HP Customer Success Story:

Company: FarmaLink

Industry: Healthcare: Prescription Drug Administrator

At a Glance: Datacenter transformation using HP Integrity server blades and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for databases; evaluation, prescription administration and analysis system

Objective: Establish a flexible, adaptable infrastructure that can continue operating while handling the exponential growth in the volume of information administered and accommodating the most dynamic business conditions. Maintain system availability in real time during all types of working situations. Increase redundancy and business continuity.

Solution: The core architecture of the Farmalink system is made up of mission-critical HP Integrity server blades with Intel processors running Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform connected to an HP StorageWorks 4000 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4000).

Hardware: 4 HP Integrity BL860c server blades, HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure, HP StorageWorks 4000 Enterprise Virtual Array, 3 HP ProLiant server blades

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle 10g Database

Download the Case Study PDF at HP.com

“HP Integrity BL860c server blades with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle allow us to offer highly reliable services in real time.”
− Pablo Giraud, Systems Manager, Farmalink

BACKGROUND
Farmalink has been operating for more than 15 years in the health industry, the company has established a leadership position in the market, where it is currently processing in excess of 4 million drug prescriptions per month for more than 45 health insurance agents.

The focus of Farmalink’s work is the processing of prescriptions so that it can create innovative tools for healthcare administration, integration, auditing and analysis

From an applications point of view, Farmalink developed an evaluation system for online prescription validation based on logical rules and has incorporated it into its services over the past few years. To do so, the company required a high level of availability, faster processing speed and analysis, and the
power to respond effectively during periods of heavy demand.

Some of the services it offers are:
• Online validation of medical prescriptions in dispensing pharmacies
• Pharmaceutical auditing of prescriptions
• Liquidation of payments to the various healthcare service providers in the pharmaceutical market (pharmacies, health insurance agents, laboratories, etc.)
• Programs for clinical management by pathology
• Programs for control of consumption online
• Systems and reports for analyzing information and making decisions
• Integrated processes on a reliable and secure platform.

Farmalink is dedicated to administering and auditing prescription drug plans for health insurance agents. Due to the nature of the business’ commercial end, in which precise and secure exchange of large volumes of information related to medicine is required, the company needed to find an innovative tool that would facilitate management of its IT processes and also ease the decision-making process for its clients.

APPROACH
Design a new technology architecture using 4 HP Integrity BL860c server blades, an HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure and an HP StorageWorks 4000 Enterprise Virtual Array

GROWTH PROMPTS FLEXIBLE BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY
Over the last few years, Farmalink has experienced significant growth in the number of clients served and the volume of information processed and consequently, incorporated new services on an advanced technology base. To meet current and future challenges, the company needed a strong infrastructure to have the flexibility to respond quickly to business changes.

In 2004, faced with the need to grow with a powerful, high-performance system, Farmalink chose HP solutions and migrated its entire technological infrastructure from RISC-based servers to HP Integrity rx2600 and rx5670 Servers with EPIC (Intel Itanium) Architecture, which fosters high levels of parallelism and computational capabilities, and the HP-UX 11i operating system.

The idea was to reorganize the datacenter with a storage area network (SAN) for centralized storage and add powerful processors to conduct database transactions in a UNIX-based environment.

• In 2006, when the need arose to expand this high availability architecture and provide real-time processing, the company chose HP Integrity BL860c server blades, becoming the first company in the region to adopt this solution. Designed for mission-critical applications, HP Integrity server blades combine the modular design and energy savings of the HP BladeSystem with the world-class performance and flexible capacity that the Integrity server family delivers for memory-intensive database transactions.

HP Integrity BL860c server blades offer similar levels of exceptional availability, reliability and power as HP Integrity entry-level, rack-mounted servers.

• Two years later, Farmalink acquired two additional Integrity blades with which it could increase the services provided by its core Oracle 10g environment without requiring additional physical space. This capability is made possible by the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure, which Farmalink acquired in 2006.

One of the largest municipal electric distribution utility in Canada deploys JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to eliminate proprietary lock-In and cut costs

FAST FACTS

Customer: Toronto Hydro Corporation

JBoss Advanced Business Partner: Int3s Corp.

Industry: Utilities: Electric Power

Geography: Toronto, Canada

Business Challenge: To build a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the foundation for future-looking strategic initiatives designed to support enablement of smart metering and smart grid integration, reduce operational costs, promote energy conservation, and improve IT productivity

Solution:Deployed JBoss Enterprise SOA and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform for innovative Smart Meter program and has successfully completed the initial phases of its program to create a customer-focused cost and energy-saving initiative

Software: JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform (including JBoss ESB), Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Leveraging Int3s expertise in SOA and Red Hat / JBoss open source Enterprise Framework, Toronto Hydro was able to successfully complete the initial phases of its groundbreaking Smart Meter program and plan other customer-focused cost- and energy-saving initiatives going forward.

Download the case study [PDF]

“Toronto Hydro’s technology strategy required experienced resources to supplement internal staff in delivering complex custom development projects. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a comprehensive toolset that comes with everything we need to build a solid SOA for facilitating easy integration of disparate systems and data. It was the perfect solution to meet our current needs – and we trust Red Hat to meet our future ones.”– Nicholas Yee, Chief Technology Officer, Int3s

BACKGROUND
Toronto Hydro is one of the largest municipal electric distribution utility in Canada and operates two wholly owned affiliates with a combined workforce of over 1,400 people. It serves 697,000 residential and commercial customers across the greater Toronto Area, representing 18.5% of electricity consumers in the province of Ontario.

Toronto Hydro’s technology strategy required experienced resources to supplement internal staff in delivering complex custom development projects and they partnered with Int3s, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, to help implement JBoss Enterprise SOA platform, including JBoss ESB.

Int3s designs, develops, and implements IT solutions for energy and utility, financial, and telecommunications organizations. By automating key business processes, Int3s is able to cost-effectively improve the overall business performance of its clients. A Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, Int3s has two distinct practices: one dedicated to service-oriented architecture (SOA) development and implementation, and one focused on business intelligence (BI) solutions. In both of its lines of business, Int3s is committed to using open source products for strategic client initiatives.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In late 2006, the Vice President of IT & Chief Information Officer of Toronto Hydro-Electric System, Eduardo E. Bresani, called in Nicholas Yee, the Chief Technology Officer of Int3s, to help him with an ambitious new five-year strategic initiative. His goal was to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace his organization’s traditional IT infrastructure.

