Brazilian Paint Manufacturer, Tintas Iquine, Migrates from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Increase Performance and Improve Security

FAST FACTS

Customer: Tintas Iquine

Industry: Manufacturing: Paint and Tints

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Increase the stability and performance of business critical ERP applications

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Datasul, Progress Database, Trend Micro Security Solution

Hardware: Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

Migration Path: UNIX/RISC based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge servers

Benefits: Red Hat virtualization enabled increased stability, performances, and increased security on redundancy and backup, and Red Hat Satellite simplified systems management

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Tintas Iquine, a Brazilian paints, coatings, and special resins company, produces more than 1,500 products including; industrial paints, varnish, sealing, resins, pastes, and is known for its rigorous quality control, and its use of new technologies to improve its processes, products and deliver more value to its customers, paint and building material resellers and retailers.

In operation since 1974, Tintas Iquine’s two factories have the capacity to produce 8 million liters of products per month, guaranteeing to the company 6% to 7% of the Brazilian market, operate 24/7 and are fully computerized in order to achieve enhanced production capabilit, security, and in addition, less impactful to the environment. Tintas Iquine achieved the certificate of approval in NBR ISO 9001:2000, which signifies the company´s compliance with the requirements of the standard of Quality Management System in coatings. Iquine also won the certificate of quality of the Brazilian Association fo Manufacturers of Paints.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tintas Iquine grew significantly in a short amount of time, with sales volume increases of 20-30 percent, the company increased in size from 200 to 500 employees, and needed a operating platform to improve its critical Enterprise Resource Planning applications and increase the IT team’s ability to scale for the company’s growth.

The existing UNIX based server environment at Tintas Iquine supported the ERP system, database, BI, CRM and security tools, consisted of a disparate, aging infrastructure that resulted in a lower application performance level and required resources devoted to systems management and monitoring, making it increasingly difficult and costly.

The new operating platform needed to increase the ERP application’s performance, security, and provide a simplified systems management tool.

SOLUTION
The Tintas Iquine’ IT team was well versed with open source operating platforms, and especially favored Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to the enterprise support, stability, and performance the platform provides, in addition to Red Hat Satellite systems management, that would solve the company’s systems management issues.

With the expertise in-house and the enterprise-ready reputation, Tintas Iquine confidently decided not to conduct a lengthy technical evaluation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Due to the breadth of third-party applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Tintas Iquine decided to migrate all of its applications from UNIX, as all of the applications would be running under only one operating system, thus increasing the performance and reducing systems management resources.

The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux involved the virtualization of 12 machines to supports the company’s Progress database, Business Intelligence (BI) applications, CRM and Trend Micro Security Solutions.

BENEFITS
Tintas Iquine’s implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has allowed the company to scale for growth, increase application performance, reduce costs, and simplify systems management. The satisfaction and gain of performance were immediately realized by the IT staff and throughout the company, as application users began to work more efficiently and more productively.

The virtualization and the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from UNIX, provided Tintas Iquine increased server utilization, and the management process on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux based servers have shown greater agility and ease of use, when compared to the Windows based servers, due to less interruptions in the maintenance process.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the performance in the application processing has increased 30 percent, and the costs have fallen about 50 percent, thus confirming the company’s decision to migrate to Red Hat.

Although Tintas Iquine’s Oracle database is running in a Windows platform, due to the results of the UNIX to Red Hat migration, the company plans to gradually migrate all systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation of Peru Implemented Zimbra Collaboration Suite on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Achieve Greater Scalability, Security and Productivity

FAST FACTS

Company: Ministerio de Vivienda: Peru’s Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation

Industry: Government

Partner: Software Libre Andino

Geography: Peru

Business Challenge: Needed to replace the existing client/server e-mail and collaboration platform to achieve improved scalability, security, productivity, and to reduce costs

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Alfresco Zimlet, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Dell Quad Core Server, 3.0 Ghz, 8GB ram, 1.5 Tb. Fully redundant

Migration Path: From a client/server system running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise to Zimbra Collaboration Suite, a Web-based email technology, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and utilizing Alfresco Zimlet

Benefits: Improved communication and collaboration among users and provided a single integrated calendar and email solution; increased access to e-mail, agendas, and documents independently from physical equipment; reduced IT administration and support costs by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

“The high level of know-how and expertise of Red Hat’s consultants, coupled with Red Hat’s local presence, were decisive in making the decision to secure consulting rather than performing these tasks internally.”
– Jaime Honores Coronado, managing director of the General Department of Statistics and Information Systems, Ministerio de Vivienda.

Download the case study PDF

BACKGROUND
Ministerio de Vivienda, Peru’s Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation, is a government agency whose goal is to promote and improve the development of housing, water, and sanitation services throughout Peru by facilitating access to adequate housing and basic services, facilitating the management, growth, preservation, maintenance, and protection of population centers.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Building community in Peru is a key objective for the Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation. And technology—in the form of email, calendaring, messaging, and collaboration solutions—has become an essential tool in achieving that objective. The Ministry realized it was outgrowing its communications infrastructure, and the IT team began planning for the task of replacing its aging client/server email and calendar systems.

The Ministry’s aging and limited email communications platform was based on SUSE Enterprise Linux with Postfix and Horde for Web customers. Users relied on different versions of Microsoft Outlook to check their email, resulting in challenges due to the platform age and configuration. The platform also caused the need to add an exclusive server allocated to this service. The Ministry’s main problem consisted of the lack of scalability and security, and limited flexibility in management and constrained the user interface.

SOLUTION
In early 2009, the Ministry made the decision to evaluate solutions to replace its expensive proprietary software with lower cost, open source alternatives for a Web-based email solution with integrated email, calendar, and messaging.

The Ministry worked with Software Libre Andino, a Red Hat and Zimbra partner in Peru, in the evaluation process to replace its outdated systems.

“We needed a quick-to-deploy and easy-to-manage solution. We assessed several proposals from various vendors, among them, SUSE Linux and Microsoft Windows-based solutions, but we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and Alfresco, for the cost savings, simplified administration, reliability, and quick implementation,” said Jaime Honores Coronado, managing director of the General Department of Statistics and Information Systems, Ministerio de Vivienda.

The entire project consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Zimbra Collaboration Suite, including the migration of each account, installation, configuration, start-up, technical, and end-user training. Email accounts were configured with a 900 MB per user quota.

With Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as the primary development and deployment platform for the open source email platform. Zimbra Collaboration Suite integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, voice over IP (VoIP), and online document authoring into a single application with a rich browser-based interface, and is compatible with all standard email clients, and integrates easily with third-party applications.

The Ministry was able to deploy the Alfresco Zimlet, a tool created by Zimbra community members to allow a simple way for employees to store email attachments on the Alfresco server, and in turn select documents from the Alfresco server and attach them to a Zimbra email. This tool created by the open source community makes it easy for government agencies or companies to invest in multiple open source products to meet their needs.

Although the Ministry’s technical staff had minimal experience with a web-based email technology, Red Hat Consulting facilitated a faster implementation and provided the technical staff with the knowledge and tools to effectively manage the new platform.

“The high level of know-how and expertise of Red Hat’s consultants, coupled with Red Hat’s local presence, were decisive in making the decision to secure consulting rather than performing these tasks internally. Red Hat, through partner Software Libre Andino, contributed to service deployment, technical, and end-user training, and the migration of old e-mail accounts, allowing our team to quickly become experts,” said Coronado.

BENEFITS
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite e-mail platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux immediately improved the productivity and coordination of the Ministry’s employees by enhancing collaboration and sharing of work agendas.

“We have achieved a larger physical distribution of our users who are now capable of accessing their e-mail accounts wherever they are. Our investment project coordinators can perform Web queries of their local e-mail, manage their work agendas, and refer to the document management system, all in one single platform,” said Coronado.

During the evaluation, the Ministry weighed Microsoft Exchange against Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and determined that the latter would account for 30 percent savings compared with the former. Zimbra’s own studies show similar TCO savings.

Saving the government money is definitely one reason for the switch to Zimbra, but another important factor in its decision to deploy open source solutions is that open source platforms allow users to easily integrate and build new solutions.

