key to the success of the project is knowledge sharing and strong management support. Given that MAH has the healthcare domain, Y3 and Red Hat provided the needed technology and solution to be able to meet the business objective,” said Jocelyn Austria, bed management system project manager, Y3 Technologies.

“MAH has shown its pioneering spirit by embarking on this project. It is truly a leader in the field of healthcare and has shown technology proficiency as it has used a unique solution to improve its operations and services,” said James Loo Wai Kheong, COO, Y3 Technologies.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Monash University: Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

Industry: Education

Geography: Australia

Business Challenge: Monash University needed to construct a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to support its biomedical research efforts. The cluster needed to be easily expandable, and CPU power per dollar spent was a major consideration.

Solution:cluster built on Dell PoweEdge blade servers and Dell PowerVault storage running Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge M600 blade servers with Intel Xeon processors, Dell PowerEdge M1000e enclosures, Dell PowerVault MD3000 modular disk storage arrays, Dell PowerVault MD1000 disk expansion enclosures

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Platfrom OCS (Open Cluster Stack)

Benefits: Able to add a new server node in minutes with no downtime, able to support 400% more research projects, research completed in weeks vs. months, favorable price, lower power requirements, easily expandability of both cluster and storage

Read the full case study at Dell.com

BACKGROUND
Melbourne-based Monash University, Australia’s largest university, is known as a worldwide leader in biomedical research. Until recently, however, the university’s researchers were limited in their ability to achieve results quickly due to fragmented and often insufficient computing resources. They sometimes had to spend precious research dollars hiring outside computing facilities to meet their needs—until a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster built on Dell hardware changed everything.

Although the university’s IT leaders knew that a local HPC cluster would greatly improve the situation, they had held off on the purchase due to cost and scalability concerns. “Building a cluster using specialized HPC hardware would have been too expensive, yet we knew we needed to start providing better computing facilities in order to remain
competitive,” says Adrian Ling, manager, infrastructure and major I.T. projects.

“Also, we knew that once we built it, it was going to grow quickly, so we wanted to make sure we could add new servers and storage capacity easily.”

The solution to both problems turned out to be the cost-effective combination of Dell PowerEdge blade servers and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. After considering servers from five vendors, Monash decided that Dell servers offered the most compute power per dollar spent.

“Using standardized, off- the-shelf Dell servers for our cluster nodes instead of custom-built HPC hardware has allowed us to purchase much more CPU power per dollar,” says Ling. “Dell’s pricing was much better
than the competition on a price-per-flops basis.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: Republic of Korea

Challenge: Migrate to a flexible platform to achieve cost savings for server consolidation in the data center project

Migration: UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database

Hardware: IBM xSeries, HP BladeSystem

Benefits: Reduce server operating costs; achieve reliable and flexible system operation

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Headquartered in South Korea, POSCO (formerly known as the Pohang Iron and Steel Co.) is one of the world’s largest suppliers of iron and steel products. The company produces more than 30 million tons of steel a year, employs more than 20,000 workers and includes subsidiaries: POSCO Engineering & Construction (which builds steel plants, steel-related infrastructure, and energy facilities) and POSDATA (systems integration).

POSCO operates iron and steel making operations in South Korea and India that are renowned for their high efficiencies throughout a physically huge and complex operational structure., so choosing a fool-proof backup and recovery system is critical to the company’s business health.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
POSCO relies heavily on an extensive array of servers to deploy numerous applications for day-to-day operations handling a massive volume of data transactions daily, making the operating platform for the servers critical to the company’s business health.

POSCO, through its systems integrator subsidiary, POSDATA, embarked on a project to replace its aging, disparate systems with an integrated platform as the company was experiencing problems with system performance, and cost control. The company needed to identify an operating system for the system wide server refresh project that would take place over three stages from 2004 to 2009.

SOLUTION
POSCO needed to replace its dated and costly UNIX servers with IBM and HP x86 commodity servers in order to consolidate its systems into one large-sized data center. POSCO began benchmark testing and the evaluation of operating system vendors. Paramount to POSCO’s decision was the solution’s ability to provide a flexible environment while matching, if not improving, the reliability and performance of its existing UNIX platform. POSCO also aimed to reduce operating costs. Already familiar with Linux, POSCO selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its server consolidation project because of Red Hat’s reliability, increased performance, security, and the resulting reduction in operating costs.

POSCO began gradually migrating its operating environment for select business systems from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux dating back to 2004 and today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux currently runs on more than 50 percent of POSCO’s servers. Due to the increased performance and cost savings, POSCO plans to continue its UNIX-to-Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration as the solution enabled the company to cut reporting time, improve data quality, strengthen accounting and financial planning, enhance asset management, and achieve integration within systems.

The organization has adopted six Sigma, in-house bulletin and data warehousing for new business systems and has performed migration of several systems, including ERP, EP/mail, KM, EDMS, and EAI from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided POSCO’s systems the reliability and performance expected from the operating platform systems, while providing unmatched reductions in operating costs when compared to UNIX and proprietary solutions.

“By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in an industry where IT trends are changing rapidly and user demands are becoming more diverse, we can save development costs and time. In particular, we can drastically reduce maintenance costs because we are purchasing subscriptions rather than proprietary licenses. In addition, the high interoperability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and industry-standard hardware and certified applications enables reliable systems operation,” said Oh Jong Wan, Manager of Information Planning Department Information Service Group for POSCO

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is equipped with a wide range of certifications through a broad ecosystem of hardware and software partners that allow POSCO to be flexible with their systems and selected vendors.

Because the entire deployment is open source it reduced development costs, eliminated license fees and significantly increased work productivity leading to shorter development time.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Transportation

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: Provide an alternative channel for taxi booking to alleviate phone call booking overload during peak periods

Solution: Short Message Service (SMS) booking system developed on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Seam

Benefits: Allows customers to book a taxi anytime, anywhere using SMS in just 30 seconds, which means less waiting time for customers and more booking jobs for cab drivers

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ComfortDelGro is the world’s second largest public-listed passenger land transport company with a fleet of 45,000 vehicles. The Group has a global workforce, shareholder base and outlook. Headquartered in Singapore, it has operations in China, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

ComfortDelGro was formed in 2003 through the merger of two land transport giants – Comfort Group and DelGro Corporation. Both had started out in the 1970s and had, by the time of the merger, grown to become successful listed land transport companies.

Comfort and CityCab, the group’s two taxi companies, are the largest in Singapore with a combined fleet of about 15,000 taxis.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Catering to more than 20 million taxi bookings annually, ComfortDelGro’s Customer Contact Centre is running at full capacity, with the situation becoming more pronounced during peak hours and on rainy days.

In 2007, the Company started to explore more ways to automate the booking process so as to handle the increasing volume of calls and reduce the time it takes for calls to be handled. Part of the booking process had already been automated with the broadcasting of call bookings to taxis using General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology via the in-vehicle Mobile Data Terminals.

As mobile phones are widely used in Singapore, ComfortDelGro decided to implement the Short Message Service (SMS) taxi booking service.

SOLUTION
A closed tender was called with three vendors pitching for the project. “Our criteria were the vendor’s experience in the SMS platform, its track record and support level. The platform must be able to integrate seamlessly with our existing Java-based solutions,” said Ms Wong Oi Mei, Vice President, Information Technology of ComfortDelGro’s Taxi Business.

After carefully considering the options available, the Company decided to pick the JBoss Seam-based solution proposed by Maven Lab, a Red Hat Business Partner under the Infocomm Development Authority’s (IDA) Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP).

“Maven Lab’s proposal matched our requirements. The Red Hat solution also offered lower cost of implementation,” said Oi Mei.

Maven Lab took three months to develop the system, which runs on Windows on HP Intel-based servers. JBoss Seam was used as the application server. A pilot run involving staff and selected customers started in January 2008 and following feedback gathered, the improved and more user-friendly SMS taxi booking service – the first of its kind in Singapore that enables commuters to book a taxi via SMS any time from any location without having to register – was launched.

BENEFITS
The service has proven to be a hit with many customers switching to SMS taxi booking since waiting time is now a mere 30 seconds. It has, in particular, been a boon to another group of customers – the speech- and hearing-impaired passengers. They now can book a taxi by themselves via SMS without having to rely on others for assistance.

“All that our customers, including the speech- and hearing-impaired passengers, have to do is to send a SMS and wait for a SMS response. This process bypasses the contact centre agents and IVR, saving time on waiting for the call to be answered and waiting on the line for confirmation. Our customers will also not have to experience getting an engaged tone during busy periods,” said Oi Mei.

Around 2% of all taxi bookings are now made via SMS. ComfortDelGro aims to increase this figure to 5% of all bookings by the end of 2009.

“ComfortGelGro is using the SMS taxi booking service as another channel to help improve customer experience. Using the Red Hat’s JBoss Seam-based solution has ensured that the company has a stable, reliable and cost-effective system to support this service,” said Hiew Wee Soon, Director of Maven Lab.

Oi Mei is pleased with the success of using open source solutions. “We are impressed with JBoss for its reliability and flexibility, and the support and service level from Red Hat,” she said.

Building on this good experience, ComfortDelGro will be using JBoss Seam and Hibernate for its customer and driver portals, both of which are expected to be launched later in 2009.