“The new CIO was focused on modernizing the technology infrastructure, and developing a plan to build next-generation systems that would enable the firm to be more agile and efficient,” said Yee. “One of the most attractive features of an SOA is that it allows companies to build composite services in which business processes can be extended over a number of different applications. “Using an SOA to integrate a number of disparate systems was one of the primary goals of the new CIO,” said Yee.

A key business driver for the change was the firm’s availability of IT resources. “Toronto Hydro continuing issue was that system integration and support activities were using more and more resources over time,” said Yee. “The CIO wanted to free up his personnel to focus on more strategic and value-added matters.”

A key business driver for the change was the firm’s availability of IT resources. Specifically, building point-to-point interfaces between all the various systems Toronto Hydro had put into place over the years – legacy as well as client-server and Web-based systems – was proving too costly and complex. “All the custom coding was proving very expensive to develop and maintain,” said Yee.

The new SOA implementation was part of Toronto Hydro’s groundbreaking “Smart Meter” initiative. The initiative had three primary business goals: to help the firm be more customer-focused; to provide its residential and business customers with tools to do a better job of conserving energy while managing their own electricity costs; and to meet regulatory mandates to use less energy, especially during periods of peak usage.

In the case of Toronto Hydro’s Smart Meter program as mandated by the province of Ontario, the intention was to program variable pricing into the system based on the time of day that electricity was consumed (Time-Of-Use billing). The goal was to price electricity higher during peak times to encourage people and businesses to conserve energy during periods of high demand.

SOLUTION
Toronto Hydro and Int3s selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware for the Smart Meter program due to the size and stability of the technology and the toolsets that JBoss provided, including JBoss Hibernate, Rules, and jBPM Frameworks, to simplify the migration from Mule to the JBoss platform.

One of Toronto Hydro’s most important applications uses the JBoss SOA platform as a mashup framework to allow customers to view their consumption data on the Web.

“We didn’t want to be dependent on proprietary products for our SOA framework. What JBoss gives me is a solution that works with other products as long as they meet open source standards,” said Eduardo Bresani, Chief Information Officer, Toronto Hydro.

The second reason Toronto Hydro went with JBoss was the flexibility of the subscription model. “JBoss doesn’t charge for the product itself, but for the support – and we valued the enterprise level support that JBoss provides,” said Bresani.

Moving to an SOA was an essential first step in implementing Toronto Hydro’s Smart Meter initiative, as multiple diverse systems and data sets needed to be integrated to collect, process, and disseminate all the relevant customer and operational information. “Building custom APIs between each of the many systems involved simply wasn’t an option,” said Yee.

From the very beginning of the project, open source was the answer. “With open source, we could avoid vendor lock-in, and standardize everything related to business logic, business processes, and data models,” said Yee.

In a previous solution, Yee had led the team that developed the Rosetta Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which was acquired by Red Hat’s Middleware Business Unit in 2006 and incorporated into the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. After running an evaluation program with the Mule ESB, the JBoss SOA Platform was selected and implemented as part of the Early Adopter Program in early 2008.

Although Toronto Hydro is not the largest utility in North America, it currently has the largest production deployment of smart meters on the continent which stands at over 600,000. The firm is also reaffirming its leadership position by rolling out its Time-Of-Use billing initiative that will bill customers higher rates at peak times, and lower rates at off-peak times.

“From a strategic point of view, Toronto Hydro’s commitment to open source made it an imperative to look at the size and stability of the technology vendor we chose for the long-term,” said Yee. “Based on our technical evaluations, we realized it was a much better fit to align ourselves with JBoss.” In addition to other functional advantages, there were the toolsets that JBoss provided, including JBoss Hibernate, Rules, and jBPM Frameworks. “These were all powerful tools that made migration from Mule over to the JBoss platform a very straightforward process,” said Yee.

Since the initial smart meter implementation, Int3s has expanded the use of the JBoss SOA Platform at Toronto Hydro in multiple projects including the development of an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) framework for a new Enterprise Data Warehouse and integration to Google’s PowerMeter project. The SOA Platform has also simplified large system implementations such as Oracle’s Customer Information System and the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) using SAP.

BENEFITS
The support provided by Red Hat has been superb. “As an Advanced Business Partner, we’ve had terrific access to some of the best development professionals at JBoss,” said Yee. “Not only were they very responsive when we called, but they asked us to help prioritize what functionality should be incorporated in future releases of the platform, ensuring that JBoss will continue to meet our evolving needs.”

From a global perspective, utilities have moved from focusing on simply “keeping the lights on” to better matching supply to demand.

“Ultimately, it comes down to developing new applications that can be integrated with existing systems, and consolidating the huge amounts of complex data that comes from the household as well as the utility company,” said Yee. “Although we’re still in the infancy of that effort at Toronto Hydro, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform will enable us to do that.”

“JBoss technology comes with everything we need to build a solid SOA for facilitating easy integration of disparate systems and data. It was the perfect solution to meet our current needs – and we trust Red Hat to meet our future ones,” said Yee.

Toronto Hydro is also very pleased with the relationship its firm has forged with Red Hat. Other Red Hat utilities clients can now leverage the experience Int3s gained during its work with Toronto Hydro. “It’s a win-win situation for us both,” said Yee.

“Our relationship with Red Hat has been very good, everything has always gone very smoothly. In meetings with Red Hat at the headquarters in Raleigh, Bresani discussed the innovative deployment with executives. Bresani recalls the meetings, “We discussed how we were using the products and how we could work together closely to make their products more successful. The meeting gave me confidence that we’d made the right choice of technology and vendor.”

“We’ve succeeded because of the combination of the leadership of Toronto Hydro, the innovation of the Red Hat products, and the expertise of Int3s integrating systems. Together they allowed us to leverage the power of JBoss and really make the technology work for us.

FAST FACTS

Company: Alpine Electronics

Industry: Electronics: Consumer

Geography: United States

Business Challenge: Without a single integrated enterprise resource planning and supply chain management solution, Alpine lacked the consolidated business data required for accurate long-term planning

Software: SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP 6.0, SAP NetWeaver, IBM Cognos 8 Planning, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: Systemx: System x3850

Solution: IBM Global Business Services leveraged its electronics and automotive industry expertise to design, deploy and manage a solution based on SAP Business Suite. Niteo, an IBM Business Partner, also helped to implement IBM Cognos Planning, which captures sales and budget data downloaded from the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse system at the Japanese headquarters location

Benefits: Enhanced process efficiencies have led to much more rapid access to business intelligence. By using SAP ERP, monthly financial closes can be completed up to 30 percent faster than before, and there has been a 40 percent reduction in operational workload for the finance department.