The Ministry’s future plans contemplate expanding the use of the solution by integrating it with other applications and platforms. Engineer Honores Coronado said, “We hope to continue our commitment to open source solutions and trust in Red Hat as the ideal partner for our projects.”

“The Zimbra and Red Hat solution provides a cost-effective platform that allows for greater efficiency and a unified email and collaboration platform,” said Coronado. “And we also benefited from significant cost savings with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

FAST FACTS

Company:Brazil Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF)

Industry: Government

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Needed a service-oriented architecture that improved Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s (STF) system integration process and the database and deployment governance in the STI (Technology Information of Office Secretary)

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Operations Network, JBoss SOA Platform, JBoss ESB, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, and Hibernate

Hardware: x86 commodity servers with Intel Xeon-Based Processors

Benefits: Reduced costs and increased agility, functionality, and flexibility with a combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions

Download the case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF) provides systems development for the Brazilian High Court’s coverage area which involves all Brazilian regional tribunals for second court appeal, which means something about 35 tribunals from all Brazil states. This includes providing new technology adoptions, computing and database net management, and software and equipment technical support and specialized assistance. All these systems supported by the Technology Office have both internal and external users who constantly demand new functionality. Among these demands is system integration, which was one of STF’s most critical functionalities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
While STF had a functional level system and solid applications development, they were experiencing a lagging performance in regards to collaborations and information sharing. Users consistently complained about slow access and the business delays caused by shared files not appearing in real time.

In addition to low performance and a great demand for court trials, STF also experienced system integration problems. The team needed an architecture that could offer a quick and easy integration between systems, that would enable the needed components, applications, services, programs and users to easily integrate with one another to successfully share critical files, such as contracts and processes. STF demanded the system integration capabilities that could handle requests per file and setup procedures for remote calls by shared database and message lines.

SOLUTION
When considering various platform options, STF researched:

• The Federal Government guidelines for open software usage

• STI’s prior experience with Red Hat

• Evaluation of the capabilities and experience of system administrators, developers, and other IT professionals with the platform vendor’s technology

The team determined that an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the best solution to meet its demands and requirements in a message system with the capability to implement several open integration patterns. After researching several SOA and ESB vendors and solutions, both community projects and open source software providers, the team selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

JBoss Enterprise SOA provides automatic message routing and supports several information exchanging providers and channels, such as FTP, SMTP, JMS and Web Services. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform enables business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective, open platform and aggregates pluggable security, auto-discovery, localization independence, and integration patterns implementation functionalities.

Every STI/STF architecture is now developed on open source software with Java technology. For software development and support needs, STF now uses Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. STF uses (ESX 3.5) Virtual Machine, 2 Processors 3 GHz, 2 GB and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform memory.

The JBoss SOA Platform (customized by STF for services patronization) is currently in the implementation phase. STI has a subscription for Red Hat’s technical support for four CPUs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

STI’s governance project will begin generating its services still in 2009, which STI expects to improve the aggregate value and transparency of the entire organization. 90 percent of its new projects will be based off JBoss Enterprise SOA and 100 percent of its legacy is currently in migration from JBoss.org and Fedora to JBoss Enterprise SOA. By using more efficient services, all of those who communicate with STF are expected to have benefits. For example, the lawyers win agility when they have to introduce a petition to the ministers of government. It can be done electronically, which represents a great evolution of government service.

Every STF service in production must be monitored and manageable, such capabilities are achieved using JBoss ON – JBoss Operations Network, which offers accurate information about the processing of the Services hosted in the JBoss ESB, as well as the quality and metrics delivered by the JMS technology. Based on Alerting features of JBoss ON, we can receive alerts in order to prevent any unpredictable service behavior, in addition to this, in certain cases, some default actions can be taken according the alerts, it allowed the IT team to focus exactly on real potential problems, letting JBoss ON resolve issues that can be addressed by an the enterprise SOA management solution.

For the STI team the most important benefit has been getting an infrastructure that is flexible and mature, coupled with development systems to assist the STF IT team. Also, the IT team got governance, being able to manage and measure its contribution for the Supreme Tribunal’s strategies with JBoss ON.

BENEFITS
STI reports positive experiences with Red Hat’s support as the team receives quick and informative responses. Red Hat’s support model eliminates the need for STI to staff Red Hat specialists in-house, thus cutting costs.. The STI also finds great benefit in the Red Hat Business Partner Tecnisys, which provides specialized technology consulting and support, as training and specialist technicals to assist STI needs.

STI has experienced increased agility and flexibility with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. From the commercial point of view, the cost savings are significant with the usage of open source software, and from a technology perspective, the infrastructure is more stable and failure tolerant; the service buses allow the IT team to work on more strategic work deployments, by the reuse of the available services in the service buses.

An additional, unexpected benefit from using Red Hat and JBoss is the STI developers’ attitude shift. Instead of thinking in components, developers now think in terms of aggregating services. This attitude shift contributes to increased service performance, agility, and maintenance economy.

Oil and Gas Leader Reduced Costs and Increased Performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Integrated Virtualization on Intel® Xeon® processor-based Servers

FAST FACTS

Company: YPF SA

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Argentina

Business Challenge: Renovate proprietary infrastructure with the goal of reducing costs and boosting performance with open source solutions

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Network, SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), 10g DB, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Intel Xeon Processor-based IBM System x 346, 366, 3650, 3850 servers

Migration Path: From SUN Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization on Intel Xeon Processor-based IBM System x servers

Benefits: Reduced capital and operational costs, boosted performance and efficiency of administrators, increased internal customer satisfaction by reducing implementation time, increased scalability and agility, and expanded flexibility

“Now, more than 80 percent of our Oracle databases and 90 percent of our SAP applications run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization on Intel Xeon Processor-based servers and is the choice for our SAP and Oracle implementations.”
–Adriana Marisa Vázquez, responsible for the UNIX administration group at YPF.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
YPF S.A., the largest company in Argentina, is an energy company, operating a leading integrated oil and gas business across the domestic upstream and downstream segments. The upstream operations consist of the exploration, development and production of crude oil, natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas. The downstream operations include the refining, marketing, transportation and distribution of oil and a range of petroleum derivatives, petrochemicals, liquid petroleum gas and biofuels.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 1999, YPF embarked on the task of renovating its proprietary infrastructure for the solution of its YPF Gas business unit with the goal of reducing its costs and to boost the performance of its critical business applications.

YPF determined that migrating its infrastructure off legacy RISC/UNIX and proprietary software and deploying open source solutions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, would allow it to manage operations more efficiently and drastically reduce the cost of IT operations.

At the time of the decision, YPF had to overcome internal hesitation about open source platforms, as Linux was just beginning to emerge as a viable enterprise operating platform, and had not yet gained the widespread adoption prevalent in today’s industry.

“At YPF, decisions are made only after thorough testing and research, and the IT team had proven that migrating from the RISC/UNIX and proprietary servers to open and flexible platforms would pose no risk to the reliability, availability, and performance of the systems,” said Adriana Marisa Vázquez, responsible for the UNIX administration group at YPF. “We also had to ensure that our SAP and Oracle solutions were fully supported and certified on the selected platform.”

SOLUTION
After research and testing, YPF selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon Processor-based hardware and started incorporating the solution on small Informix systems to renew the database servers distributed among the company’s 29 gas plants around Argentina.

The company saw an immediate positive impact on cost and performance. The significant reduction in costs, especially when compared with the license cost of RISC-based platforms, and the increased performance and availability, drove the decision to scale with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon Processor-based IBM System x servers.

“We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a number of reasons, the most basic being the lower costs, simplified management with Red Hat Network, and the compatibility and performance with our SAP and Oracle solutions,” said Vázquez. “After the initial success, we began to include other platforms. Now, more than 80 percent of our Oracle databases and 90 percent of our SAP applications run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization on Intel Xeon Processor-based servers and is the choice for our SAP and Oracle implementations.”

There are 117 Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel Xeon Processor-based servers, 83 percent of which are allocated to SAP and Oracle applications supporting different company processes such as:
- Serviclub
- YPF Boxes
- Internal Service Stations network
- Service Station Stores
- Well information for extraction and maintenance
- Retail
- 90 percent of the dialog steps processed at YPF run on the Red Hat and Intel

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization enables YPF to quickly virtualize servers for testing and development, and arranging configurations to try new features in-house before offering them to the public. YPF can rapidly push servers live into productions, effectively increasing the utilization of servers without server sprawl in data centers.