FAST FACTS

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

Business Challenge: Roll out new, competitively priced educational products and services more swiftly while cutting costs. Build applications upon a base of infrastructure software technology that will position ETS for evolution into cloud models.

Migration Path: Vertically scalable platform to commodity software and hardware platform and proprietary application server technology to Open source technology

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Web Platform, JBoss Developer Studio, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

Benefits: Reduce costs and boost competitiveness by moving to a stable, secure x86-based platform for developing and delivering new assessment products to market more quickly.

With Red Hat products, ETS achieves the following benefits (metrics are based on the current server-hardware and OS support service cost at ETS:

• Cost savings (approximately 40 percent)
• Improved efficiency (approximately 30 percent)
• Improved technology management and standardization
• Improved leverage of development resources
• Better positioned for adoption of cloud computing and virtualization technologies

“We performed extensive in-house performance testing, talked to industry analysts and considered all other aspects of the operating system and application server, including the quality of support, market share and the software and hardware ecosystem. Once we took all these things into consideration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss from Red Hat with support subscription were the obvious choice at that time.”
– Harikumar Rajappan, enterprise IT architect for applications at ETS

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ETS advances quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. The nonprofit organization serves individuals, educational institutions and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English-language learning and elementary, secondary and post-secondary education, as well as conducting education research, analysis and policy studies.

Founded in 1947, ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually — including the TOEFL® and TOEIC® tests, the GRE® test and The Praxis Series ® assessments — in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ETS is widely recognized as the world leader in creating and administering academic assessments that are both rigorous and fair. But in the early 2000s, ETS management realized that limitations in its IT infrastructure were impeding its ability to compete in an increasingly crowded and price-sensitive global educational market. ETS’s dependence on proprietary hardware and software, in particular, was standing in the way of its ability to maintain its position as the premier educational assessment organization.

“A lot of new companies with new technologies have entered the market in recent years, offering solutions that were very aggressively priced against ours,” said Harikumar Rajappan, Enterprise IT Architect for applications at ETS. “We knew we needed to embark upon a different technology strategy to compete effectively.”

ETS had previously used platform were costly and non-portable (the software enabled with vertically scalable features as well as the proprietary hardware required to run them), and also prevented ETS from bringing competitively priced products and services to market in a timely manner.

ETS wanted to heavily move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that would enable it to combine reusable modules of functionality to quickly create new products and services. It also wanted to be able to easily port its applications from one hardware platform to another. “We’re particularly interested in the opportunities offered by cloud computing and virtualization as a way of bringing costs down while improving the scalability, portability, performance, flexibility and reliability of our applications,” Rajappan said.

Additionally, having an utterly stable platform for its mission-critical applications was one of ETS’s top priorities, he added.

“ETS wanted to stay with highest quality and hence design our applications to perform with no error,” Rajappan said. ETS has developed applications that designed to enable instructors to grade tests in a standard manner to ensure fairness. More recently, it has introduced tests that students can take via the Web.

“These applications must be high available due to the nature of ETS services and” Rajappan said.

For example, if a system crashes while a student is taking an online test, the student risks losing all of his or her work. “This would be unacceptable,” he said.

SOLUTION
ETS decided to move from vertically scalable platform to horizontal scalable Linux platform, primarily for reasons of cost, and portability. It chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because the open source operating platform was established as one of the most stable and reliable Linux distributions on the market at that time.

“We performed extensive in-house performance testing, talked to industry analysts and considered all other aspects of the operating system and application server, including the quality of support, market share and the software and hardware ecosystem,” said Rajappan. “Once we took all these things into consideration, Red Hat was the most viable choice.”

Although ETS initially tested the open source waters using the JBoss.org community version, the company today mandates that all developers use JBoss Enterprise Middleware to gain access to Red Hat’s stellar support resources.

ETS is in the process of migrating a majority of its applications from vertically scalable platform and proprietary technologies to Intel x86 boxes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

ETS has also migrated J2EE applications to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform. In addition, the company plans to pilot JBoss Operations Network (JON) as a monitoring and administering tool for J2EE application servers to improve real-time monitoring and proactive resolution capabilities.

BENEFITS
Thanks to its new Red Hat-based strategy, ETS is positioned to compete aggressively in the rapidly evolving educational assessment marketplace. In addition to dramatically reducing its upfront investment in hardware and software, ETS is in process of using the Red Hat products to construct an SOA that will speed time to market of new products and services.

ETS has also achieved its performance goals with Red Hat products. When benchmarking Oracle databases running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and x86 machines compared to Oracle databases on SPARC stations running Solaris [Sun SPARC(4 CPU , 1.2 GHz) to Intel (2 CPU Dual Core, 3.2 GHz)‏], “we found that Oracle running under Linux on Intel machines delivered required performance and that the cost was substantially lower based on the support service cost at ETS,” Rajappan said.

Thus far, ETS’s management has been very happy with the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to the fault tolerance capabilities of the platform. “When you are running your application on a single 8-CPU Sun machine and it fails, you are in trouble,” he continued. “But if you are running it on four Intel x86 machines, even if one crashes, your application stays up.”

And given ETS’s interest in virtualization and cloud computing, Red Hat was the optimal solution. “It would be very difficult to move vertically scalable systems into the cloud, or into virtual machines,” Rajappan said.

Since ETS standardized its J2EE application development IDE to JBoss Developer Studio, the company has experienced improved resource management, application portability, security monitoring and patch updates. Since ETS migrated its J2EE applications to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform, it has also found it much easier to manage application configurations, application deployments and changes in technology lifecycles.

“We have potential opportunities to increase our capacity with the same resources necessary to support deployment and production environments,” Rajappan said. “Now we can better leverage our existing development teams as the applications are becoming more portable within different development teams.”

ETS has also experienced improved technical support and cost savings through Red Hat Global Support Services and Red Hat Consulting, and is very pleased that Red Hat treats it like a true collaborator. “Red Hat representatives have briefed us on upcoming solutions, allowed us to tour their facilities, and provided insight into their product roadmap,” Rajappan said.

This knowledge makes Rajappan feel confident that ETS’s J2EE application architecture vision is aligned with Red Hat’s strategic direction. “Thanks to Red Hat, we feel we are on the right path to the future,” he said.

Copyright © 2009 by Educational Testing Service. All rights reserved. ETS, GRE, TOEFL and TOEIC are registered trademarks of Educational Testing Service (ETS). THE PRAXIS SERIES is a trademark of ETS.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Hong Kong

Business Challenge: Rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace website with an efficient financial information portal, and to leverage virtualization technology to reduce hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows and UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux AP with integrated virtualization

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate

Hardware: Intel Xeon based servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits: High-performance, flexible IT infrastructure delivered through the integrated virtualization technology in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 50-70% Reduction in software and hardware costs

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors. We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs.”
-Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Quam Limited serves both institutional and retail investors and provides an array of services supporting participation in capital markets and wealth management. The company’s history goes back to the founding of Quam Limited in 1986 and the listing of Quam Ltd on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1997. Today Quam Ltd is the holding company of a diverse financial services and wealth management group with a major and fast-growing stake in Mainland China through strategic alliances and intermediaries.

The Quam Limited used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with virtualization technology and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, to re-build its website, www.quamnet.com, as a high-performance information portal in three languages and serve several million customers. The new portal is designed to combine the financial services offerings with an online financial information and investment advisory portal, for retail clients and investor relations services for corporate clients.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 1998, Quam built the first financial services website in Hong Kong. However, by the spring of 2007, Quam’s rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace the existing website with an efficient financial information portal that would provide a much stronger link between the firm’s financial services and its hundreds of thousands of members.

Slow access time was becoming a problem with the old website. “In our business, users expect very rapid response time,” said Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited, “and our infrastructure was not able to handle the large user base that we had acquired.”

The financial information portal also has to process direct connections to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for stock announcements on listed companies as well as wire news services, including Xinhua and Infocast Financial news for news of Hong Kong and Asia.

“We have a very large number of active members, many of whom are involved in online trading,” said Choi. “We needed to provide them with market information, including financial news, reports, analysis and real-time stock quotes.” In addition, the financial information portal needed a redesign of its front-end, the Content Management System, and back-end, the Customer Relations Management System, in order to enable Quam to know and serve our members better.

Another problem with the old website was the inflexible infrastructure, which made updating web content a tedious business. “Our financial information has to be altered frequently, so we needed a fast, simple way of updating the site,” said Choi.

When Philip Choi joined Quam in May 2007, he was asked to completely re-build the website. “We were asked to totally revamp and restructure the website, so we basically did everything from scratch,” said Choi.

SOLUTION
The main operating systems used in the existing website were Windows and UNIX. “For the financial services industry, Windows may have some security issues,” said Choi. “UNIX is more costly, in terms of license fees and related hardware. I also had to consider the availability of skilled support labor.”

In his previous experience, Choi had used Red Hat Enterprise Linux successfully, so he decided to measure it against the existing alternatives. “One advantage would be that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can run on powerful and inexpensive servers, with a wide choice of hardware vendors,” said Choi, “So we would not be locked into any proprietary technology.”

Another factor in Quam’s decision was the wide acceptance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the leading platform within the financial services sector. Quamnet has the same demands for performance, availability and security as other major financial institutions, said Choi. “Like other players in the financial services market, we seek alliance with the leading vendors to optimize the performance and security of our operations.”