Download the case study from the IBM website [PDF]

Background
Based in Torrance, California, Alpine Electronics USA Inc. develops and markets a wide range of leading-edge integrated mobile media entertainment, and navigation systems for mobile use. The company employs 300 people and has a separate sister company which has strong focus on research and development – continually striving to generate and enhance a new kind of in-vehicle experience, based on the convergence of high performance audio, video, navigation and telematics in the form of integrated mobile multimedia systems.

As well as marketing its in-car mobile media systems to consumers, Alpine also designs and manufactures complete, integrated systems for the automotive sector. To align with the long-term strategies of the automotive manufacturers, Alpine needs to be able to plan sales and production 2-3 years ahead.

“Alpine operates under two separate business elements,” explains Mick Ono, Senior IT Manager at Alpine Electronics USA Inc. “The first is aimed at the after-market, working through retailers and representatives to sell products that can be fitted to existing vehicles. The second works directly with automotive manufacturers to integrate advanced mobile media solutions into new vehicles.”
Predicting future trends

“Working with the automotive manufacturers is a unique challenge: they are already designing vehicles that will not reach the dealerships until 2012. To supply integrated mobile media solutions that will meet the needs of drivers and passengers three or four years in the future, we need to be able to plan sales, quantities and pricing a long way ahead.”

Without a single integrated enterprise resource planning and supply chain management solution, Alpine lacked the consolidated business data required for accurate long-term planning. By establishing a central database as a ‘single source of truth’, and by gaining the ability to collect and analyze data in real time, Alpine could understand its current position and sales history, and analyze market trends from other sources to help forecast its future direction.

Finding a way forward
“We were coming from a situation where our North American manufacturing and sales companies were separate entities, each with its own IT systems,” says Mick Ono. “We decided to consult IBM to find the best way to implement a single centralized solution that could manage our operations and long-term planning processes from end-to-end.”

IBM Global Business Services performed a feasibility study to explore the unique requirements of Alpine’s business, and recommend both a target technology platform and a project management methodology that would ensure the success of the move to a fully integrated solution. Alpine then sent out a request for proposals to a number of leading business and IT consulting companies.

The need for industry-specific expertise
“We received four responses to our request for proposals, and IBM Global Business Services was by far the strongest candidate,” comments Mick Ono. “In addition to technical expertise, we wanted a partner that not only had experience in the electronics sector, but could also provide insight into the demands of the automotive sector, and IBM was one of the few companies that could deliver.

“IBM also has one of the most advanced project management methodologies for ERP implementations, called Ascendant. This gave us confidence that we could achieve this business transformation, fast.”

IBM Global Business Services designed and modeled a wide range of enhanced business processes for Alpine, helping to simplify and automate key workflows in the finance, procurement, sales and inventory management departments. These new processes are managed by applications from the SAP Business Suite, running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux and VMware on IBM x3850 servers.

End-to-end integration of business data
The solution provides an end-to-end process management framework, collecting and integrating data from a wide range of inputs, both digital and physical. Interfaces developed by IBM using the SAP NetWeaver Process Integration component enable Alpine to gather, process and seamlessly exchange data (future usage planning, purchase orders, inventory information and so on) with its local suppliers, its distributors and its largest clients.

This enables total traceability of each financial transaction and physical component throughout the supply chain – an ability that is highly prized by clients in the automotive industry.

With all key business data held in a single central SAP system, Alpine now has a reliable, accurate and accessible historical record of its entire business – which forms a basis for the creation of long-term planning and forecasting activities.

A clear view of business activity
The solution also delivers a wide range of other advantages. Since application support and strategic development is handled by IBM Global Business Services – Application Management Services, Alpine benefits from a highly cost-effective and scalable support model, reducing the need to maintain highly skilled SAP administrators and developers in-house.

IBM maintains the entire SAP environment, ensuring smooth business operation, configuring new business requirements as per standard SAP practice, providing end-user training for new users, and conducting monthly meetings with key customer stakeholders to present the deliverables and project status reports.

IBM has also recently helped the company upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0, bringing its IT infrastructure into line with the parent company in Japan, and potentially paving the way for further ERP integration across the whole group. Keeping up-to-date with the latest SAP application releases also helps Alpine to minimize support costs and implement new functionalities as and when the business requires.

Since IBM provides an onshore/offshore support model by leveraging resources in both the US and India, development of the environment can continue 24×7.

Reaping the benefits
The end-to-end automation of key financial and sales processes has reduced workload for the accounts department by approximately 40 percent, and enabled monthly financial closes to be completed up to 30 percent faster.

“The ability to share the long-term future throughout business owners is very important to us, and it depends to a large extent on doing the simple things right: getting the right information in the first place and handling it reliably in our back office operations,” comments Mick Ono.

“Looking beyond the bells and whistles, you need to have a system that can manage your finances and supply chain effectively. SAP provides the building blocks of that system, and IBM Global Business Services continues to be a highly valued partner in our effort to improve quality and efficiency in all our business processes.”

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.

2009 RED HAT INNOVATION AWARD WINNER: MANAGEMENT EXCELLENCE AND INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR

COMPANY: Whole Foods Market

CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Consumer

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a cost-effective operating platform and complementary management solution that would scale with the company’s growth while increasing the security, manageability, and availability of business-critical applications

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: 75 HP x86 servers, 16 virtual servers

BENEFITS: Obtained an easy-to-use and reliable systems management solution that enabled increased productivity and reduced costs by increasing system administrator efficiency; Experienced increased performance and internal-user satisfaction of homegrown applications, including order processing applications.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1980 in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods Market (www.wholefoodsmarket.com) is a leader in the natural and organic foods industry and was America’s first national certified organic grocer. In fiscal year 2008, the company had sales of $8 billion and currently has more than 275 stores, nine distribution centers, and more than 54,000 team members in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Since opening its first store in 1980, Whole Foods has experienced rapid business growth and success at both the national and international levels driven by the market’s desire for natural and organic products available in a friendly, neighborhood shopping experience. As the business grew and technology advancements were made, Whole Foods IT department began evaluating technology solutions and vendors that would enable cost-effective expansion of its IT infrastructure while simultaneously meeting the performance demands of its internal technology users.