“The virtual machines we built were very expansive, and we’ve achieved truly outstanding performance with Red Hat. Without the help of Red Hat Consulting, we would not have been able to have the virtual servers providing the SAP and Oracle application services as we have today,” said Vázquez. “With Red Hat’s virtualization technology, we can maintain the hardware without affecting the performance by moving virtual machines on the fly,” she added.

YPF relied on Red Hat Consulting to contribute expertise during the deployment and ongoing improvement, and the Red Hat Consultants still provides expert product knowledge to increase internal capabilities. With demanding day-to-day activities at YPF, deploying new technology solutions generally takes significant time and resources, Red Hat Consulting has been able to speed up implementation projects, helping to free up internal YPF resources to work on strategic projects.

“Over the years, Red Hat Consultants have gained considerable knowledge of our business and we consider them technological partners rather than a consultant or a vendor,” said Vázquez.

The implementation of Red Hat Network, a centralized systems management platform, heavily involved Red Hat Consulting. “Red Hat Network has allowed us to administer the platform in a centralized manner, which has helped us save considerable time and enabled our administrators to become far more efficient,” said Vázquez.

BENEFITS
The success of YPF’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization deployment has allowed the company to roll out Red Hat as the standard solution of choice across its organization. Through the combination of Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities and Intel processor-based servers, YPF achieved cost savings, heightened performance, simplification and ease of management, and expanded scalability.

Through Red Hat’s advanced virtualization capabilities, the organization was able to free up internal hardware and technical expert resources for reallocation in alignment with business goals. With its virtualization technology integrated with the operating platform, and at no extra cost, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided YPF with added flexibility and reduced costs and complexity for its critical systems.

“Our systems have become more agile and flexible with the combination of Red Hat’s virtualization technology on Intel’s reliable platforms,” said Vázquez. “Our systems are now more operationally efficient, and we still have the high performance our business demands, coupled with decreased costs” she added.

“With Red Hat Network, our work has been simplified by means of set-up and configuration standards. With Red Hat virtualization technology, deployment times are drastically reduced, and a Linux server only takes a few minutes, compared to hours, to configure,” said Vázquez.

The reduced delivery times of an installed server have increased YPF’s internal customer’s satisfaction too.

Currently, YPF is analyzing the addition of the Red Hat Network Satellite option, in order to leverage high-end management, provisioning, and monitoring. It is also evaluating the implementation of Red Hat Cluster Suite for high-availability solutions.

“Red Hat is based on the subscription model, which has provided us freedom from vendor lock-in,” said Vázquez. “We trust Red Hat as a technology partner for the solid expertise of its IT professionals, its knowledge of our business-critical concerns, and its commitment to high-quality support and services. We look forward to growing together with Red Hat in the future,” she concluded.

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.

Organization increases ability to handle mission-critical educational demands utilizing JBoss Enterprise Middleware

RALEIGH, NC – April 28, 2009 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Brazilian National Institute of Educational Research and Studies (Inep), has migrated its applications to a full suite of JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology, including the JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal Platforms. Since beginning its migration to JBoss solutions, Inep has increased scalability, performance and stability for its mission-critical applications.

Inep, a Federal Institution linked to the Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), manages the data and results from educational studies, research and evaluations related to the Brazilian Educational System. It is also responsible for the National High School Brazilian Exam (ENEM), which had over one million online registrations in 2008. After regularly encountering IT issues that required reconfiguring Inep’s system, the organization decided that the performance and scalability of its complex IT architecture must be increased to better execute daily tasks.

After evaluating a number of middleware solutions to address its performance and scalability needs, Inep selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware for its ability to meet the organization’s mission-critical demands, as well as for its affordable, reliable architecture. Inep’s solution includes JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Operations Network (JON) and JBoss Seam Framework. All of the solutions are deployed on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology and are in compliance with the Brazilian Federal Government’s recommendation of utilizing open source solutions.

“We believe that JBoss is the best middleware architecture for enterprise use because it brings together expertise and advanced technology to meet the mission-critical demands of our systems,” said Fábio Petrillo, information systems general coordinator at Inep. “Our choice to use JBoss’ open source middleware technology has been very successful. We now have innovative technology that reduces both software and hardware costs, provides large performance gains and allows for ease of management. Just after the exam results were released at the end of 2008, thousands of people had accessed the web site, with peaks of 90,000 simultaneous accesses. Between November and December of last year alone, we had around 2,000,000 unique access hits to our systems. Red Hat support had been essential for this success”, said Petrillo.

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

For more press, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Inep
Inep, a Federal Institution linked to Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), promotes statistics studies and valuations at all educational levels that help to create and deploy public policies to the educational area. In addition to Enem, Inep promotes the Certification and Competences National Exam (Encceja), Students Performance National Exam (Enade), Graduation Courses Valuation, School Census and Basic Education Valuation National System (Saeb), School Census, and University Census.

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 delays or reductions in information technology spending, 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; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; 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.

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2009/inep.html

FAST FACTS

Industry: Government, tax collection

Geography: Ecuador

Challenge: To develop a technology solution on a stable, secure, and affordable platform for an Internet-based tax return project.

Migration Path: From proprietary software to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and from JBoss Application Server 2.4 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Software: Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Hardware: HP blades with dual-core AMD processors and quad-core Intel processors on a 64-bit architecture

Benefits: To promote and enable Internet-based tax return filing by taxpayers to reduce processing times and avoid increasing the customer service infrastructure at its own counters and bank tellers.

SRI’s experience with open source has been successful. The organization has achieved an efficient, reliable, scalable and affordable platform. The access to Red Hat’s source code has allowed the company to customize the functionality of the products in terms of business needs. The success achieved with Red Hat solutions has encouraged the organization to explore open source solutions for other areas of the business.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Internal Revenue Service – SRI -, Ecuador’s tax management agency, provides services to over one and a half million taxpayers throughout the country’s 24 provinces. It maintains a workforce of 2,400 and recorded an annual income of over USD 5 billion as per 2007 data. SRI services include: taxpayer register, reception of tax returns, authorization of sales receipts, taxpayers’ claim and inquiry handling, and tax audit, among others.

SRI invested in information technology to provide over 15 different services through its portal for taxpayers and for the 60 applications on its Intranet for internal management, all Web-based. In addition, it keeps automatic information exchange processes with other government entities.

CHALLENGE
SRI developed plans to implement a new tax service program that would promote voluntary compliance with tax obligations among its taxpaying customers. It investigated different ways to make it easier for its customers to comply with fiscal procedures and created easier processes.

In 2002, SRI decided to pilot an Internet-based tax return project aimed at encouraging taxpayers to submit their tax returns online instead of submitting papers through the banking system. This called for a technology solution that could offer a stable, secure, and affordable platform.

SOLUTION
SRI first began using Red Hat solutions in 1999 when it implemented Red Hat Linux 6 on Intel Pentium III processors for a variety of internal projects but mainly to implement the Internet-based billing issuance control system. It turned to Red Hat solutions after analyzing product capabilities and the freedom from licensing costs. This last detail allowed SRI to move ahead with the project as it avoided the red tape typical of government procurement, with the ensuing time saving.

After experiencing success with its initial implementation of Red Hat Linux 6, SRI analyzed Red Hat solutions for use in its Internet-based tax return project.

SRI started a solution evaluation process that included Novell’s SUSE and Red Hat Solutions. Red Hat Linux was chosen for cost savings and reliability. When they searched for an application server solution, the organization investigated offerings from Oracle, BEA and JBoss. JBoss was the option that best met the standards and budget set for the project and the organization opted for implementing JBoss Application Server 2.4.

With the combination of Red Hat Linux and JBoss Application Server, the Internet-based tax return system was implemented as a pilot project by the end of 2002. The project introduced the Internet as a massive interaction platform with taxpayers for the first time. Three years before, in 1999, SRI implemented the Internet-based billing control system, but this is used by a limited number of users (authorized printing houses) in order to authorize sales receipt printing for taxpayers.