Today, Red Hat is a very mature OS, and the vendor provides high quality direct support. “I have confidence in the top management of Red Hat in Hong Kong and believe the company is a long-term partner for Quam,” said Choi.

Quam IT Department started the study project on the new financial information portal in May 2007, and the staff talked to several vendors. “We decided to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management, and flexibility,” said Choi.

Red Hat Consulting provided guidance and hands-on support to the Quam IT team, right from the planning stage. “Once our server hardware was installed, Red Hat Consulting certified the platforms as stable and scalable and carried out all the software installation work, providing a guarantee to remedy any platform issues,” said Choi.

Throughout the installation process, Red Hat helped Quam with the sizing and planning of how to configure the resources. “We gave them figures, such as the number of portal visitors and page views per day that we needed to support,” said Choi. “This helped us determine how many servers, how many CPUs and how much memory we needed. We have a requirement of so many transactions per second, and we need to guarantee the response time provided to end-users.”

Quam’s infrastructure includes server farms to support front-end users’ access and back-end service delivery with all Intel Xeon based servers on rack mounted blades. Quam relied on Red Hat for the majority of the sizing work on planning the financial information portal, server utilization, and connections to the database and application layers.

In the Red Hat Linux Advanced Platform, virtualization is more powerful than ever. Features such as distributed lock management, global file system, logical volume management, can now operate over multiple physical systems and guest operating environments.

Quam also uses Red Hat Network Satellite to help the company keep its open source environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and virtual servers. “The beauty is we can reassign memory and CPUs on-the-fly and whatever applications need more resources, we can provide them immediately,” said Choi.

Clustering is one of the elements of virtualization that Quam required. Red Hat Advanced Platform Virtualization Technology allows Quam users to easily move applications and resources between servers.

Powerful middleware: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
The financial information portal build was carried out at high speed, aided substantially by Red Hat Consulting, and was mostly complete in months. “My in-house programmers had to write a number of new applications from scratch, mostly using Java J2EE,” said Choi. “It was then subjected to extensive testing, after which we went live in mid-January 2008.”

To support the large number of applications on their financial information portal, Quam selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which it found to be the best platform for innovative and highly scalable Java applications. Integrated and simplified, it includes powerful open source technologies for building, deploying and hosting enterprise Java applications and services.

A key part of Quam’s use of JBoss Application Platform is Hibernate, a framework that
enables users to express queries in native SQL, an extension called HQL, or with an object-oriented Criteria and Example API. Hibernate provided a ubiquitous object-relational mapping and persistence framework which does not require hand-written SQL or stored procedures and this provides a significant increase in performance and scalability.

Another JBoss technology used was the JBoss cluster, which is a group of nodes comprising JBoss server instances within a server partition. “Individual nodes can be added to or removed from a cluster at any time,” said Choi. “JBoss Clustering provides high availability for J2EE applications running inside of JBoss.”

The use of JBoss middleware enabled Quam to speed up the creation of applications. “Our system is very stable, and that enables our IT team to concentrate on the programming operation,” said Choi.

BENEFITS
Quam has invested in multi-lingual market communications. “Our financial information portal provides both traditional and simplified Chinese language versions, plus English,” said Choi. “Our competitors have traditional Chinese only, some with English. I am proud of the fact that we were able to build a best-in-class information portal with Red Hat within six months, in three languages.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform provides integrated server and storage virtualization technologies. The virtualization provided is easy-to-deploy, simple to manage, flexible. “Red Hat Virtualization has enabled us to reduce the numbers of servers we need,” said Choi, “and that in turn has reduced the space, cooling and power consumption.”

For users, the new information portal provides a much faster response to queries, even at peak times during the stock exchange trading hours. It’s also much easier to update information on the new financial information portal. JBoss provides a programming framework which facilitates changes to business logic using minimum programming effort.

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors,” said Choi. “We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. But we are not locked in to any vendor. The beauty of open source is that it enables freedom of choice.”

Red Hat service team not only supported the financial information portal build, but also provided valuable information on best practices. This was vital in helping Quam to achieve an outstanding time-to-market for the project. “The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs,” said Choi.

The success of the project confirms the value of open source solutions as a long-term strategy. “Overall we made a solid decision in choosing Red Hat as our partner and our customer’s have benefited from our decision to use Red Hat and JBoss technologies,” said Choi.

“Our next project will be a financial information portal specifically for the Mainland China market and we will need to deploy servers on a larger scale,” added Choi. “We are committed to open source software over proprietary software, and we definitely plan to keep using Red Hat in future.”

FAST FACTS

Geography: Republic of Korea

Business Challenge: Searched for a reliable, high-performing alternative to reduce server failure, optimize resources, and enable faster response times

Migration Path: From UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization technology, Oracle database

Hardware: Dell PE2950/ PE1850, EMC CX3-10

Benefits: Achieved significant cost savings by deploying a reliable, open source virtualization solution with Red Hat, reduced maintenance costs with hardware integration and clustering, acquired operation flexibility, and experienced ease of use and ease of management

“By deploying Red Hat’s open source-based virtualization solution, we were able to receive the proven stability of the platform and Red Hat’s reliable support and services.”
Hwang Sae Yong, assistant manager of Computer Operation Team for Korea Federation of Banks

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Korea Federation of Banks (KFB), a non-profit organization founded in 1928, plays a role in the development of the Korean finance industry. Its members include all commercial banks, special banks, and provincial banks, while its associate members include all Korean branch offices of foreign banks. It promotes the development of financial industry through cooperation between financial institutions, R&D of financial issues, and improvements of business practices of banking industry. It also establishes healthy credit transaction order with centralized management of credit information and evaluation about financial institutions clients.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
KFB faced the challenge of unreliable systems that could not meet the organization’s performance needs. Its previous server system lacked resources and often experienced failures that resulted in delayed response and availability of its mission-critical systems. In addition, the usage of the overall system was not balanced, causing some servers to be under-utilized.

It was important to KFB to integrate its many physical servers into a virtualized environment to benefit from ease of management, cost savings, and for the ability to configure multiple guest operating systems. It also wanted to increase system availability.

SOLUTION
To address these challenges, KFB decided to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for its integrated virtualization technology. By duplicating the configuration of existing systems to server virtualization from Red Hat, KFB was able to leverage a reliable solution that provided no downtime.

“We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advance Platform after considering maintenance cost reduction, support, and manageability,” said Hwang Sae Yong, assistant manager of Computer Operation Team for Korea Federation of Banks.

“By deploying Red Hat’s open source-based virtualization solution, we were able to receive the proven stability of the platform and Red Hat’s reliable support and services. This also resulted in ease of management for our solutions. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, we are able to leverage our full hardware capabilities and cannot tell the difference between our physical and virtual systems.”

BENEFITS
In addition to integrated virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) technology for no additional cost. With these solutions, KFB was able to achieve high availability, maximizing availability by minimizing service downtime, and significantly increased reliability and availability of service.

“In addition, with Red Hat virtualization, we were able to reduce the number of servers we were maintaining, and were able to innovatively reduce operation costs including server and power costs,” said Yong.

“After implementing Red Hat virtualization technology, our systems are running much more smoothly, and we are able to achieve flexible service operation through online migration.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Information Technology

Geography: Australia

Business Challenge: CVSDude required a platform that was affordable, bullet-proof, and ensured scheduled release cycles

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Hardware: 24 x AMD and Intel servers, up to quad code 2.5GHz

Benefits:

• Stable and reliable platform with optimal uptime
• Superior security
• Affordable
• Built-in, scheduled release cycles

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Since 2002, CVSDude has served as the original provider of free and commercial Subversion hosting and CVS hosting for individuals, startups, and Fortune 1,000 companies.

CVSDude’s technology allows maximum availability to source code while ensuring its security. It delivers this service through dual CPU servers running hardware RAID-5, each connected by 6x redundant 10GigE pipes, and all housed in state of the art US-based data centres.

CHALLENGE
More than 65,000 users, including Government institutions, private enterprises, universities, and not-for-profit organisations across 110 countries rely on CVSDude to deliver a highly available solution for their mission-critical systems responsible for activities from hosting code to providing collaboration and project management.

One of Australia’s leading web design agencies depends on CVSDude to manage team-based development of client portfolio projects, and to distribute deliverables to Fortune 500 clients. Similarly, Zuora, a high-growth Software as a Service leader in the online subscription billing space, uses CVSDude to manage two China-based development teams and achieve rapid 4-week release cycles.

“Customers pay us to guarantee that we can provide 99.9 percent uptime, but we needed a rock-solid, reliable support system in place so that we had the foundations to deliver on that promise,” said Mark Bathie, CTO, director, and founder of CVSDude.

In order to offer a service that was fit for managing mission-critical workloads, CVSDude required a platform that was not only stable and affordable, but ensured scheduled, built-in release cycles.

“From the outset we knew we were looking for a Linux solution — we wouldn’t use anything else for what we are hosting — but we needed enterprise-ready Linux that would offer CVSDude and our customers absolute confidence.”

SOLUTION
With more than 15 years of Linux experience, CVSDude’s team was well aware of the cost efficiencies and security benefits that were possible with a commercial application of Linux.

“You can’t compare code that has been developed, reviewed, and tested by thousands of coders worldwide to closed-source code, which is generally developed by a much smaller team. The former is going to be far more resilient, secure, and more cost-effective than anything closed code can offer,” said Bathie.