The company needed a stable and reliable operating system to run its business-critical homegrown ordering systems and its middleware environment. The company also realized the need for a reliable management solution that would enable its IT staff to focus on strategic projects.

SOLUTION
After testing and cost evaluations, Whole Foods selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on commodity HP x86 servers to run some of its critical order processing and middleware environment components. It also selected Red Hat Satellite as its Linux systems management solution.

“As a cost-conscious company, our IT department is always looking at ways to cut costs without sacrificing performance. More and more of our leadership team is recognizing that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an easy way to do that. Take for example our other major UNIX platforms. While they are stable environments, the hardware, license, and support costs are prohibitive. With Red Hat on an x86 platform, it is a significant difference. In addition to the direct cost benefits, Red Hat Satellite’s management tools allow us to focus on strategic business initiatives,” said Bryan Pennington, senior systems administrator at Whole Foods.

Currently, with more than 90 servers deployed, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the largest UNIX operating system environment at Whole Foods. As the performance of the order processing applications and middleware are highly important programs to the internal customers, Whole Foods’ Enterprise Linux deployment is considered mission-critical to its business.

“Our order processing applications are critical to our daily business operations, and if these systems are down, orders are not put through, deliveries could be delayed, and products might be unavailable to our customers,” said Pennington. “With Red Hat, we have experienced the stability, reliability, and performance we expected and required, and have not encountered interruptions to our daily business operations.”

Whole Foods used the expertise of Red Hat Consulting to install and deploy Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat systems. Built on open standards, Red Hat Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities such as management, provisioning, and monitoring for large Linux deployments. Pennington, a Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) himself, found great value in the Red Hat Consulting team. “Our Red Hat Consultant worked with us side-by-side during the installation, answered all of our questions, provided best practices, and has checked in with us routinely since the engagement,” said Pennington.

In 2008, Whole Foods began using Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) to further improve system administration through enhanced system backup and failover services.

BENEFITS
Pennington attributes Red Hat Satellite’s reliable and easy-to-use management capabilities with cutting company costs. “Red Hat Satellite has allowed us to reallocate resources,” said Pennington. “We’ve been able to assign new hires in strategic business roles because Red Hat Satellite’s management capabilities allow me to manage all of the systems without the additional help. Help would be nice, but with Red Hat Satellite, it’s not as needed.”

The increased performance of some of the homegrown applications resulted in increased internal user satisfaction and the opportunity to grow the Red Hat technology presence at Whole Foods.

“Our internal applications running Red Hat Enterprise Linux are critical to our business and we have complete trust in Red Hat technology and support,” said Pennington. “Our decision to select Red Hat was the right one, and we have never looked back.”

With the use of Red Hat Satellite and PXE boot, new servers are able to quickly be provisioned, configured, and available for use by application teams.

The knowledge transfer with Red Hat Consulting was valuable to the Whole Foods IT team, as the information gained and best practices put into place have saved time and resources since deployment.

“Simply put, with Red Hat Satellite I am able to manage the provisioning, updates, patching, and maintenance of our entire Red Hat environment myself, which would be very difficult otherwise. A result is in cost benefits and resource efficiency gains due to our high Red Hat administrator-to-system ratio.”

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Tallahassee Community College

Industry: Education

Geography: United States

IBM Business Partner: Mainline Information Systems, Red Hat

Business Challenge:
Needing to grow its organization to keep pace with its student body, TCC sought to update its aging IT infrastructure. Its existing environment included an IBM zSeries® 890 mainframe, a storage area network (SAN) with 1TB of capacity and a Novell net­work. The college wanted to boost its technology with reliable, flexible and scalable hardware that featured additional storage capacity to support new initiatives.

Solution: With help from IBM and IBM Business Partner Mainline Information Systems, TCC migrated its applications from its mainframe to an IBM System x™ platform featuring one IBM System x3950 server that hosts the production environment and runs the Red Hat Enterprise Linux® operating system and one System x3950 server that hosts a test environment.

Benefits: Achieves roughly US$250,000 per year in savings by growing its SAN, enabling the college to reallocate the funds to its operating budget. Enables the client to tackle new initiatives with greater flexibility and storage capacity. Supports all of the college’s different enterprise applications and enables it to provide students and faculty with larger storage accounts for e-mail and personalized Web portals

Download the PDF case study

Background
Founded in 1966, Tallahassee Community College (TCC) is a comprehensive open-admission community college. It aims to deliver excellence in teaching and learning through educational programs that promote students’ intellectual, social and personal development.

Challenge
Needing to grow its organization to keep pace with its student body, TCC sought to update its aging IT infrastructure. Its existing environment included an IBM zSeries® 890 mainframe, a storage area network (SAN) with 1TB of capacity and a Novell network. The college wanted to boost its technology with reliable, flexible and scalable hardware that featured additional storage capacity to support new initiatives.

Solution
With help from IBM and IBM Business Partner Mainline Information Systems, TCC migrated its applications from its mainframe to an IBM System x™ platform featuring one IBM System x3950 server that hosts the production environment and runs the Red Hat Linux® operating system and one System x3950 server that hosts a test environment.

To support the institution’s new initiatives, TCC also installed a 25TB SAN composed of an IBM System Storage™ DS4800 device with two IBM System Storage DS4000™ EXP810 Expansion Units. The storage and application servers connect via four 4GB IBM SAN Switches.

TCC leverages IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager software to back up its applications.

Benefits
• Achieves roughly US$250,000 per year in savings by growing its SAN, enabling the college to reallocate the funds to its operating budget
• Enables the client to tackle new initiatives with greater flexibility and storage capacity
• Supports all of the college’s different enterprise applications and enables it to provide students and faculty with larger storage accounts for e-mail and personalized Web portals

“By deploying the IBM System x and IBM System Storage solutions, we save about US$250,000 in IT costs each year. We can now reallocate that money and use it in a way that benefits the students.” —Tallahassee Community College

COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: An aging and costly IT infrastructure was impeding the ability of Union Bank to scale to growth and respond agilely to changing market dynamics

MIGRATION PATH: UNIX™ on high-end RISC machines to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based HP servers; Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux™, Red Hat Network Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform™, JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: More than 150 Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based HP ProLiant servers

BENEFITS: Improve reliability and scalability, cut costs, and deliver new financial services and products to market faster

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Union Bank, N.A., headquartered in San Francisco is a full-service commercial bank providing an array of financial services to individuals, small businesses, middle-market companies, and major corporations. Union Bank is California’s fifth-largest bank by deposits. The bank has 335 banking offices in California, Oregon, and Washington and two international offices. Its holding company, UnionBanCal Corporation, is the 16th largest commercial bank holding company in the U.S. based on assets at March 31, 2009.