From the beginning of the project, Red Hat has been the operating system of choice for the internal application servers and updated it with each new version released to the market. SRI is currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is used on 90 percent of the HP Blade servers with dual-core AMD processors and quad-core Intel processors on a 64-bit architecture. It supports the 60 Intranet applications and 15 Internet applications, and approximately 95 percent of SRI’s employees rely on Red Hat solutions daily to execute their job.

BENEFITS
SRI has achieved the goal it set out to accomplish with its Internet-based tax return project and today, the number of taxpayers approaching bank tellers and SRI counters looking for help to submit their tax returns has dropped remarkably, especially high-income taxpayers that account for 70% of the tax collection aggregate.

SRI has experienced hardware and software cost savings after migrating to Red Hat solutions. In terms of hardware, the organization was able to purchase servers with lower cost architectures, such as x86 in place of Sun’s Sparc, which was SRI’s primary platform. In terms of software, Red Hat offered the best total cost of ownership – TCO – against proprietary competitors.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform have provided SRI with a robust platform for reliable Internet services for its taxpaying customers.

SRI’s experience with open source has been successful. The organization has achieved an efficient, reliable, scalable and affordable platform. The access to Red Hat’s source code has allowed the company to customize the functionality of the products in terms of business needs. The success achieved with Red Hat solutions has encouraged the organization to explore open source solutions for other areas of the business. As a matter of fact, SRI’s planned software architecture up to 2011 mostly contemplates open source solutions as certain risks relating to support availability have been eliminated with the Enterprise version alternatives.

Delivered Value Winner: Nortel

Submitted by: Ernest Szeideman

Vertical: Telecommunications

Geography: International

Website: www.nortel.com

Company Background

By linking hundreds of millions of users the world over, Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering the communications capabilities that make its promise of “business made simple” a reality. Based in Toronto, Nortel provides enterprises and service providers in more than 150 countries with the next-generation technologies they need to support their multimedia and business-critical network applications. Nortel technologies help eliminate barriers to efficiency, speed, and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to their information-whenever and wherever they need it.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

In 2002, Nortel faced a growing demand from its design community for the latest coding tools and the need for an absolutely stable environment in which to deploy them. Nortel began searching for a patching and management infrastructure it could deploy locally on its network to achieve these goals. This was no easy task given the network in question had more than 291,000 nodes located in excess of 350 locations worldwide-not to mention 8,000 subnets housing a myriad of servers and desktops running a wide variety of operating systems that provided access to a broad range of network services.

“We needed a robust patching solution for the machines we were deploying in the field for three key reasons,” said Ernest Szeideman, Nortel senior systems analyst. “First, we needed to ensure security. Next, we wanted to deliver increased capabilities for the systems deployed. And finally, we needed to improve the manageability of the boxes themselves.”

In short, the company needed a robust, scalable patching solution that could be accessed and used similarly across all systems-and that would be deployed locally so that the integrity of its data could be ensured.

In addition to the technical challenges of finding an adequate patching solution, Nortel was faced with another: Despite having considerable Unix expertise and a growing Linux installation, its staff was still relatively new to the Linux world. Thus it needed a true partner to help it support its growing Linux environment and to collaborate with the open-source community in general to support its very heterogeneous infrastructure that contained a variety of systems including proprietary Unix to Windows to big iron systems.

Vendor Selection Process

Already familiar with Red Hat from its work with the company on other projects, Nortel nonetheless considered a number of offerings-including one from Ximian (now Novell)-but in the final analysis Red Hat was selected due to the capabilities offered,manageability of its products, and the ease of installation and use across the board.

Most importantly, Red Hat “enabled us to use Linux within our heterogeneous environment,” said Szeideman.

Specifically about Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Szeideman said, “We wanted a product that would allow us to perform the patching while making certain that no information left our internal network.” Ximian wasn’t as mature, he pointed out. “And it was absolutely key that we partner with a company that had a solid service offering to support our business,” he said. Red Hat was able to do just that.

Szeideman also said that it didn’t hurt that Red Hat had the best independent software vendor (ISV) support of any Linux vendor Nortel was able to identify-a factor that was critical for Nortel’s ability to run its business.

Solution

In 2003, after much collaboration with and input to the Red Hat Network team, Nortel was one of the first Red Hat customers to deploy RHNSatellite along with various proxy servers to service its Red Hat installed base. Today, the company is using version 5.0.1 of Red Hat Network and employs both servers and workstations running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Nortel employs primarily Hewlett-Packard hardware (DL380, DL580, DL385, and DL585 servers as well as xw4300, xw4400, and xw4600 workstations); however, it also uses a significant quantity of Dell equipment. The range of software used on these machines includes Clearcase, Oracle, VMware workstation, and a variety of in-house applications for load builds. Today, Nortel has approximately 2,000 machines registered against its RHN Satellite server.

Benefits

For Nortel, the benefits of deploying RHN Satellite for its patching and infrastructure needs were numerous and immediate. Not only were the initial upfront costs (including licensing and hardware) substantially lower than proprietary Unix solutions, but the solution’s continually upgraded feature set has enabled Nortel to do things like automatically clean up duplicate entitlements (thanks to its exposed API), easily determine the number of each version of RHEL deployed on its networks, and provide patch penetration statistics for SOX and other audit points. The company has also been able to develop a front end to the “up2date” and “yum” commands that enables system administrators to patch supported machines by simply touching a file and running a command-regardless of operating system.

Most importantly, however, RHN Satellite has enabled Nortel to patch its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems seamlessly via its internal networks (providing bandwidth savings even for those outside of Nortel)-and it has done so in a safe, secure, and tested manner.

According to Szeideman, RHN Satellite long ago proved itself in terms of return on investment-so much so, in fact, that the company is now exploring Linux for the desktop. “Although hard-core designers represent the current market for Linux, we’re now exploring the option of going full scale with Linux as a potential replacement for the Microsoft offering,” said Szeideman. “It’s becoming a key to our environment.”

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

Nortel was also one of the first Red Hat customers to make use of a technical account manager (TAM), and it continues to do so very enthusiastically today. In addition, a number of Nortel engineers attended Red Hat Certified Engineer training, which helped the organization work effectively with both Red Hat and its offerings.

Today, Nortel continues to collaborate with its Red Hat TAM from both an image development and a support perspective-and continues to be extraordinarily pleased with the results which not only benefit Nortel, but the open source community as a whole.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Based on Nortel’s positive experience working with Red Hat technical account managers, Szeideman strongly recommends that any large company interested in deploying Red Hat throughout the enterprise should work with a TAM to get this done.

Said Szeideman, “I view the TAM as a cheerleader for us within Red Hat to bring about whatever we require in our environment and to meet our business goals.” These days, said Szeideman, Nortel is “lean, mean, and focused from a technology point of view. We deliver value for our customers-and over the years, we’ve been able to rely on Red Hat to help us with that mission.”

EsSalud utilizes virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Raleigh NC – November 28, 2007 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that EsSalud, a state-owned insurance and service provider in Peru offering medical and economic benefits that cover eight million regularly insured parties and successors, has experienced success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. With the solution’s virtualization capabilities, the company has stabilized its organization-wide systems through a swift, transparent and cost-effective implementation project.

EsSalud was faced with challenges resulting from its aging information systems, which consisted of outdated, non-integrated technology that caused trouble with monitoring and control across its 362 National Assurance Centers. With a wide array of operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Novell, AIX and others, spread across its centers, the company could no longer maintain the mutli-platform support for its main system. The system’s disconnectedness led to a weak administration and sluggish monitoring.

To reliably and cost-effectively centralize the information of its National Assistance Centers, EsSalud turned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on HP hardware. Because EsSalud’s Health Benefits Core System was developed on Foxpro 2.6, it required two virtualized versions of the operating system. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization, the two versions were converged within 30 days to support Foxpro. Ultimately, EsSalud was able to change the overall administration and distribution scheme of its National Assurance Centers’ IT infrastructure.

“The virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 were a decisive factor in our company’s resolve to adopt this platform. In addition, we looked to Red Hat solutions for platform stability and security,” said Luis Martín Jiménez Chirinos, systems developer manager at EsSalud. “Other alternatives initially considered included Novell, SCO and Microsoft products. Each had strengths, but in the case of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, we found all the strengths we sought converged in the same product.”