Working with its US data centre providers, in 2005, CVSDude selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux over a variety of Linux alternatives, as the basis of its hosted solution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was deployed across the 24 servers that comprise CVSDude’s distributed development environment.

The decision to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux was based on Red Hat’s well-established reputation for enterprise-class Linux, its prompt release cycles, affordability, and first-class security.

“Our distributed development model allows for richer functionality along with the flexibility to evolve our business more rapidly. Enhancing that set-up with Red Hat Enterprise Linux just made good business sense,” said Bathie.

BENEFITS
Since deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux four years ago, CVSDude has acknowledged that without the backing of a reliable, secure platform like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it couldn’t have delivered the level of service customers have come to expect from its organisation. Bathie believes the business can’t afford not to work with Red Hat.

“It stands to reason that customers use CVSDude for the same reason we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux – it continues to provide a superior level of service for a better price and with better security,” he said.

The longer lifecycles of between six and 12 months have been of particular value to CVSDude, removing the need to change packages and enabling more effective planning for the future. According to Bathie, the guaranteed release cycles delivered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux are another way Red Hat has been good for business.

Today, CVSDude is continuing to grow exponentially, adding some 100 customers a month to its service.

“Around 10 per cent of new customers are coming to us from proprietary systems. People are looking to save money and benefit from more feature rich systems, and are therefore looking to open source solutions and to open source leader Red Hat,” said Bathie.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Consumer Retail: Wellness

Geography: Singapore

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Business Challenge: SK-II Boutique needed a customisable spa management system that enables realtime sharing of data and generates timely reports

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss 4 Java Application Server running mobySPA, a web-based Spa Management System. It was developed based on mobyClinic, a Clinic Management System, used by more than 100 users.

Benefits: Gained a customisable solution that delivers real-time reports and ensures timely commission payment

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
SK-II Boutique Spa is a collaboration between renowned skincare brand, SK-II and Singapore-based luxury spa specialist Senze Salus. Combining the goodness of SK-II products with excellent spa services, it provides an experience that tantalizes the senses and leaves customers with radiant, crystal clear skin.

The spa pays special attention to customers’ skin concerns and tailor treatment according to their skin care needs. Its team of experienced beauty therapists provides a customised treatment plan, and follow-through with careful monitoring to ensure progressive improvement.

Believing that skin care is a long-term process, the spa’s aim is to help customers develop and preserve crystal clear skin.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As the business grew over the past three years, SK-II Boutique Spa realised that its point-of-sale (POS) system was not able to cope with the complexities that were inherent in spa operations. For example, commission structure and payout are complex because they are multi-dimensional, involving both sales and operational staff, such as the therapist who executes the facial.

Realtime reports with accurate and up-to-date data also needed to be accessible from multiple locations — the corporate headquarters and two outlets — for decision-making and payroll.

The technical challenge was the complexity in requirements, plus the need for multiple location support, including the possibility of cross-border implementation as the spa has plans to expand to other countries.

“We were using a POS system which was based on Windows. It was a closed and inflexible system,” said Calvin Tan, managing director of SK-II Boutique Spa. “What we needed was a highly customisable system that is scalable
and can grow with us.”

While he wanted a customisable solution, Tan was mindful that a technically competent vendor was required to ensure stability of the application despite the customisation.

SOLUTION
SK-II Boutique Spa shortlisted and evaluated a few solutions before deciding on a dual core Intel server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, JBoss 4 Java Application Server, and running mobySPA, a web-based Spa Management system. It was developed based on mobyClinic, a Clinic Management System, used by more than 100 users. The decision was based on the scalability of the solution, the proven track record of Red Hat, and the availability of reliable support.

“We chose Red Hat and its operating system and middleware products because it provides cost-effective solutions
that also deliver on performance, security, and reliability. The application is scalable and allows for expansion of fea-
tures as well as support for our growing business and database,” said Tan.

Customer relationship management (CRM) and short messaging service (SMS) type functions can be added as and
when required. “Although our system will be further customised, we were confident in what we saw, giving us the comfort of a robust and proven platform,” said Tan.

SK-II Boutique Spa was also impressed with the implementation track record across various industries of Philip Tang & Sons (PTS), a Red Hat Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP) Partner.

Availability of support was another key consideration. Tan noted that the skill set availability and technical competency of the vendor in supporting the server operating system and application were important. “This is also why we choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5,” he said.

BENEFITS
PTS took just two months to customise and implement the Red Hat-based solution. SK-II Boutique Spa is pleased with
the results as the system has proven to be stable and reliable, with excellent uptime.

“Our IT platform can now do things which it could not do previously, such as having realtime access to data. Our old POS systems were not networked so data could not be shared. Now, we can view data in realtime and generate
whatever reports we require in a jiffy,” said Tan. “The timeliness of management reports is critical and assists greatly
in decision-making.”

Payroll used to be a challenge for SK-II as it took about a week to collate data to pay staff salary and commission. This process is now quickly and easily completed, and the spa can pay staff more timely and accurately, leading to
better employee relations.

Tan noted that the Red Hat subscription model allowed his company to defer the high initial investments and has allowed the company to convert the cost from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. This has allowed the spa to stage its investments in the entire platform, which was important as it needed time to refine the loyalty programme and software application functionality.

“Our experience with Red Hat and open source has been great. The operating system and application have run smoothly and are very flexible, allowing us to customise according to our needs,” he said.

Franklin Tang, marketing director of PTS, pointed out that the technology partnership with Red Hat under iLIUP has
enabled his company to develop and deliver solutions that are relevant to the market. “Once again, Red Hat has been very supportive and instrumental in ensuring the successful implementation at SK-II Boutique Spa,” said Tang.

Following the successful implementation and proven experience with the Red Hat solution, SK-II Boutique Spa plans
to upgrade the platform to involve more CRM functions to better satisfy its members’ needs.

“We are very satisfied with the reliability and robustness of our Red Hat platform. We have been running our systems without any glitches, unscheduled downtime, nor maintenance requirements,” said Tan.

Fast Facts:

Company: SPH Search

Industry: Information technology

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: SPH Search needed a reliable and secure solution to drive its new search engine services, Rednano,sg

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite

Hardware: HP Intel Xeon-based servers

Benefits: Established a robust, reliable, and secure search engine with the confidence of enterprise-level support

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
SPH Search is a collaboration between two media powerhouses — Singapore Press Holdings Group (SPH) and Schibsted Group. The two companies, headquartered in Singapore and Norway respectively, have long been in the business of giving people information and significantly, the context which make the information more useful.

Both companies have also established reputations as trusted sources, each over more than a century, with their continuous delivery of accurate information speedily. The platforms on which they do this have changed over the years and have, since the 90s, included the World Wide Web.

Their joint venture, SPH Search, aims to provide the premier online tool for anyone seeking information about Singapore; its people and its businesses. It intends to respond to queries speedily. Most importantly, it plans to make relevance the hallmark of its answers.

Incorporated in September 2006, the company is located in News Centre. The jointly formed company has its own technology team who are working on producing a system which allows users of personal computers, PDAs and mobile phones, easy access to SPH Search’s search and directory tools.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Starting from scratch, SPH Search wanted to quickly occupy and dominate the empty space between the general search engines of the world and the niche-oriented online directories.

SPH Search was faced with a very short timeline to launch the business and get the search engine and directory business up and running.

Immediately identified as critical to the success of SPH Search, top priority was given to the choice of a technology platform, in particular the choice of operating system to run on its Intel-based servers. Clustering was another important requirement due to the traffic and peak demands a search engine business garners, the IT organization has to load balance among multiple machines.

Rednano.sg, Singapore’s local search and directory platform requires a reliable and scalable infrastructure. The systems software vendor must be able to provide good, local technical support,” said Mr Christopher Yeo, Chief Technology Officer at SPH Search, “We considered various open source options and after a careful selection process, we decided on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Yeo is impressed with the extensibility and scalability of Red Hat solutions, which are backed by major vendors that Red Hat has established partnerships with, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SGI.

“Red Hat is well-established in Asia and this gives us the necessary confidence that we can get support when we need it,” said Yeo. “Through its business model, open source vision, and acquisitions, Red Hat has shown that it has a clear strategy.”

SOLUTION
After selecting Red Hat as its software vendor, SPH Search deployed several Red Hat products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, both 32-bit and 64-bit, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS for shared file storage, and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite for systems management. In addition, SPH Search’s open source-based platform includes Java, Apache, MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and Tomcat running on HP’s Intel Xeon-based servers.

The solutions were deployed starting in July 2007, and today run on about more than 140 servers, including Intel Xeon processors, HP ProLiant DL360, BL460c, and BL480c servers.

“We are very pleased with the entire implementation process. Red Hat was able to do the things that we required for our hardware and infrastructure. The easy-to-use graphical user interface facilitates easy installation and configuration,” said Mr Yeo. “Cxrus Solutions, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner and iLIUP Partner, helped us a lot with the implementation and ensured that our servers ran smoothly,” he said.

According to Chua Boon Wee of Cxrus Solutions, Red Hat has been part of his company’s Linux strategy since 2003. Cxrus has helped many enterprises build robust Linux infrastructure, including the busiest and biggest online cinema booking system in Singapore for Golden Village. “We helped set up the infrastructure, namely the operating system and the network for SPH Search, which later
required a high-performance storage that can be accessed concurrently by few servers. Cxrus then helped to build three Red Hat GFS clusters for the company,” said Chua.