Union Bank was selected for its operating platform migration from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Websphere to JBoss to support its mission critical applications at an improved price with greater performance and less up-keep. Union Bank used open source solutions to increase time to market, reliability and return on investment.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
When Mok Choe joined Union Bank in early 2007 as chief technology officer, the Union Bank IT infrastructure faced a host of challenges similar to those of many other companies at the time, mainly increasing costs and resources associated with the maintenance and upkeep of legacy systems.

Over the years, Union Bank’s IT infrastructure had grown increasingly large, cumbersome, and complex. Not only was it costly to operate and maintain, but it couldn’t scale to accommodate the bank’s rapid expansion into new markets. System availability was also a continuing challenge. And as the financial services industry expanded into electronic banking products, Union Bank’s reliance on IT was increasing. The bank thus required an IT infrastructure that could speed new products to market with rock-solid reliability and availability, and which could also scale as needed.

The hardware environment embraced a “big box” approach with a few massive servers at strategic locations that offered little relief when significant impacts occurred. This environment required tremendous overhead with constant monitoring and management of server problems.

The IT department at Union Bank was also under pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its overall IT operations. The solution needed to deliver a robust disaster recovery environment with minimal mean-time-to-restore (MTTR) and maximum mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) times. Finally, the solution needed to better leverage Union Bank’s most highly skilled IT workers. By enabling valued staff workers to reduce the day-to-day support required by overhead-intensive legacy systems, productivity would improve, and the bank’s IT department could move from a reaction to proactive support model.

“First and foremost, we needed to improve system availability,” said Choe. “Secondly, we needed to speed time to market of new financial services products. And at the end of the day, we needed to decrease the cost per transaction of delivering services.”

SOLUTION
Union Bank immediately focused on the task of establishing a new and innovative technology environment. The first decision: to create a new open source-based enterprisewide IT platform to obtain improved availability, agility, scalability and reduced TCO (total cost of ownership), while enabling the support of the bank’s growing IT needs and better alignment with the bank’s overall business plan.

“We did three specific things,” said Choe. “First, we migrated our entire Web-based infrastructure over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so we could go from a scale-up to a scale-out architecture. Next, we ported our teller platform over to JBoss. And third, we wrote a brand new Web-based cash management application built on the entire Red Hat technology stack: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss, Hibernate, and SEAM.”

The strategy started at the operating platform level by replacing the aging UNIX based RISC servers with commodity x86 machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and migrating to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform at the application server level. Union Bank initially utilized Red Hat Network to set up centralized, secure management of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Union Bank took advantage of Red Hat Consulting to assist the IT group with the initial design of the first phases of deploying the new architecture and Web-based applications. The bank’s infrastructure and application development teams attended Red Hat Training to learn valuable tools and lessons on integration and migration issues.

The new strategy also encompassed building a new data center that leveraged virtualization technology on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to dramatically reduce the bank’s hardware footprint. “The bank is very serious about its green initiative, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a key part of that,” said Choe.

One of the most strategic projects was to replace the bank’s operating system environment on branch teller systems with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Within just months, the Union Bank development staff was able to create a “silent” JBoss deployment package and distribute it remotely to over 330 production branch servers.

“The JBoss-based teller application has been running successfully at the 330 branch sites ever since,” said Choe, “The small footprint of JBoss has freed up much needed space on each branch server and has laid the ground work for future expansion. We plan to migrate other customer-facing web applications from Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.”

BENEFITS
Union Bank’s innovative approach to its IT re-architecture has resulted in improvements to system availability, scalability and, resiliency, increased ROI, enhanced security, provisioning, configuration management, and improved time to market.

The most significant benefits have been improved system availability and resiliency. Upon migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there have been improvements of the bank’s hardware infrastructure, as seen by improved mean-time-to restore (MTTR), and mean-time-between-failures (MTBF).

The return on investment (ROI) was also substantial. For example, the large RISC machines were running at less than 50 percent capacity. To ensure redundancy, the bank needed to double its hardware investment to allow for fail over. “With Red Hat’s commodity model, we were able to spread the load over multiple machines and reduce our overall spend by approximately 80 percent,” said Choe. “And these savings don’t take into account the reduced maintenance costs of moving to the Red Hat platform, which is easier – and therefore cheaper – to maintain.”

Additionally, because application performance increased significantly under the new JBoss and Red Hat architecture, the bank was able to reduce the time-to-market of new products. The bank was also able to improve customer service by boosting the performance of its teller application. “The success of that project gives us confidence to tackle the rest of our browser-based Web applications with a JBoss solution,” said Choe.

The move from a vertical to a horizontal architecture and process enhancement have improved both system availability and resiliency, which allows the bank to absorb normal glitches without impacting customer transactions. “The reliability of our Web applications has improved to the point where I can go to our business partners and confidently say we have better than ‘four 9s’ availability,” said Choe.

The Red Hat/JBoss solution requires less maintenance and enables Union Bank IT to reduce their efforts on day-to-day support of legacy systems, allowing for better resource utilization. This also helped the IT group move from a reactive to a proactive model more expediently.

Additionally, the bank’s overall cost-per-transaction declined 25 to 40 percent, something that Union Bank’s business centers appreciate. “We have a charge-back system in which our departments pay for the IT resources they consume,” said Choe. “They’ve seen their charges go down month by month.”

“We benefited greatly from Red Hat consulting services as they provided valuable input and assistance in helping us migrate to Red Hat technology and dramatically improved our ability to achieve our goals,” said Choe, “With Red Hat Consulting, we felt there was an immediate knowledge transfer, and we were very satisfied with the level of involvement and quality of knowledge provided to our team.”

And ultimately many of the ongoing benefits that Choe expects to reap in coming years as a result of transforming the bank’s IT operations come from his expanded technology options. “We’ve achieved tremendous cost, reliability, and availability benefits, but in the end it all comes back to the fact that we now have choices when it comes to deploying hardware and software,” he said. “We’re no longer locked into using a particular product or vendor. Open source – and by extension, Red Hat – makes that possible.”