Today, EsSalud enjoys a centralized administration of its servers installed across the company’s Assistance Centers. It has also experienced stability in its organization-wide systems, effective and stable communication capabilities and access security for system management, all for costs lower than originally budgeted.

“The experience was transcendent. We’ve seen large benefits at a low cost, with low implementation time,” said Chirinos. “For the future, we have plans to use Red Hat solutions for our inventory and terminal control solutions.”

About Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. 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; 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; the 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, 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.

Latin American-based Sixbell Nekotec Solutions finds success after migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Raleigh, NC — September 25, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Sixbell Nekotec Solutions, a leading Latin American telecommunications company, is experiencing heightened flexibility, increased cost savings and enhanced performance after migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Sixbell Nekotec Solutions is engaged in the design, development, marketing and support of integrated telecommunications solutions. With corporate offices in Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, it has been offering comprehensive solutions to enterprises and network operators for 18 years. The company recently looked for a flexible solution based on a standard and open operating system that would provide interoperability with a greater number of hardware and software providers. With an expanded open environment, Sixbell would offer solutions in infrastructure environments to better fit its client’s needs.

After months of analyzing the support, flexibility and robustness of multiple solutions in mission-critical environments, Sixbell selected Red Hat solutions and began the implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in early 2006. With Red Hat solutions, Sixbell diversified its platforms, mounted applications and incorporated new hardware vendors like HP, IBM and Sun. The company was additionally able to mount its previous Unix platforms on Linux, reducing hardware costs and supporting more hardware alternatives with heightened performance.

“Following our successful experience with Red Hat solutions, we now always provide Linux to our clients if they do not impose any infrastructure scheme,” said Rodrigo Perez, network development manager at Sixbell. “This allows us to have a broad array of hardware options, with Intel or AMD processors. We’re convinced that the use of Linux will be only to our advantage. For future implementation, we’re exploring JBoss solutions to continue enhancing our infrastructure.”

Flexibility and performance are important elements in every organization’s IT infrastructure, said Gabriel Szulik, general manager of Latin America at Red Hat. We are happy to be able to deliver these benefits, in addition to cost savings, to Sixbell and its customers.

For more information about Red Hat, visit http://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 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

About Sixbell Nekotec: Sixbell Nekotec Solutions is a leading Latin American corporation developing value added software and service systems and system integration. We offer complete telecommunication services for network companies and operators. For 15 years, more than 250 companies have relied on our solutions, delivering value to their new services by helping them to differentiate from the competition, obtain customer loyalty and generate higher revenues. www.sixbell.cl

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; 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; the 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, 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.

City’s IT system benefits from stability, compatibility and cost reduction with Red Hat and JBoss solutions

Raleigh, NC — September 19, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the City of Recife’s Computer Technology Organization (Emprel) in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil is experiencing long-term success with Red Hat solutions. Emprel first selected Red Hat Linux in 1998, has since migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its critical applications and currently utilizes the full suite of Red Hat solutions.

Before migrating to open source solutions in 1994, Emprel was struggling with several problems in its proprietary-based IT infrastructure. It was experiencing operating system instability and budget limitations with its legacy software. It turned to open source to find a reliable, stable and cost-effective solution. Over time and after exploration of various open source solutions, it selected and deployed Red Hat Linux in 1998. With Red Hat Linux, Emprel was able to make its processing solutions available online, allowing the organization to take the municipal tax and urban planning systems to the city’s service centers. Then, the company updated and developed its tax, planning, health, education, budget, financial and shopping port software.

“In 2002 Emprel upgraded its real estate and commercial records and implemented them on the Red Hat Linux platform. Updating our records was a big challenge for us because these involve highly critical and complex systems which had been running on mainframes since day one” said Luís Siqueria, IT infrastructure director at Emprel. “But since we were finding success with Red Hat solutions already, and because we have always pioneered innovation, we decided to install Red Hat Linux on our mainframe. That was a deciding step toward the consolidation of Emprel’s open source software strategy.”

Today, most of the company’s critical services have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Its IT infrastructure comprises databases including DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL. Its application servers include JBoss Application Server and WebSphere and it utilizes an Apache webserver and firewalls. Of Emprel’s 60 servers, 50 currently run on Red Hat solutions.

Since implementing Red Hat solutions, Emprel has enjoyed an extremely stable platform, compatibility with other commercial software versions and cost reduction for its management of over 2,000 machines. “The adoption of Red Hat solutions allows us to ensure compatibility and the knowledge that we can install its solutions without concern. Additionally, we didn’t have to use Red Hat support, which in our opinion is an excellent sign of stability and reliability,” said Siqueria. “This allows our tasks to be executed without interruption — the goal of any data processing center working 24×7.”

“We’re thrilled to see that Emprel has found such long-term success with Red Hat and JBoss solutions,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat. “Emprel’s use of Red Hat solutions since 1998, in addition to its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its mainframes and critical applications, is a testament to the reliability and effectiveness of our solutions.”

For more information about Red Hat, visit http://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 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions. 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; 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; the 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, 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.

deRemate.com implements Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for cost savings, reliability and scalability

Raleigh NC – March 25, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that deRemate.com, a leading online trade community with presence in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, has migrated to Red Hat and JBoss solutions to create an in-house-controlled portal to enable the payment of purchases completed through the company’s online retail sites throughout the region. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Dell PowerEdge hardware, the company has achieved cost savings, reliability, ease of implementation and scalability.

With Red Hat and JBoss solutions, deRemate.com created a new architecture for its transactional sites and in June 2007, deRemate.com introduced DePagos.com, a payment platform that allows any user, individual or company to receive or send online payments in a safe, fast and secure way, only using an email address. The solution, currently only in operation in Argentina and Chile, is expected to be rolled out in Colombia and Mexico in the near future. In Argentina, DePagos.com has achieved significant cost savings, enjoyed its new solution’s transparency and benefited from reduced use of resources, requiring only 10-15 people within its organization for the development, operation and testing phases of its implementation.

“Our experience with our new combined Red Hat and JBoss solution and the related support has been excellent. We’re happy to be dealing with products with an established presence in the market, with a large community of developers backing them up and with the support of well-known organizations,” said Yung. “Our new solution has larger potential than we’re even using so far, so we’ll later see what other business opportunities arise from our new platform, and how our business will evolve as a result.”

For more information 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 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. 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 the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. 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; 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 the 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, 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.

Download this video: [Ogg Theora]

Category: Migration
Winner: Sakonnet
Submitted by: David Renton, Vice President, Product Delivery at Sakonnet
Industry: Oil and Gas
Geography: New York, London, Rio de Janeiro

Overview
Used JBoss Application Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to develop a scalable, performance-driving, well-supported solution that provided ease-of-use, cost savings, and transparency for Sakonnet’s energy-trading solutions. With JBoss Application Server, Sakonnet discovered a solution that combined low-cost, quality software and reliable support to fit into its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategy of frequent application upgrades and top-notch support.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Sakonnet Technology, dedicated to excellence in trading solutions for wholesale energy markets, is a private company that was started by JPMorgan technologists in 1999. The company focuses on energy trading and risk management systems under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model for utilities, banks, hedge funds, and commercial and industrial companies that are heavy consumers of power./p>

Sakonnet’s main offering is the energy-trading application, Xenon®. Xenon is the ideal platform for running a profitable, tightly-controlled trading operation. It allows clients to set their processes and controls at every stage, from pre-trade analysis to final settlement. The application covers trades in power, natural gas, crude oil, refined products, coal, and emissions credits.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

The challenge for companies trading in energy markets is handling the vast quantity of data that arises from transactions combined with traders’ reporting needs. There is a tension between the amount of data and the near realtime speed with which traders need consolidated reports to take further actions in the markets. A single trade in the power market may require the system to capture a distinct price and volume for every 15-minute period for the next year, and then turn around and report on position and risk in a matter of seconds. Timely reporting and suitable follow-on actions are a key difference in making profit and avoiding loss in fast-moving markets.

What was the desired solution?