BENEFITS
Since implementation of Red Hat solutions, SPH Search has launched its search engine services and tested its database servers. The company practises good risk management with security penetration and performance load testing.

Its trust in relying on the open source platform has proven to be a wise move. The results have exceed expectations and the system was launched successfully in March.

“Red Hat is a good fit and it delivers great technical support around the clock — which is an important factor in our business. Red Hat also provides constant software updates and patches through Red Hat Network Satellite that come with detailed information to ensure that our solutions are always tweaked for maximum performance and security. What’s best is that it’s easy for us to find and
contact Red Hat-certified system engineers and Red Hat’s presence in Singapore provides local support,” he added.

The combination of Red Hat solutions and the numerous Intel Xeon-powered HP servers was just what SPH Search needed to drive its business.

“Our network and infrastructure must be designed and implemented correctly right from the start, and the Red Hat-Intel combination gives us the necassary power, performance, scalability and security needed by our search engine,” said Mr. Yeo.

Going forward, SPH Search has plans to leverage the industry-acclaimed Red Hat Training programs, including its well-known Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) hands-on training.

“Open source is very reliable with lots of community support. In Singapore and across the region, we can find many good technical engineers and developers,” said Yeo. “We are continuously working on deploying new search services to serve our users and continuously optimising and pushing the limits of our infrastructure and solutions to power ever more new services.”

Fast Facts

Industry: Food and beverage

Geography: Singapore

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Business Challenge: Develop a reliable system to run its customer loyalty programme

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss 4 Java Application Server running mobyLoyalty, a loyalty application developed in Java

Benefits: Achieved a reliable loyalty programme offering rewards points to customers

BACKGROUND
The Coffee Connoisseur (TCC), a leading purveyor of gourmet coffees in Singapore, offers an extensive range of exclusive top-quality coffees, brewed to perfection using a variety of methods including syphon, ice coffee dripper, and espresso techniques.

Customers at TCC enjoy a cosy, welcoming ambience where they can fully appreciate the pleasure of savouring a truly excellent cup of coffee. Each of the chain’s art boutique cafés features a unique design and ambience to suit the local clientele. Besides coffee, it also serves a comprehensive menu of delicious starters, main courses, and desserts.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The food and beverage industry is highly competitive and a key to success is not only attracting but retaining customers. Having established a brand name in Singapore, TCC wanted to develop a strong customer retention strategy centered on its brand and quality of products and services.

This involved the rolling out of a customer loyalty programme that offers members discounts off total bill, special deals, and exclusive offers to arts events and performances.

“The technical challenge was the implementation time frame,” said Henry Tan, marketing communications manager of TCC. “We had a very tight deadline to come up with a system to support this programme.”

SOLUTION
TCC evaluated several vendors based on the loyalty application. Following extensive assessment, it decided on mobyLoyalty, a customer loyalty application developed in Java, running on servers based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss 4 Java Application Server. The solution was recommended by Philip Tang & Sons (PTS), a Red Hat Business Partner.

The coffee chain based its decision on the proven track record of Red Hat, scalability of the solution, and availability of reliable support.

“We found PTS to have an extensive track record of implementations for various industries, as well as good clientele base. The mobyLoyalty application which was developed and deployed in a telco scenario. Which gave us the comfort of knowing that it is a robust and proven platform,” said Tan.

TCC also wanted a solution that is scalable, allows for expandability of features, and can support its growing business and database.

The mobyLoyalty system deployed by TCC has already gone through enhancements over the past two years. It is also capable of having customer relationship management (CRM) and short messaging service (SMS) functions, should the business require it.

Availability of support was another key consideration. “The skill set availability and technical competency of the vendor in supporting the server operating system as well as application was important. That is also the reason why we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux — both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss are cost-effective solutions that simultaneously deliver reliability, high performance, and offer scalability,” said Tan.

PTS deployed the entire platform and application on an Intel server within two months of the award of the contract. This included all the customisation on the back-end as well as integration to the point-of-sale (POS) terminals to accumulate and redeem points seamlessly. Training for all retail staff was done within this timeframe.

BENEFITS
Thanks to the solution, TCC was able to launch its loyalty programme and attract almost 50,000 members in just three years.

“The scalability of the Red Hat-based solution has enabled us to support this rapid membership growth and the expansion of our chain to 30 outlets. We need not upgrade the platform at all,” said Tan.

The customer loyalty system has run smoothly – with only one scheduled maintenance during closing hours – since its deployment. “This is excellent considering that it is supporting our chain of 30 outlets every day of the year. We are delighted with the reliability of our Red Hat solution,” he said.

Tan is also impressed with the Red Hat subscription model, which allows the coffee chain to defer the high initial investments and converts the costs from capital to operational expenditure. “This allows us to stage our investments in the entire platform, which is important as we needed time to refine the loyalty program and software application functionality,” he added.

According to Franklin Tang, marketing director of PTS, Red Hat has helped to ensure the successful deployment of the solution at TCC.

“Red Hat has been extremely supportive and is an excellent global corporation partner under the Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP). It is very committed to the programme and in supporting small and medium enterprises. We have benefited much from its reliable support,” said Tang.

Going forward, TCC plans to upgrade the platform to involve more CRM functions to better satisfy its members.

“We are very satisfied with the reliability and robustness of our Red Hat platform. We have been running our systems for over three years without hitches, with excellent uptime and with few maintenance requirements,” said Tan. “We are happy with PTS’ recommendation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss as the platform has been very stable.”

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Sydney

Industry: Education

Business Challenges: Quickly and cost-effectively develop a high-availability platform to support a web-based file repository, enabling the University to comply with new Government regulations

Migration Path: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat Consulting, DSpace (web-based file repository)

Hardware: 2 x HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers, 2 x Dual Core CPUs, HP EVA SANs

Benefits: Achieved quick deployment, cost savings, high availability, reliability, and scalability

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1850, the University of Sydney became the first university established in Australia. Today, it has an international reputation as a centre of research excellence and an active and engaged community leader.

The University boasts approximately 45,000 students and about 3,000 full-time academic staff. Its library holds the largest collection of books in Australia.

The University of Sydney is one of a number of member universities across Australia and New Zealand that takes advantage of the Red Hat CAUDIT Agreement. Through the CAUDIT Agreement, the University is given the opportunity to deploy an unlimited number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments covering both its server and desktop environments. Each Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is protected by unlimited 24×7 support, and the package comes at a small fee. The CAUDIT Agreement is currently one of the most successful university programs in the world.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2007, the Australian Federal Government introduced new guidelines for justifying university funding, based on evaluating the quality of research output from individual universities. Known as the Research Quality Framework initiative, the program introduced a peer-based output review process that relied on reviewers’ input from all over the world. In order for this to be successful, the Government required a reliable and secure channel of 24/7 access to each university’s repository of research.

The new guidelines presented two main obstacles for the University of Sydney. First, it was unsustainable to finance round-the-clock datacentre staffing to ensure the 24/7 system uptime that was required. Second, it would risk overloading its two aging datacentres. This meant that the University of Sydney couldn’t guarantee 100 percent uptime and needed a reliable system.

“In order to comply with the new rules we needed to quickly and inexpensively provide a high-availability platform for the ‘DSpace’ Tomcat Web-based repository application that would enable us to store research files and publications, along with a PostGreSQL back end,” said Nikolas Lam, Unix System Administrator, University of Sydney.

“The real dilemma was that both the University’s aging datacentres, situated approximately two kilometres apart and powered by different electricity sub-stations, were already under considerable cooling stress and were very close to electrical capacity. On their own, neither was considered to be reliable enough to handle the platform,” said Lam.

Lam and his team also recognised the need to enable DSpace to failover relatively quickly, not just between hosts, but between the two datacentres.

SOLUTION
Given that the university faced significant time, financial, and capacity constraints, it turned to Red Hat to help provide a virtualised open source environment as an alternative to adding multiple new machines.

In mid-2007, the University of Sydney deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 Advanced Platform with built-in virtualisation and integrated Red Hat Cluster Suite capabilities. It engaged the trusted expertise of Red Hat Consulting to provide guidance during the deployment, which was completed within three months.

“We were already running DSpace on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and the team was familiar with the operating system. Initially, we considered having the code of the application modified to make it cluster-aware, but it became apparent that it would be too complex a task,” said Lam.

“Red Hat Cluster Suite emerged as a straight-forward way of taking a non-cluster-aware service and placing it in a cluster, and was a fundamental component of the system. When it came to virtualisation, the compatibility with Cluster Suite, the extra efficiency of para-virtualisation and the ability to minimise the number of vendors involved meant that the virtualisation capabilities incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform made the most sense,” said Lam.

“Enlisting the help of Red Hat Consulting to assist with the installation also meant that our staff could continue with their normal workload, which expedited the implementation,” said Lam.


The University also employed Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite with management and provisioning modules, for additional administrative capabilities. RHN Satellite is an easy-to-use systems management platform for growing Linux infrastructures. Built on open standards, RHN Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities for large deployments. It enables organisations like the University of Sydney to manage many servers as easily as it would one.

Also important for the University was ensuring immediate, seamless automatic failover between datacentres, should a disaster arise. For this it relied on one HP EVA SAN in each datacentre. Another critical component was the layer three Linux Virtual Server, developed in-house to allow the University to present a single IP address to the outside world despite being hosted in various geographical areas.