“The high costs and overhead associated with legacy proprietary-software and infrastructure led us to the decision to deploy Red Hat and JBoss open source solutions, and this allowed us to provide core infrastructure and development platforms at a significantly lower cost and at a faster rate,” said Choe, “Our use of Red Hat and JBoss solutions demonstrate creative business innovation through the use of horizontal architecture and the improvements allow Union Bank to continue to increase our customer experiences.”

COMPANY: GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company)

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: US

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Existing proprietary middleware platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

MIGRATION PATH: Proprietary middleware platform to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform: 28 bands (1 band = 32 CPUs), JBoss Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Consulting, Amentra

HARDWARE: 50 Dell servers

BENEFITS: Reduced the total cost of ownership by more than 30%, throughput gain of 3X with utilization down to 1/3rd of the current platform, overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

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COMPANY BACKGROUND
GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) is the third-largest private passenger auto insurer in the United States based on the latest 12 months written premium. GEICO provides auto insurance coverage for nearly 9 million policyholders and insures more than 14.4 million vehicles.

In addition to auto insurance, GEICO also offers customers insurance for their motorcycles and homes. Commercial auto insurance, boat, ATV, RV, personal umbrella protection and life insurance are also available.

GEICO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Berkshire Hathaway group of companies, is rated A++ for financial stability by A.M. Best Company and ranks at the top of several national customer satisfaction surveys. For more information about GEICO, go to www.geico.com.

BUSINESS AND/OR TECHNICAL CHALLENGE
In 2007, GEICO’s enterprise architecture team recognized they were facing several challenges with their existing proprietary middleware platform. The platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

The GIECO IT team identified the following challenges with their existing proprietary solution:

- Cost – GEICO’s license agreement was a “time bound licensing agreement” related to the number of proprietary application servers deployed during the time frame. Since GEICO experienced significant growth during this time frame, the cost to “true up” and pay for the additional licenses was significant.

- Performance – When GEICO upgraded their standard Java Development Kit (JDK) from version 1.4 to 1.5 on their existing proprietary platform, they did not see any improvements in machine (CPU/Memory) usage or application response time. After eight weeks of performance testing and tuning, they were finally able to configure the upgraded proprietary platform to match the earlier version’s performance. The upgrade was not only cumbersome but was also expensive since they had to engage external consultants to accomplish the upgrade.

- Memory leaks – The previous proprietary deployment also experienced unexplained memory leak(s). Developer load and memory testing returned misleading results unless the developer knew how to work around the leaks and complete certain types of tests.

- Documentation/Support – GEICO found it challenging to identify and understand the Java API in the current proprietary environment due to lack of documentation. They also had challenges in acquiring tools to identify memory issues, debug leaks, etc. For every instance of a high severity issue such as memory leak, external consultants needed to be engaged to identify and fix the problem.

- Staging – Due to these challenges, some of the GEICO development teams adopted JBoss technologies for their developer workstations and began building applications using JBoss. This dual use strategy became complex and redundant for IT Operations as they needed to make configuration changes on both the proprietary and JBoss platforms.

VENDOR SELECTION PROCESS
GEICO conducted extensive research and identified Sun’s GlassFish and Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware as potential solutions that were suitable for GEICO’s application and infrastructure. JBoss Enterprise Middleware was selected based on its’ market share and extensive support from Red Hat. GEICO conducted a proof-of-concept, installing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in a cluster of servers (POC environment). Performance and load tests were conducted using various tools for a selected business application on both platforms.

The JBoss results from these tests were astonishing. A few highlights include:
- User page transition time decreased as much as 19 seconds using JBoss

- During the proof-of-concept 1,749 additional business processes were created on the JBoss platform

- On the same hardware and environment, JBoss required 70% less CPU resources than the current platform

- Performance tuning with JBoss was accomplished in 40 man hours versus 1440 man hours for the existing proprietary platform

GEICO also conducted multiple reference checks with organizations that were of similar size and industry. The reference checks were extremely positive about Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

SOLUTION
The solution consisted of subscriptions for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and the initial deployment environment consisted of 540 processors. An additional 350 were added at a later date. A plan was put together to aggressively migrate 2 out of 3 mission critical applications in a time span of 3 months. GEICO also utilized a JBoss Technical Account Manager (TAM) who was dedicated to supporting GEICO’s specific needs during their switch to JBoss.

BENEFITS
By implementing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, GEICO was able to reduce the total cost of ownership by more than 30%.

When compared to the previous proprietary platform, GEICO also experienced throughput gains of 3x, and a 2/3 reduction in utilization. The overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

RED HAT SUPPORT, TRAINING, AND CONSULTING SERVICES LEVERAGED
One of the challenges for GEICO was the time bound migration process. GEICO’s middleware team was trained on JBoss for a week. With the support of Red Hat and Amentra (a Red Hat company), they successfully migrated the initial 2 applications and were able to migrate the 3rd application as well. This was a clear demonstration of expertise in Red Hat Consulting services and the ability of GEICO’s middleware team to adapt rapidly to the new JBoss environment.

ADVICE FOR OTHER COMPANIES FACING A SIMILAR BUSINESS CHALLENGE
“Open-source does not translate to unsupported. Don’t be afraid of change. GEICO had initial concerns about support, stability and deploying open-source software for its mission critical applications, but the market maturity and the premium level of enterprise support offered by Red Hat made it very easy to make the change to an open source environment. If your organization has been slow to consider adopting open-source solutions, they may lose a competitive advantage that can be gained based on lower cost of ownership and utilization of efficient/best of breed open source products.

COMPANIES: Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) and Optaros

CATEGORY: Extensive Ecosystem

INDUSTRY: Convention center management

GEOGRAPHY: Boston, MA

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Manual processes and siloed systems resulted in inefficient workflows that caused customer service to suffer.

MIGRATION PATH: From a Microsoft™ Windows – based client-server application to service oriented architecture (SOA) J2EE application based upon the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA, JBoss Messaging, JBoss ESB, JBoss jBPM, J2EE™, Google Web Toolkit™, Apache

HARDWARE: Intel Xeon™ – based x86 servers

BENEFITS: More efficient and timely access to data and an automated streamlined workflow that improved worker productivity and customer service levels and increased revenues. Approximately 90 percent of the MCCA’s day-to-day operations are run using open source technologies.