As we developed the newest version of our application, Xenon 5.1, we were focused on scalability and performance and needed a solution that could help deliver these benefits. Originally, the application ran on Weblogic technology. With the vast amount of data processing involved in energy trading, we required a large number of application servers and suffered heavy licensing fees associated with our previous Weblogic solution.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

When looking for a solution that would fit our scalability, performance-enhancing and cost-effective requirements, we looked toward open source solutions because we knew we could find the reliability and low cost that we desired. We decided to migrate to JBoss technology because we saw a solution that combined the transparency, which would provide us with top-level operational availability, and the same functionality from a licensing perspective, but with a much lowered cost. The quality of the software, the support available for the software, the performance data, and the ease of deployment were also key factors in our decision to migrate from Weblogic to JBoss.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

Once we migrated to JBoss Application Server in 2002, we added compute server clusters, today known as grid computing, to our n-tier J2EE application for better scalability, while leveraging our existing infrastructure. We paid one licensing fee and were able to utilize JBoss solutions on scores of machines, avoiding a per-CPU cost model.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• JBoss Application Server provided us with lowered costs, mainly through third-party licensing costs.
• We’ve saved a lot of development time with the combination of JBoss Hibernate, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Oracle because the combination provided us with the ability to quickly understand and resolve any issues that arose during our platform migration.
• 24×7x365 availability is less costly to maintain because of the transparency inherent in JBoss’ open source technology. With transparency, we are able to deal with any issues in and take immediate corrective action to minimize the impact to our clients.
• We’ve experienced the benefits of the speed and efficiency of the Red Hat and JBoss support teams, in comparison to other vendors.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

Our IT architecture solution includes 30 HP Blade Servers utilizing Sun JVM 1.4.2 and JBoss Application Server 3.2 on Windows. We also use Oracle databases running in a cluster on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.1 on Dell hardware with EMC. For our migration, our CTO played the role of architect and guided the technology.

For the future, we plan to additionally migrate to JBoss ESB and we’re currently in the early stages of exploring JBoss Rules. We also hope to incorporate a monitoring tool like JBoss Operation Network.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

We used migration consulting when deploying JBoss solutions and had a very positive experience. While our CTO acted as the architect, we utilized JBoss consulting for a few months during the migration. Now, we use 24×7 enterprise-level support and have found that any questions we may have are easily answered by knowledgeable support staff. Our experience with Red Hat and JBoss support has been excellent. After several months in production, we ran into an obscure cluster problem and were able to immediately get the assistance of the senior developer from JBoss to help us understand the issues. That level of expertise truly made a difference for our system. We also ran into several Oracle issues while porting our application. Once the problem was identified, Oracle turned around a patch for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in four days. Our development team currently develops on Windows desktops and the same patch that we had for Red Hat Enterprise Linux would only be available for Windows in the next release of Oracle.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

Our advice to companies in our industry with the same challenge of needing a reliable, scalable, and affordable solution is to explore open source, specifically Red Hat and JBoss solutions, because this technology is 24×7 stable, provides a full feature set, can be developed on quickly, and maintained with less cost. We’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and even more in development time.

Industry: Telecommunications

Geography: Chile, with operations throughout Latin America and offices in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico

Opportunity: Sixbell looked for a flexible solution that would provide interoperability with a greater number of hardware providers and would encourage the incorporation of innovative technological solutions from different market leaders. The ideal solution would be based on a standard and open operating system and have excellent support.

Solution:
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
Hardware: HP Proliant DL servers, Intel X86 servers, Sun Galaxy servers

Benefits:

• Heightened flexibility with the ability to offer its solutions through a broader array of technological alternatives.
• Increased cost savings and enhanced performance after migrating from proprietary solutions to Red Hat solutions.
• Fast, reliable support.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

Background

Sixbell Nekotec Solutions is a leading Latin American company engaged in the design, development, marketing, and support of integrated telecommunications solutions. With corporate offices in Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, it’s been offering comprehensive solutions to enterprises and network operators for 18 years. The company presently has four regional units and two technological development centers that satisfy the telecommunications needs of over 100 million users across Latin America.

Opportunity
Sixbell looked for a flexible solution that would provide interoperability with a greater number of hardware providers. The ideal solution would be based on a standard and open operating system. With an expanded open environment, Sixbell would be able to offer solutions in infrastructure environments to better fit its clients’ needs.

Sixbell searched for a solution that featured a distribution with certification agreements for solutions targeted at the telecommunications market. The solution needed high performance and uptime levels, reliable support, and a strong history of successful migrations from proprietary Unix to Linux.

Solution
Ultimately, after months of analyzing the support, flexibility, and robustness of multiple solutions in mission-critical environments, Sixbell selected Red Hat solutions. The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux began in early 2006 and Sixbell received excellent, timely Red Hat support from the start.

After implementing Red Hat solutions, measurements of Red Hat’s performance in open x86 infrastructures became available. The measurements concluded that Red Hat’s performance was far higher than the alternatives managed with proprietary systems. “We conducted preliminary tests with some solutions based on SIP protocols (convergence solutions) and performance almost doubled. There is a margin that may be related to the implementation and hardware used, but there was a remarkable change shown by the operating system,” said Rodrigo Pérez, Engineering Manager at Sixbell.

The migration to Red Hat solutions was smooth and educational for Pérez, who expressed that Sixbell had initially underestimated the open source migration process. “My chief advice for others looking to migrate to open source solutions is to program everything based on a standard basis,” said Pérez. “When we dealt with new hardware vendors, we had to compile processes and adjust programming practices. It’s also good to avoid using programs that seem to facilitate programming and tie the company to one type of software. With open source, there is more flexibility and choice.”

Benefits
With Red Hat solutions, Sixbell diversified its platforms, mounted applications, and incorporated new hardware vendors. Red Hat’s flexibility in supporting units from vendors including HP, IBM, and Sun was valued most by Sixbell.

“When Sixbell first entered the market, it had multiple proprietary platform workhorses including Sun Solaris and Oracle that gave us enough backup,” said Perez. “Now, Sixbell is recognized in the market and we have been able to further our growth in cooperation with Red Hat. We’ve kept the Sun platform, but now have been able to incorporate HP, IBM, or other varied hardware in our solution.”

Additionally, Sixbell was able to mount its previous Unix platforms on Linux, reducing hardware costs and supporting more hardware alternatives with heightened performance. “After our successful experience with Red Hat, if our client does not impose any infrastructure scheme, we provide Linux,” said Pérez. “This allows us to have a broad array of hardware options, with Intel or AMD processors. We’re convinced that the use of Linux will be only to our advantage. For future implementation, we’re exploring JBoss solutions to continue enhancing our infrastructure.”

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography:Latin America

Challenge: Minimize operating costs and overhead without sacrificing data security or system reliability

Software:Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sybase

Hardware: Intel-based servers from HP and IBM

Benefits: Cost savings in excess of 70% per server and a 4x performance increase after migrating from legacy UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

The world’s largest producer of refined silver and other metals, Industrias Peñoles, S.A. is comprised of 50 companies with nearly 7,000 employees throughout Mexico. Traded on the Mexican Stock Exchange since 1968, Peñoles places great emphasis on increasing their value to shareholders, and one way they do so is to strictly control costs company-wide. This meticulous fiscal responsibility is increasingly important given the strong effect that the international market for silver and other non-ferrous metals has on prices Peñoles can charge for its products. Because they have little control over market fluctuations, Peñoles must keep its own operating costs to a minimum in order to maintain profitability.

Challenges

One of the biggest concerns of the Information Technology division is containing overhead and operating costs. The high cost of hardware for their UNIX-based infrastructure combined with increasing maintenance costs made aligning with Peñoles’ corporate-wide goal of minimizing expenses difficult, if not impossible.

Data security is also a top priority. 85% of Peñoles’ business comes from a small number of customers, meaning that those transactions involve large sums of money. As the IT team investigated cost-saving alternatives, the security of each transaction and the systems themselves could not be compromised.

Because mining operations are often located in remote areas of the country, traditional data transfer can be unreliable, so Peñoles views maintaining the most current technology as extremely important. As part of this, they maintain 24-month lease arrangements for hardware with both HP and IBM. Any solution Peñoles considers must operate with the latest hardware, emphasize new features, and allow an easy upgrade path.