BENEFITS
For the University of Sydney, one of the most notable benefits of the Red Hat deployment was the ability to plug in a standard application and instantly improve its availability, without substantial modification to the application source code.

“When we were suddenly faced with Government-imposed guidelines for managing and storing research data, it was Red Hat that allowed us to easily and effectively plug in DSpace to give us the solution we needed,” said Lam.

“It also meant that we could comply with the new regulations in a short space of time. The alternative would have required time and money that we didn’t have,”
 said Lam.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, the University was provided with a complete solution that offered both cost savings and high performance. The solution delivers integrated virtualization technology at no additional cost, eliminating the need for expensive, third-party alternatives. It also provides Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite as a part of the solution without added fees.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform allowed us to carve costs out of our deployment because we were able to consolidate servers and use a leading, high-performing virtualisation solution that came built-in as part of the solution without us needing to buy from another vendor,” said Lam.

The University was also impressed by the scalability of its new virtualised environment. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform’s virtualization capabilities accommodated the architecture’s current data load of about 15 gigabytes, as the University continues to grow and incorporate new video and other rich data formats, it will scale up to several terabytes of data without any configuration change.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Education

Geography: Singapore

Opportunity: To implement a cutting-edge, reliable, and affordable solution that scales with growing business needs, and to leverage virtualization technology to reduce hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Network

Hardware: HP Proliant G5 servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits:

• Approximately $40,000 cost savings
• High-performance, flexible IT infrastructure delivered through the integrated virtualization technology in Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Efficient allocation and management of computing resources through features such as dynamic addition/removal of server memory and processors.
• Simplified systems administration

Download the case study [PDF]

“We trust Red Hat virtualization because it delivers immediate, real benefits to U21Global. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux we met our goals for a high-performance virtualization implementation that is stable, reliable, scalable, and secure,” said Caven Yip, systems engineer at U21Global.

BACKGROUND
Established in 2001, U21Global is the world’s premier online Graduate School that offers globally recognised graduate programmes. The graduate school is backed by an international network of leading research-intensive universities in 11 countries and has successfully enrolled students from 60 countries around the world including those from Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

U21Global, understands the value and potential of harnessing advanced technology and the Internet to provide an invaluable learning experience for its enrollment of over 5,000 students worldwide.

To deliver high-quality, dynamic, and interactive academic content, U21Global relies on a powerful IT infrastructure to provide the highest levels of availability for its online programmes.

U21Global’s datacenter is located at its global headquarters in Singapore. It provides IT services to its students, faculty and support staff around the world, while simultaneously supporting the business-critical function of development and staging of courseware. Courseware developers, faculty members of affiliated universities, and quality assurance professionals access the datacenter resources to develop content and carry out user-acceptance tests and certification.

OPPORTUNITY
In 2008, rapid business growth put pressure on U21Global to add three new servers to keep pace with user demands on its development and staging platform. At the same time, 10 existing servers were also due for maintenance renewals. The cost of new hardware and renewals was substantial, causing U21Global to look for an alternative solution that could deliver a robust enterprise platform while also offering cost savings, reliability, ease of management, and scalability.

SOLUTION
U21Global was familiar with the reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, having used Red Hat solutions in various parts of its IT architecture for a number of years. When Red Hat delivered its integrated virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, U21Global decided to assess how this and other virtualization solutions could help it address its cost, scalability, and system management challenges.

U21Global evaluated three virtualization solutions. It had never utilized virtualization capabilities on its systems before, but knew that it needed the promise of quality support from the vendor it selected. U21Global also wanted to work closely with the technology provider to learn best practices and gain help during implementation.

“We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization for its cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management, and flexibility,” said Caven Yip, systems engineer at U21Global.

U21Global’s virtualization solution was installed with the help of Red Hat Consulting. U21Global had the internal expertise to install the solution, but it looked to acquire best practices from the experienced team of Red Hat experts. With Red Hat Consulting, U21Global was able to implement its Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization solution more quickly than had been anticipated at the beginning of the project.

Using Red Hat virtualization technology, U21Global has converted four physical servers to virtual servers (guests). It has also implemented a virtual server dedicated to new development work. By the end of 2009, U21Global aims to have a simple, yet powerful, infrastructure with one high-performance server and up to 12 virtual guest servers.

U21Global has also invested in Red Hat Network, an easy-to-use systems management platform, to help the company keep its open source environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and virtual servers. The system enables U21Global’s IT team to view the status of its servers at all times and allows the company to download important patches, configuration changes, and updates as they become available through Red Hat’s subscription service.

BENEFITS
Virtualization is a powerful enabling technology. It has allowed U21Global to create a highly flexible IT infrastructure where server memory and processor resources can be quickly re-deployed for any new server setup.

“While a typical server can cater for up to 10 concurrent users, with virtual servers, it is possible to re-allocate memory and compute resources on-the-fly to allow more users to log on to a server. The IT team is now able to provision servers and IT services in a timely manner,” said Yip.

Through Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology, U21Global has saved approximately $40,000. Because Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities are delivered integrated with its operating system at no additional cost, the company did not have to turn to a third-party vendor to purchase a separate technology solution and was able to eliminate the added expenditure for the virtualization technology.

“Virtualization presented a great cost-saving solution. By migrating a number of our physical servers to virtual servers, we were able to reduce the number of servers in the datacenter, increase utilization rates and reduce power consumption,” said Yip. “If we had not implemented virtualization, we would have spent $24,000 on three new servers and continued to incur the cost of annual maintenance for the original 10 servers.”

Additionally, due to the integrated virtualization, U21Global was assured that its deployment would be secure, stable, and manageable through collaboration with one reliable vendor. In addition to enjoying the flexibility of a virtualized environment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 also provided U21Global with dramatic improvements in performance.

After implementing Red Hat virtualization, U21Global has achieved a flexible IT infrastructure that allows for shared pools of compute and memory resources. For the IT team, this translates to the ability to rapidly provision new servers for staging and development.

With its previous deployment, the IT staff needed to back-up an old server before they could transition its applications to a new physical server. This was a tedious process requiring approximately two days. Virtual servers eliminated that entire process. And before implementing virtualization, U21Global’s IT team had to connect remotely to the server or access the console directly in order to manage the system.

“Now, I only need to access the virtualization manager from any Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system in order to access all the virtual servers,” said Yip. “It used to take days to provision new servers. Now, we can provide servers in just a few hours.”

“We have been using open source technologies since 2002 and have tried many different Linux distributions,” said Yip. “Today, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the enhanced security, the platform’s robustness, and the flexibility of the operating system. We also enjoy very good Red Hat support.”

FAST FACTS

Company: KSH Holdings

Industry: Construction

Geography: Singapore

Challenge: Needed a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution to monitor project budgets and ensure timely data reports for use by the KSH Holdings management team

Migration Path: Paper-based reporting system to a Progress Claims System (PCS) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, PHP, and Apache

Hardware: Dell 2850 with 2 GB RAM and 1 x Processor

Benefits: Developed a scalable Progress Claims System (PCS) that offered access to real-time financial data, reduced manual input errors, and enabled expedited reimbursement processes for subcontractors

“We handle a lot of data input on a daily basis and require something stable and capable of handling the load. That’s why we chose Red Hat.”
-Tony Tang, Chief Financial Officer of KSH Holdings.

Download the Case Study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
With more than 28 years of experience, Kim Seng Heng Holdings (KSH Holdings) is a well established construction, property development and property management group with operations in Singapore, Malaysia and China. The group’s activities are construction in Singapore and Malaysia, and property development and management in China.

Among its notable private sector construction projects in Singapore are The Coast, The Berth By The Cove, The Spectrum, Montview, the Mustafa Shopping Centre extension, and the restoration of Far East Square. Its public sector portfolio includes The Frontier Community Place, Choa Chu Kang Sports Complex, Nanyang Polytechnic, and Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal. KSH Holdings has also secured a S$32 million contract to build an assembly plant in Selangor and a S$7.2 million contract from Tan Chong & Sons Motor for the construction of a warehouse and office in Selangor.

CHALLENGE
With several simultaneous projects underway in Singapore, KSH Holdings’ finance department needed to a better system to keep track of all claims for payment for work completed by subcontractors. This manual process involved the subcontractor submitting a claim, the quantity surveyor verifying the work done, and the manager and director approving the submission. The previous claims system involved a paper form that had to be passed by hand across sites in Singapore to reach project managers and directors located in different offices.

As a result of the outdated manual process, there were inconsistencies in the progress claims, and the KSH Holding management team could not reliably track their budgets.

“We needed something to monitor the project cost at almost real time to ensure that we were not exceeding our budget. When insufficient or incorrect information is provided to the finance department, payment to the subcontractor may be delayed. The manual process was inconsistent and we could not generate management reports,” said Tony Tang, Chief Financial Officer of KSH Holdings.

The company wanted a solution that could streamline the entire claims process and deliver accurate, real-time data that could be used to produce meaningful management reports.

“Users must be able to log in to the system from any location to input the data. This data will be stored centrally and the system must be able to compute the information and push back to the financial system. The system must allow project managers and directors to check on the current progress in development and payment. It must also be reliable and secure,” said Tang.