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BACKGROUND
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) owns and oversees the operation of four major facilities, including the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCEC). The MCCA’s mission is to generate local economic activity by attracting conventions, tradeshows, and other events to its world-class facilities. The MCCA has generated $2.3 billion in economic impact over the past five years in the greater Boston area and is the eighth busiest convention center in North America.

Optaros is an open source consulting firm that specializes in the development of custom applications for clients through the Assembled Web. Optaros and MCCA staff worked together to rebuild the MCCA’s event management system. The product, known as ShowBiz, helps streamline the detailed process of setting up large-scale events, and is now completely run on an open source stack that was designed and assembled by Optaros. Approximately 90 percent of the MCCA’s day-to-day operations now run on open source solutions from Red Hat and JBoss.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The MCCA’s business model is based on the premise that it has an “inventory” of convention center space to sell – space that is used to host trade shows, association meetings, and other events. And despite being owned by the state government, the MCCA prides itself on operating like a for-profit business for the economic benefit of the City of Boston and Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In particular, the MCCA team strongly believes in providing an exceptional client experience, which means being able to rapidly configure its facilities and tailor its services to deliver whatever a particular customer wants.

To do this, the MCAA required an IT structure that was fluid, flexible, and scalable. But the application the MCCA was using to manage the sale of space was antiquated and difficult to use. The biggest challenge was that personnel did not have ready access to data. Without this data, users couldn’t make the kind of smart, real-time decisions needed to optimize service delivery and revenues during each stage of an event’s lifecycle. Important business decisions were being affected by the antiquated software, often relying on intuition and guesswork rather than facts. Everyone in the organization was affected by the system’s faults – from the executive suite down to contract electricians.

For example, because the financial database had been separated from the event management system in 2006, all accounts receivable and event creation information had to be manually entered in both applications, creating duplicate work for all involved as well as introducing errors into the databases. Additionally, managing service delivery to the large number of exhibitors was primarily a paper-based manual process that didn’t support online ordering and payment. And then there was scalability. The MCCA realized that its systems were a serious impediment to its ability to grow as planned.

Because of the MCCA’s unique, multi-facility business structure and complex business processes, a commercial off-the-shelf application wouldn’t do. MCCA senior executives knew they needed a new, custom-built solution that was designed to support the specific needs of their business.

Moreover, such a solution needed to provide MCCA employees with more efficient, timely access to data. It had to automate workflows. It had to minimize manual processes and eliminate redundant data entry and utilize technologies that would provide flexibility and scalability for the future needs of the business. Finally, it had to deliver an easy-to-use and elegant user experience that the MCCA could eventually extend access to the application to clients and customers.

SOLUTION
After performing a thorough analysis of its needs, the MCAA brought in Optaros, a Boston-based professional services firm that designs, assembles, supports, and monitors custom Web applications using open source software. “Steve Snyder, the CIO and CTO of the MCCA liked the freedom and the choice that open source offered,” said Errol Apostolopoulos, a management consultant at Optaros, who managed the project. “The fact that we could build him an application based on industry standards was very attractive to him. There were the lower acquisition costs, of course. But then there was also the fact that all the open source technologies, tools, and platforms integrated together so well.”

The MCCA was looking for a scalable solution that could grow with the company — exponentially in regard to data structures. They determined that a SaaS, software as a service, type architectural model, allowing for plug-and-play, iterative updates would offer technology that could evolve and grow along with the organization.

From the beginning, it was clear that Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was going to play a large role in the solution. “Part of our process is to go out and comb the open source community to find the best technologies we can leverage to build our solutions,” said Apostolopoulos. “JBoss was the absolute best choice for the MCCA.”

The MCCA solution contained three pairs of JBoss instances. The first pair was used for the online customer-facing site. By hosting JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in a clustered environment, the MCCA allows exhibitors to purchase services and materials online. Previously, they had to fax in their orders, which then had to be entered into the old event management system manually.

The second JBoss pair also involved using JBoss in a clustered environment, and was used for the MCCA’s internal event management site. This new event management application allowed MCCA personnel to manage all aspects of the event lifecycle – from sales, to event and space setup and configuration, to exhibitor services, to all financial aspects of the event. This application uses JBoss jBPM as the workflow engine for the initiation, review, and approval of space booking throughout the sales cycle, from pre-sales through confirmation upon receipt of the signed contract.

The last JBoss pair hosted the Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This ran all services for executing transactions such as auditing, issuing notifications, and integrating with external organizations’ systems such as PayPal for credit card processing.

Optaros selected Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as the front-end of the system. Business services were developed using Hibernate frameworks to handle queries and transactions.

All JBoss applications and ESB servers were configured to run on Intel Xeon-based hardware under Windows Server 2003. The applications run on a cluster of SQL Server database servers configured for replication and failover. Today, the MCCA employs 10 production servers; four servers for quality assurance (QA) and testing; and two for developing enhancements to the system to run the application.

BENEFITS
MCCA personnel now have ready access to real-time data, as opposed to running reports and requesting information that was often hidden within the old system. Streamlined processes enabled by the new architecture have allowed staff to redeploy time previously spent on unnecessary manual and paper processes to focus on customer service. Overall, employees are much more efficient, and the corporate culture is much more customer-centric than under the previous system.

This tiered architecture is not only secure, but is also scalable, reliable, and available. For instance, the deployment manager can scale the three clusters independently based on their respective usage in terms of number of concurrent users, transactions volume, and more. From a security perspective, the ESB servers act as reverse proxies to a back-office financial management system and PayPal’s credit card processing network.

The fact that Optaros designed the applications using service oriented architecture (SOA)-based plug-in/plug-out framework means that the MCCA’s own IT team can integrate other external services into it as needed going forward. This gives the MCCA the flexibility and scalability to meet its growth objectives while keeping the main application stable.

From a financial perspective, the new applications have been a tremendous success. Employees are no longer wasting time manually inputting duplicate content into multiple systems, but can focus on higher-level tasks. As a direct result of this, the MCAA has been able to collect more than $500,000 in outstanding accounts receivables over the past six months.

And the new applications have allowed the MCCA to deliver a premiere customer experience. Under the old systems, work orders were comprised of 50- to 100-page documents that included details such as the number and location of chairs, the timing of food service, electrical needs, and everything else that impacts the success of an event. Today, all data related to an event is searchable, and MCCA customers are now able to order and update space, tables, internet access, electrical outlets and other services online rather than using the outdated paper faxing process. MCCA personnel are then electronically notified when there are any changes to work orders that affect their roles in an event, and the event system can be trusted to contain the most recent information.