Solution

Peñoles looked to Intel-based hardware solutions as a way to significantly and quickly cut costs. Because their IT employees had a UNIX background, Linux quickly emerged as the most viable solution. Peñoles ran several performance tests with multiple Linux distributions, but, according to Pedro Luis Sanchez Armas, IT Research Manager for the mining division, none matched the results they achieved with Red Hat. “It simply tested better,” says Sanchez Armas. “We knew after our testing that it would meet our needs of cutting costs while maintaining high levels of security and reliability.”

After six months of testing, Peñoles migrated a DNS server from UNIX to Linux, followed by their security firewall and external email application. Pleased with the results, the IT staff looked at more mission-critical applications as candidates for migration. Portions of Sybase, the database used by Peñoles for a number of different applications, were also migrated to Linux. In fact, Sanchez Armas says, “The UNIX-to-Linux migration was the easiest large-scale migration we have ever done. It was almost transparent.”

We look forward to the cost and performance benefits that further use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will bring to Peñoles and our shareholders.

“The company was originally interested in the cost savings we could achieve,” acknowledges Sanchez Armas. On average, Peñoles recognized a cost savings in excess of 70% per server when they migrated from proprietary UNIX to commodity Intel-based servers with Linux. “But when we started testing, ” Sanchez Armas says, “we found additional impressive performance benefits as well.”

On average, server performance increased by a factor of 4, though certain tasks improved even more. For example, processing time for one of Peñoles’ most processor-intensive reports was reduced from 27 minutes to 7 minutes, a 74% time savings. And with the performance improvements they were getting, Peñoles could anticipate better overall system reliability and more uptime.

Additionally, the Linux environment proved to be more secure because Peñoles could control more of the functionality of their network in-house rather than depend on third party providers. Early on, Sanchez Armas realized that the flexibility of Linux, combined with the fact that the source code was freely available for modifications, would let him run the DNS server outside of the DNL network.

Future

Currently Peñoles’ mining division utilizes Linux for the majority of its infrastructure, which is distributed throughout Mexico. They are now evaluating the further use of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family in multiple instances across the corporation, including Red Hat Desktop. Recent tests have shown that migrating some core applications could result in a cost savings of up to $2.5 million. Additionally they’re evaluating Intel’s Itanium processor and are seeing strong indications that Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Itanium will offer higher performance at a lower cost than UNIX on the same platform.

“Soon, our equipment leases will be up for renewal,” explains Sanchez Armas, “and if current tests are successful, we will begin migrating more of our operations. We look forward to the cost and performance benefits that further use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will bring to Peñoles and our shareholders.”

Industry: Healthcare and Government
Geography: Argentina
Goal: To create a centralized database for organ transplant coordination. To allow multiple groups access to that information.
Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Distributor: LatinSource Technology
Benefits: Cost-effective solution. Reliable, timely communication throughout theorgan donation process.

Decentralized systems create major problems

For years, INCUCAI had to work with each regional branch separately to coordinate various independent systems. Many times, these systems were not properly synchronized.

We chose tools and technology which are the latest generation. We are happy with Red Hat and Oracle and believe we have made the right choice.

The main challenge was to decentralize information management, giving all those who have a role in the transplant process direct access to the system.

With so many people requiring access, an Internet architecture was the only possible solution. Secondly, they needed to collect the information in a single database to avoid inconsistency and to centralize administration and optimize storage.

Undertaking an ambitious project

In 2003, INCUCAI embarked on the Sistema Nacional de Informacion de Procuracion de Trasplante de la Republica Argentina, or SINTRA, project. Their goal was to renovate the IT environment, replacing outdated systems and creating a large modular system based on web applications. This would allow for real-time registration and maintain the integrity of information stored in a single database.

“Before we began to develop the new system, there were serious problems with consistency in the way the institution operated and only INCUCAI personnel had access to certain sections of information. This project was highly sought after by the authorities because implementing it would provide a significant benefit to the community contribution and would make activities more transparent,” said Mariano Soratti, coordinator of SINTRA for INCUCAI.

Linux seemed, to us, to be more reliable, stable and upgradeable than Windows. It has significant advantages regarding security of information and availability, which are essential factors in a highly available critical application.

Powered by Red Hat

Because SINTRA was to become a critical part of INCUCAI’s operations, the underlying operating system had to offer the highest levels of reliability, support and security. “The Linux operating system seemed, to us, to be more reliable, stable and upgradeable than Windows,” explained Soratti.”It has significant advantages regarding security of information and availability, which are essential factors in a highly available critical application.”

INCUCAI had existing technology vendors that they wanted to continue using, so they wanted a Linux distribution that would be certified by those vendors.

“Before we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we carefully researched the distribution because the operating system we chose had to be certified by Oracle, HP and IBM. Furthermore, we chose Red Hat because it has a distributor, LatinSource Technology, in Argentina,” Soratti said.

The SINTRA project was split into modules and deployment was scheduled over two and a half years. INCUCAI expects to conclude the project in the summer of 2005. The system consists of:

• 2 HP® ProLiant® DL380 Servers for generating databases

Before we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we carefully researched the distribution because the operating system we chose had to be certified by Oracle, HP and IBM. Furthermore, we chose Red Hat because it has a distributor in Argentina.

• 1 IBM® xSeries® 345 server and 2 Intel 5000s for applications
• 1 IBM xSeries 336 Server as a Firewall
• Oracle software (with a perpetual licence)
• J2EE software
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not caused us any problems to date. Database production has been working, uninterrupted, for a little over 2 years, and the server responds without any problems,”Soratti said.

In January 2005 the system was updated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.

Efficient, reliable communication

According to Soratti, the cost of using Linux in this project was minimal. “It was limited to the purchase of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with no hidden costs or pending maintenance fees.” Better yet, SINTRA makes information available to all parties in the transplant process. “They are allable to login to their user account, and manage their own profile accordingly. In addition, it also enables the media to be better informed and not to have to be constantly waiting for news or calling for information. SINTRA gave us a degree of mobility because it’s based on a web architecture that allows it to be accessed from any location and from any computer with Internet access,” Soratti said.

“At first, this project was really ambitious and we did not know what we were going to encounter or how much it would cost. We chose tools and technology, which, as I understand it, are the latest generation,” said Soratti. “We are happy with Red Hat and Oracle and believe we have made the right choice.

Industry: Government
Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES
Benefits: Secure, national communication through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)

• Red Hat continues global expansion with first regional offices in Latin America

Institutional information

The Judicial Branch of Peru is an autonomous service-oriented institution whose purpose is to confront the legal challenges of the future with judges committed to the process of change, transformation, and modernization. Their work translates into juridical security and inspires confidence in the judicial system among citizens. The Judicial Branch relies on appropriate technological and administrative support to accomplish its goals. Its mission is “to administer justice through its jurisdictional bodies, pursuant to the Constitution and laws; to guarantee juridical security and jurisdictional protection; and to contribute to the state of law, social peace, and national development.”

To fulfill this mission, it was necessary for the Judicial Branch to create new systems of processing, with adequate infrastructure and up-to-date information systems.

Structure of the system

The Judicial Branch of Peru has a Department of Informatics, headed by Ing. Freddy Aramburu García, that depends on several divisions. They include Systems Development, Technical Support, and Networks and Communication. The Networks and Communication Division is where the Virtual Private Network (VPN) National Connection Project originated. In total, the Department of Informatics and its divisions have a team of over 80 associates.

Introduction

The Judicial Branch shares network services, as well as applications generated by the Department of Informatics, with its different divisions nationwide. To do this, the Branch decided to securely connect the central offices across the nation using a VPN.

Challenges and objectives

One of the largest objectives was to virtually connect 26 Superior Courts of Justice using technological tools that provide a high level of performance and security at a low cost.

Objectives

To offer and share computerized services as applications of the administrative and jurisdictional systems in a centralized database, email, and other shared resources of the network. To ensure security while transmitting data by implementing firewalls and Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). To reduce the costs of implementation by using open source tools. To provide the judges with trained, service-oriented jurisdictional and administrative support personnel. To establish a decentralized administration with modern management criteria.