With these criteria in mind, KSH Holdings decided to turn to Cxrus Solutions, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, to develop a Process Claims Systems (PCS).

SOLUTION
Cxrus Solutions studied the construction company’s needs and spoke to its quantity surveyors, project managers, directors, and the finance department to understand the requirements for the desired PCS.

“We handle a lot of data input on a daily basis and require something stable and capable of handling the load. That’s why we chose Red Hat,” said Tang.

According to Alvin Teo, Business Solutions Director of Cxrus Solutions, the cost of using Red Hat is lower than other platforms.

“The solution also runs faster and performs better when deployed on Red Hat. Of course, Red Hat is renowned for its security, reliability, and scalability,” said Teo.

Cxrus Solutions conducted end-user training for about 40 quantity surveyors, project managers and directors, and finance department staff at KSH Holdings. The PCS, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, PHP, and Apache, went live in October 2007.

Teo believes that taking part in the Infocomm Development Authority’s (IDA) Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP) has given his company a technology edge.

iLIUP is aimed at promoting mutually beneficial partnerships between local enterprises in Singapore and infocomm multinational corporations, leveraging the strengths of each party to bring about greater synergy and results.

“Cxrus Solutions has gained much from Red Hat’s technological insights of the Linux operating system versus other operating systems. This has helped us to craft the best possible solutions for our customers. KSH is a good example of a customer that has benefitted from our participation in iLIUP,” he added.

BENEFITS
It took some time for the KSH Holdings staff to become accustomed to the switch from a manual system to an automated system, but the employees quickly realized the benefits of the solution.

“PCS is a means to record work done. The Red Hat-based solution has met our objectives of improving data accuracy, better visibility of project cost, and prompt payment to our sub-contractors. Our quantity surveyors can now check the status of their claims online from any location,” said Tang.

Since the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based system was implemented in 2007, business has increased by about 70 percent. Due to the scalability of the platform, the KSH Holdings financial department was additionally able to handle the associated workload increase without needing to recruit more staff, saving more money.

In addition to providing increased accuracy and scalability, PCS has also made data more easily retrievable so that management reports can be produced quickly when necessary.

Claims processing time has been cut by 50 to 60 percent, enabling sub-contractors to be paid more promptly. This, in turn, leads to maintaining good relationships and enhanced corporate reputation.

Going forward, KSH Holdings plans to link PCS with the financial system to enable customised management reports on the fly.

“We are also planning to add a document management system to PCS so that we can reduce the amount of paper utilised. By doing this, we will also have better document security, and we’ll save on storage space,” said Tang.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Finance/banking

Geography: New Zealand

Business Challenge: Address environmental and space issues in the datacentre and achieve the corporate goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2010

Migration Path: From distributed Intel and SUN SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running under z/VM on IBM z9 and z10 mainframes

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Oracle database, WebSphere Application Server, ESB, Process Server, TX and MQ

Hardware: 1x IBM z9 and 1x IBM z10 mainframe (with 3 x IFL engines in each)

Benefits:

• Recovered 30 percent of datacenter floor space
• Reduced power consumption by 38 percent
• 20 percent return on investment (ROI) over the life of the platform
• Simplified, more efficient deployment

Download the Case Study [PDF]

Read More About BNZ in the press:
CIO Magazine
Computer Business Review
OS Today
Linux Today
Financial Extra
Banking Technology

BACKGROUND
For the last 150 years, BNZ (Bank of New Zealand), a subsidiary of the National Australia Bank Group, has helped individuals, farmers and businesses with their financial pursuits. Throughout this time, BNZ has evolved to meet changing customer needs and expectations, while continuing to deliver innovative new products and services.

BNZ is focused on empowering its customers and prides itself on its flexibility, innovation, and corporate responsibility. It is also leading the New Zealand banking and finance industry in developing, and benefiting from, a more energy efficient, ‘green’ IT operation.

CHALLENGE
Like a large number of businesses in New Zealand and around the world, BNZ was close to reaching capacity in its datacenter and needed to determine how to maximise space while keeping costs down.

The bank’s corporate values also have a carbon neutral focus, which it was keen to put into practice across all aspects of its business operations.

“The issues we were dealing with were not necessarily unique, but a reflection of the current business climate,” said Lyle Johnston, Infrastructure Architect for BNZ.

“BNZ had defined two important goals for the future, both of which relied heavily on IT. The first was for the organisation to become carbon neutral by 2010 and the second was to explore open source opportunities though the adoption of Linux.”

Another challenge BNZ faced was to create a disaster recovery solution. Its datacentres – one in Auckland, New Zealand and the other in East Melbourne, Australia – are separated by the Tasman Sea.

SOLUTION
In mid 2007, BNZ embarked on a bold mission to realise its corporate objectives. It overhauled its mission-critical front-end IT environment, including its Internet banking and bank teller functions through to core backend data. It migrated its systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running under z/VM on the mainframe.

BNZ purchased one IBM z10 system for use in production, as well as one IBM z9 system for use as a disaster recovery machine. Both mainframes exclusively run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, IBM WebSphere application and IBM Process server, along with customised JAVA applications written by BNZ. Combined, these power BNZ’s customer facing banking systems, including Internet banking and teller platforms.

The combination of z/VM and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 enabled BNZ to virtualise and consolidate a largely distributed SUN environment, which incorporates all of its front-end systems, down to just one box and run it in a manner that didn’t present a significant change for administration staff.

A critical component in the successful deployment and ongoing management of its new systems, BNZ also incorporated Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite. RHN Satellite provides BNZ with the ability to combine provisioning, updating, patching and maintenance into a single function for greater simplification. By utilising RHN Satellite, the bank was able to re-provision its entire Teller platform development environment in approximately two hours.

“When it came to selecting a Linux provider, the choice to invest in Red Hat was largely based on its commitment to the ongoing development of the platform and its strong support capabilities, particularly in reference to supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the mainframe,” said Johnston.

BNZ’s first production load on the new system went live in August 2008, with high visibility across the organisation.

“Deploying IBM mainframes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to address our carbon footprint and cost saving concerns was a very big deal, especially at the senior management level. It provided us with the opportunity to take a very serious leap into Linux, and that was exciting for everyone in IT and beyond,” said Johnston.

To date, the bank has consolidated 131 SUN SPARC systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z. These systems include v440s, v280Rs and E10Ks on the high-end.

BENEFITS
While a move to Linux on the mainframe represented a major shift from traditional banking systems, for BNZ the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z platforms produced impressive returns and exceeded expectations.

After just three months the project was ahead of schedule and on budget, and BNZ was already able to consolidate its servers and reduce its front-end systems datacenter footprint by 30 percent. Even in the project’s early days, the bank noted significant cost advantages with approximately 20 percent ROI expected over the life of the platform.

According to Johnston, “We have also managed to substantially reduce our front-end power consumption by nearly 40 percent, which means we were well and truly on our way to becoming carbon neutral by our 2010 goal.”

In fact, since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM mainframes, BNZ has recorded a 33 percent reduction in heat output and a 39 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, for its front-end systems.

The new virtualised platform has also boosted the speed and simplicity of new deployments. Instead of taking days, a new environment can be deployed in just minutes. Furthermore, with just one administrator needed per 100 virtual servers, BNZ can save on resources traditionally used to manage the platform, freeing them up to work on new innovative projects.

BNZ’s industry-leading move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has attracted plenty of attention, with a number of banking counterparts monitoring BNZ’s performance benchmarks with great interest.

“The fact is there are a lot of reasons to consolidate with Red Hat on the mainframe and as we were the first in New Zealand to do it, it has attracted a lot of interest from the banking world,” said Johnston.

Looking forward, BNZ has adopted a long-term, strategic view of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux will continue to deliver value.

“What’s been truly remarkable has been the fact that introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux into the organisation has breathed new enthusiasm and new life into the business and the people behind it,” said Johnston.

“This project has been a type of gateway for us, and working with Red Hat has opened our eyes to what’s possible with open source. From our perspective, the best is yet to come.”

Australian University Carves out Costs and Improves Stability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that CQUniversity, an Australian university with ten campuses and more than 21,00 students and staff, has migrated its critical IT systems to Red Hat solutions. CQUniversity implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite and has since realized significant cost savings, increased performance, ease of management and reliable, ongoing support.

CQUniversity offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on-campus and through distance education. The University relies heavily on the reliability and stability of its IT environment on a daily basis. Its technology powers critical finance, human resources and student-administration systems. With campuses and students located across various time zones, CQUniversity requires an infrastructure that supports standard operation at all hours of the day.

For a number of years, the University serviced its student body and faculty with an extensive HP Tru64 UNIX deployment. As the University continued to expand and demand more from its technology infrastructure, its IT department knew it was quickly outgrowing its existing IT system and needed a reliable alternative.

“We knew the time was coming for a change, particularly when we knew we would need more than eight CPUs for a single database server,” said Bruce Young, PeopleSoft systems engineer at CQUniversity. “HP Tru64 UNIX was a discontinued product, and we didn’t have unlimited funds to throw at the problem, so we were forced to look at more cost-effective alternatives for expanding our capacity.”

In late 2006, CQUniversity’s IT team decided that from both a hardware and software perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its operating system of choice. “We looked at a few different configurations, including Solaris on Sun T2000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell, but it was quite obvious that the HP Blade Servers together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided a winning combination that met our needs,” said Young.