Implementation

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES was used in 27 servers throughout the nation for the installation of:

• NIDS: Protection against intrusions and possible attacks by external or internal institutional agents
• VPN: Virtual Private Network
• Firewall
• Proxy

Hardware required:

Results and benefits

The results that came from installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES surpassed the expectations anticipated by the Judicial Branch. The installation achieved secure connections and satisfied the requirements of the Department of Informatics, which controls and supervises the network service (Internet access and applications).

In addition, users from the provinces were able to remotely request and obtain penal background documents, a process previously limited to Lima. With the integrated system of national records of rulings, and with the database centralized in the Lima office, the system of District Records of Rulings was installed in the Superior Courts of Justice throughout the nation, cutting the time of issuance from 30 days to 2 hours.

Leading Natural Gas Distributor Achieves Impressive Performance Increase with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Spain, South America

Challenge: To simplify their multi-platform IT environment. To create a highly-scalable yet cost-effective environment in support of corporate-wide goal for massive growth. To quickly improve performance of mission-critical data warehouse system

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle 9i RAC, SAP BW, SAP SEM

Benefits: Reduced response time for user queries from minutes to seconds. Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) by a 4x factor. Reduced price per transaction by a 10x factor. Increased data warehouse performance as much 5,214%.

Founded in 1843, The Gas Natural Group distributes natural gas and generates electricity for more than 9.6 million customers in Spain, Latin America, and Italy. It is their goal to reach 13 million customers by 2008. The Gas Natural Group has multiple approaches for achieving this goal, but there is a common thread that runs throughout: They must maintain a solid financial position that will allow for profitable growth and shareholder renumeration.

The Gas Natural Group’s recent migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has had a major impact on this goal. There are now a variety of systems within The Gas Natural Group running on Enterprise Linux, including one of the most business critical systems: a corporate data warehouse powered by Oracle® Database 9i RAC and SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), and another system running SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM). The overall TCO (total cost of ownership) of their IT infrastructure has been reduced by a 1:4 factor and performance gains in their data warehouse have been as high as 5,214% in some queries.

Impressive Growth Creates Technology Problems

1. Complex Environment

In order to achieve their goal of 13 million customers by 2008, The Gas Natural Group knew that their IT environment must be easily and, perhaps more importantly, cost-effectively scalable. “With our highly varied infrastructure, our growth would have been vertical, which would require expensive, high-range machinery,” Checa explains. “We wanted to try a growth solution’s model based on cost-effective, flexible, horizontal growth software. We were very interested in the Grid computing model.”

2. Growth of Current Environment = Vertical = Expensive

In order to achieve their goal of 13 million customers by 2008, The Gas Natural Group knew that their IT environment must be easily and, perhaps more importantly, cost-effectively scalable. “With our highly varied infrastructure, our growth would have been vertical, which would require expensive, highrange machinery,” Checa explains.”We wanted to try a growth solution’s model based on cost-effective, flexible, horizontal growth software. We were very interested in the Grid computing model.”

3. Obsolete Data Warehouse System

At the same time, the data warehouse that The Gas Natural Group relied on was quickly becoming obsolete. “Answering time started to be excessive. We had to improve the platform performance because the current state not only created immediate problems, but also compromised future growth,” Checa said. “We had a whole list of projects related to the Data Warehouse that were stalled because of these performance problems and any type of future load increase was impossible.”

The choice of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was an easy one. Not only were they fully supported by Oracle and the main hardware vendors, but Red Hat also had a strong reputation of being focused on enterprise issues. We need a stable distribution with regular updates and top-level support. We found all that in Red Hat.

Linux Emerges as the Best Solution

In searching for a new solution, The Gas Natural Group needed to address all of these issues. “Our long term goal was to quickly implement flexible solutions in a Grid computing model and to utilize platform-indifferent environments throughout The Gas Natural Group,” Checa explains

The Gas Natural Group’s evaluations initially spanned a wide variety of environments, including UNIX® and Windows. However, they quickly determined that these solutions would not meet their requirements of flexibility, low-cost, and high-performance. A clustered Linux system represented a much lower cost than any other solution with a clear parallel in performance improvement. “We saw that Linux systems reached an excellent answering time, and to improve it, we would just be required to add more low-cost machines to the cluster,” Checa says.

“Linux also allowed us to avoid any sort of technological dependence on hardware and software providers,” Checa explains. “We try not to depend too heavily on any single thing, and that was one of the major attractions of Linux – we wouldn’t be ‘controlled’ by anyone. This allows us to maintain independence in our solutions and to modify the underlying layers without changing our critical applications.”

Oracle Support and Enterprise Commitment Make Red Hat an Easy Choice

Checa knew that Oracle would remain a constant in The Gas Natural Group’s IT environment, so he needed a Linux distribution that was highlycompatible with and fully-supported by Oracle. Similarly, Checa wanted a Linux provider that had close ties with the hardware community.

“The choice of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was an easy one,” he says.”Not only were they fully supported by Oracle and the main hardware vendors, but Red Hat also had a strong reputation of being focused on enterprise issues. We need a stable distribution with regular updates and top-level support. We found all that in Red Hat.”

We saw that Linux systems reached an excellent answering time, and to improve it, we would just be required to add more low-cost machines to the cluster.

Testing the Waters

“Because of problems with the data warehouse, we knew that the time was right to begin a major overhaul in that area. We had an open door and a perfect situation in which to carry out a concept trial,” Checa says. “To be clear, our interest in a Linux migration was not focused solely on the data warehouse project. It was simply a perfect place to start.”

One of the key things The Gas Natural Group needed to determine was that point at which adding more machines would not increase the system performance proportionally. So The Gas Natural Group performed an extensive concept trial in which various tests were run to assess the viability of this new system in terms of performance and strength. The trial was as close as possible to a true replication of a production environment, including the same data volume and identical queries, but without using indexes. Tests were conducted to validate the following points:

• The feasibility of a Linux multi-node environment display
• Basic Oracle Database 9i RAC functions
• Involvement of software and hardware settlement.
• Platform scalability model according to CPUs scalability per node and number of nodes
• Private interconnected channel: Gigabit.
• Identification of management tools
• Linux and Oracle Database 9i RAC technology knowledge by hardware manufacturers and possible channel support
• Determination of our current queries model parallel level
• Versatile disc shared to data replacement

The introduction of open source elements into The Gas Natural Group IT environment was gradual and not without some bumps. “We started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.2.1, and due to the high requirements of our environment, we experienced some problems with supported memory, number of CPUs, number of discs, and discs room management,” Checa says. “Fortunately, these limitations were resolved by a simple reconfiguration. Now, the distribution has matured a lot, and we have no problems with releases right out of the box.”

In addition, The Gas Natural Group delivered Linux-specific training to the teams in charge of Linux platform management. This has allowed them to solve the majority of issues quickly in-house, and according to Checa, has proven invaluable.

Our TCO has been reduced by a 1:4 factor and transaction prices have been reduced by a 1:10 factor.

Results Leave No Room for Doubt

Following 2,318 database consultations, The Gas Natural Group concluded that their Linux based systems would scale both horizontally and vertically, and would do so best with a heavy load. They found that two-CPU machines performed best and that stagnation during linear scalability was not an issue.

Performance results were more than impressive – the data warehouse solution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle9i RAC reduced the answering time by 5,214%! Regarding SAP SEM, Checa’s team realized a 2x factor improvement. This increased performance was coupled with cost benefits. “Our TCO has been reduced by a 1:4 factor and transaction prices have been reduced by a 1:10 factor,” Checa boasts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Offers Endless Possibilities

When asked about the future, Checa says, “We are currently thinking about converting the Linux/Oracle environments into an adaptable and flexible data processing center, which would be as close to Grid computing as possible. Within this framework, Red Hat and other open source technologies will play a leading role.” Much of the upcoming growth at The Gas Natural Group will be based on an acquisition of small machines whose role may change depending on the business necessities. Checa believes that open source technology will be essential to The Gas Natural Group’s ability to properly manage, supply, monitor, and display their IT environments.

“We are committed to the openness provided by our Linux environment, in which stability and reliability are inherent. The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems allows us to maintain the highest technical performance with great financial reductions,” Checa says. “The general feeling at The Gas Natural Group is that Red Hat offers a properly supported, solid product, suitable for the most demanding enterprise environments.”