Today, CQUniversity runs 12 HP Blade Servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its databases. Ten additional Blades run CQUniversity’s middleware solutions to support its applications. “Already, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be a fundamental component of our infrastructure, and while we’re running more environments than before, we’re running them a lot faster,” said Young.

The University has also extended Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its research students and staff, using Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat’s reliable systems management solution, to efficiently manage its IT deployment and keep it updated without additional, costly resources. RHN Satellite offers a centralized management tool that enables users to manage server systems more efficiently. With RHN Satellite, CQUniversity has been able to reallocate resources to focus on proactive, high-value roles, instead of reactively maintaining complex systems and lifecycles.

Since putting its production systems into operation in April 2007, CQUniversity has completed the initial stage of its migration. To date, the University has realized immediate savings of approximately $100,000 when compared to Solaris on Sun T2000 servers. In addition to carving out costs, CQUniversity has experienced a boost in server performance, which has increased by between 20 and 30 percent, and enjoyed an easy-to-deploy solution.

“We’re definitely impressed with the initial cost savings and the boost to server performance, and we also expect further long-term savings on licensing costs,” said Young. “The reality is that for our budget, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to do what we set out to complete. With Red Hat solutions, we didn’t have to resort to a poor band-aid job, as would have happened if we had chosen a proprietary solution.”

For the future, CQUniversity has plans to transition additional systems to its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

To read the full CQUniversity case study, visit www.customers.press.redhat.com.

For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.

FAST FACTS

Company: CQUniversity Australia (Central Queensland University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: Australia

Opportunity: To migrate from an HP Tru64 Unix environment to a cost-effective and performance-boosting platform within Central Queensland University’s budget

Migration Path: HP Tru64 Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite Server on HP 7000c Blade and BL460c Blade Servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle 10g RAC, PeopleSoft Enterprise Applications (Finance & Student Administration), Talent2 Works (HR)

Hardware: HP 7000c Blade System and BL460c Blade Servers

Benefits: Experienced increased cost savings, performance, ease of management, and reliable ongoing support

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
CQUniveristy Australia (Central Queensland University) was founded in 1967 as the Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia). It became the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education in 1971 before a transition phase as the University College of Central Queensland in 1990. It achieved University status in January 1992 and today offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on-campus and through distance education.

CQUniversity has campuses and learning sites in Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Mackay, Emerald and Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast and operates international campuses in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast. Some of the Univeristy’s programs are also delivered in Singapore.

With about 20,000 students and approximately 1,200 staff, the daily functioning of the University relies heavily on the reliability and stability of its IT environment, which powers critical finance, human resources, and student-administration systems. With campuses located across various time zones, CQUniversity requires an infrastructure that supports standard operation for at least 13 hours per day.

OPPORTUNITY
For a number of years, CQUniversity serviced its student body and faculty with an extensive HP Tru64 UNIX deployment. As the University continued to expand and demand more from its technology infrastructure, CQUniversity’s IT department knew it was quickly outgrowing its existing IT system, consisting of a four-node cluster for production with two additional web servers, and a six-node cluster with another three web servers for test development, and needed a reliable alternative.

“We knew the time was coming for a change, particularly when we knew we would need more than eight CPUs for a single database server,” said Bruce Young, Peoplesoft Systems Engineer, CQUniversity. “HP Tru64 UNIX was a discontinued product, and we didn’t have unlimited funds to throw at the problem, so we were forced to look at more cost-effective alternatives for expanding our capacity.”

CQUniversity searched for an updated, scalable, and performance-boosting solution that could fit inside its limited IT budget.

SOLUTION
In late 2006, CQUniversity’s IT team decided that from both a hardware and software perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its operating system of choice. “We looked at a few different configurations, including Solaris on Sun T2000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell, but it was quite obvious that the HP Blade Servers together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided a winning combination that met our needs,” said Young.

Today, CQUniversity runs 12 HP Blade Servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its databases. Ten additional Blades run CQUniversity’s middleware solutions to support its applications.

“Already, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be a fundamental component of our infrastructure, and while we’re running more environments than before, we’re running them a lot faster,” said Young.

The University has also extended Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its research students and staff, using Red Hat Network Satellite (RHN), Red Hat’s reliable systems management solution, to efficiently manage the deployment and keep it updated without additional, costly resources. Red Hat Satellite Server offers a centralised management tool that enables users to manage server systems more efficiently. With RHN Satellite, CQUniversity has been able to reallocate resources to focus on proactive, high-value roles, instead of reactively maintaining complex systems and lifecycles.

BENEFITS
Since putting its production systems into operation in April 2007, CQUniversity has completed the initial stage of its migration. To date, the University has realised immediate savings of approximately $100,000 when compared to Solaris on Sun T2000 servers.

“We’re definitely impressed with the initial cost savings and the boost to server performance, and we also expect further long-term savings on licensing costs,” said Young. “The reality is that for our budget, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to do what what we set out to complete. With Red Hat solutions, we didn’t have to resort to a poor band-aid job, as would have happened if we had chosen a proprietary solution.”

In addition to carving out costs, CQUniversity has experienced a boost in server performance, which has increased by between 20 and 30 percent, and enjoyed an easy-to-deploy solution. “In terms of ease of management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the best choice, and the closest fit to what we were familiar with when using Tru64,” said Young.

For the future, CQUniversity has plans to transition additional systems to its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Real estate

Geography: Australian Capital Territory (ACT), Australia

Business Challenge: Rebuild the All Homes Pty Ltd technology platform in order to modernise its website, ensuring an optimal user experience and equipping the site with support for future expansion plans

Migration Path: Outdated, costly software and hardware solutions to enterprise Linux servers, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Hibernate Framework

Solution:

• Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Hardware: IBM xSeries x3550 and x3560 servers

Benefits: Experienced increased performance, reliability, flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As a sales and rental listing service dedicated to residential property in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and surrounding regions, All Homes Pty Ltd has one of the most popular real estate websites in Australia. In January 2008, http://www.allhomes.com.au was rated 25th on Top100Australian.com’s list of the 100 most popular Australian websites [1].

The All Homes website is delivered through several portals, including a public site, a site for real estate agents and a back-end management interface. It also incorporates the online classifieds operation www.allclassifieds.com.au.

“Generally users only see a small part of the All Homes offering – behind the scenes there are seven portals that are interrelated to create the site and the application itself is some 360 screens,” said David Elliot, Managing Director of Agile Digital Engineering, All Homes’ technology partner. “This is where the majority of the work takes place and the reason why the site’s success demands a rock-solid foundation.”

Managing an estimated 1.4 million page impressions per day, with anywhere between 30,000 to 40,000 unique users, the All Homes technology platform has a loyal user base and is highly regarded for its speed and reliability.

“Users have high expectations of the site, so we set the bar very high when it comes to the technology we put behind the site,” said Elliot.

CHALLENGE
In November 2006, All Homes embarked on an ambitious project to completely rebuild its www.allhomes.com.au technology platform. The aim was not only to modernize the site, but also to replace the existing, stale technology with dynamic new systems that could deliver an optimal user experience and support future expansion plans.

“We needed a totally fresh approach to our infrastructure, which meant overhauling the hardware and software that we’d been using since 2000,” said Tim White, Business Development Manager, All Homes Pty Ltd.

All Homes had strict criteria for the new technology, including the ability to deliver impressive performance results to exceed the abilities of its previous solution. Additionally, All Homes demanded access to cutting-edge Java technologies to enable fast and efficient site development, along with easy, ongoing maintenance. Flexibility was also a priority for the allhomes.com.au technology platform, as along with the capabilities to scale up or down according to fluctuations in user activity.

“The average number of daily page impressions is nearly one and a half million, with about 40 page views per user, per session. That number can skyrocket and the technology that drives the site must be able to handle that sort of workload without any hiccups,” said White.

All Homes is a 24/7 service and its user base expects 100 percent uptime. When considering a new solution, stability and durability were also key considerations.

SOLUTION
Working with its technical partner, Agile Digital Engineering, All Homes implemented its new infrastructure, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux based on IBM System x Intel servers distributed between Sydney and the ACT. The infrastructure also incorporated clustered application servers, based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Hibernate Framework to handle page creation.

“We were excited about working with JBoss solutions, because they offered the cutting-edge Java technologies, like Hibernate with annotations, that we needed to build the screens quickly and ensure ease-of-maintenance going forward,” said Elliot.

“It also meant All Homes could be a leading technology innovator in the real estate industry, with access to tomorrow’s technology and the ability to introduce new operational possibilities into its business.”

BENEFITS
After launching into production in December 2007, All Homes’ new system has exceeded expectations.

“We set the bar very high when it came to system reliability and performance, but JBoss middleware and the servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux have already given us the assurances we were looking for.”

The business has also recognized the financial benefits of working with the open source middleware solution, compared with equivalent proprietary systems.

“It’s certainly an advantage when you don’t receive extortionate licence renewal bills every year, just for the pleasure of using the software. Working with JBoss, all we pay for is the support,” said White.

Pleased with the benefits of having JBoss Enterprise Middleware at the core of its new infrastructure, All Homes is exploring future implementation of Red Hat solutions to assist with the organisation’s plans for expansion.

[1] Top100Australian.com’s list of the top 100 Australian sites posted on 21 January 2008 at http://www.top100australian.com/allhomes.com.au.html