These conveniences are only the first step. The MCCA wants to extend accessibility and transparency to the applications even further. For example, the MCCA hopes to eventually give taxi drivers access to the system so they can see in real time the transportation needs of people attending an event.

Finally, credit card processing is now completed automatically and in real time, instead of manual batch processing at the end of each business day.

“The competence of Red Hat’s consultants and support personnel clearly contributed to the application development team’s overall success,” said Apostolopoulos. “Their support enabled the project team to deploy systems more effectively with the assurance that additional assistance was only a phone call away. The Red Hat team went above and beyond our expectations.”

Apostolopoulos said that he recommends JBoss to its customers whether they are building new applications from scratch or migrating existing applications from proprietary hardware and software to an open source platform.

“We’re finding more enterprises choosing open source – not just because of its low cost and ability to scale, but also because of the flexibility it gives them to choose components that plug and play into their systems as their needs change,” said Apostolopoulos. “And JBoss is clearly the industry middleware standard for these increasingly strategic open source projects.”

“Our customers will soon have access to the same data the staff does, so people can order more services directly through the system,” said Steve Snyder, chief information officer for the MCCA. “The shopping cart and credit card processing for basic client needs are only the first step in offering more accessibility and transparency for customers to directly access data. The MCCA has hopes of allowing more constituents to access pieces of the system. The technology and system that was built, the cooperation between the JBoss, Optaros, and MCCA teams, the full buy-in from MCCA executives to end-users, and everyone being involved in the whole process truly made this deployment a resounding success.”

COMPANY: American Family Mutual Insurance Company

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Property and Casualty Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a cost effective centralized management solution for its 1,200 instances of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform that would scale with its growing computing infrastructure

MIGRATION PATH: ad hoc monitoring solutions to JBoss Operations Network

SOFTWARE:JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON), JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on 150 plus systems, Red Hat Consulting, Oracle DB, HP OpenView

HARDWARE: Intel based Dell x86 commodity servers

BENEFITS: Improved availability and reliability of applications, a monitoring solution that can manage a large number of application server instances, simplified management, enhanced management and monitoring, and reduced costs

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COMPANY BACKGROUND
American Family Mutual Insurance Company, the nation’s third-largest mutual property and casualty insurer and 14th-largest property and casualty insurance company group, offers multiple insurance lines. These offerings include automotive, home, life, health, and business insurance.

American Family began with three employees in 1927 and has since grown to become a Fortune 500 company that generated $6.7 billion in revenue in 2008. American Family has 4,000 agents who serve 19 states.

BUSINESS/TECHNICAL CHALLENGE
An issue of scalability was American Family’s greatest technical challenge, as the Java application server environment was growing consistently and there was a need to identify a cost effective, stable and reliable management solution that would complement this growth. American Family’s prior management system could not scale to the size needed at an appropriate cost.

American Family deployed JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) across 1,200 JBoss application server instances and is using it to monitor and manage those systems.

DESIRED SOLUTION
American Family required a systems management solution that would provide: Real-time monitoring, alerting, historical trending, and the ability to control running systems in its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform environment. Performance of the product was a huge criteria-performance not only to scale, but to be responsive so that the operations team could use it successfully on a daily basis.

JBOSS PRODUCTS USED IN FINAL SOLUTION
About 3 years ago, American Family began migrating its IBM WebSphere environment to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to run many of the company’s business critical applications, including billing and claims, customer information management, an agent-facing sales suite, and web services. As the JBoss environment grew, American Family quickly identified the need for the tools to help monitor and manage the servers. The company evaluated a number of tools from several leading vendors and selected JBoss ON based on cost, scalability, and functionality.

The American Family operations team was asked to monitor, manage, and control a very large computing infrastructure with several different tools. JBoss ON will allow the Computer Operations team to manage the entire JBoss infrastructure with one console.

American Family will also continue to look for additional opportunities to use JBoss ON with their application developers. It is hoped that by using JBoss ON, American Family will be better able to detect and fix problems earlier in the software delivery life-cycle.

BUSINESS IMPACT
American Family expects to see improved reliability in the application server space due to the JBoss ON feature of historical trend analysis of key system metrics and faster time to react when there are problems due to the alerts based on those same metrics.

American Family is hoping to extend this capability into application support areas to detect problems early in the software development lifecycle. Through alerting, monitoring, and the opportunity to proactively address situations before they cause an outage, JBoss ON will improve the reliability and availability of Java application server applications and keep internal customers satisfied.

Ad hoc management scripts and tooling will be replaced with JBoss ON. The result should reduce time and effort needed to manage, monitor and control systems.

VALUE-ADD TO BUSINESS FROM JBOSS
American Family has been working in a collaborative manner with the JBoss ON engineering, support and product team for close to two years. JBoss provided four people on-site and over the course of two days, they worked out a number of technical challenges that could not have been tested or seen in the lab. This collaboration has resulted in improved scalability and features.

END-CUSTOMER VALUE
By working together, American Family and Red Hat have given back something of value to the open source community.

RED HAT CONSULTING / SUPPORT
American Family worked closely with JBoss ON resources to ensure that the product met functional and non-functional requirements such as scalability and performance.

ADVICE FOR COMPANIES FACING SIMILAR CHALLENGES
American Family suggests detailing the desired solution’s requirements and identify a provider who not only can offer the specific product, but also the support and willingness to collaborate and devote resources to making the relationship successful.

INNOVATION
The American Family and JBoss collaborative work on JBoss ON blazed a trail for the future features and scalability of the monitoring and management product and will provide benefits to other customers and developers to capitalize on.”

COMPANIES: Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Rivet Logic

CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Publishing

GEOGRAPHY: Cambridge, Massachusetts

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: The HBP’s ability to get new products to market and the quality of the customer experience at its e-commerce site were hindered by a proprietary operating system, a difficult-to-use legacy content management system (CMS), and inflexible customer-facing Web applications, which were negatively impacting the HBP’s revenues and limiting growth

MIGRATION PATH: From a proprietary operating system running a proprietary legacy CMS application to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running the Alfresco Content Management System

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Frameworks including JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, jBPM, Oracle Database, and Alfresco’s open source Content Management System

HARDWARE: Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based Dell™ 2950 multicore servers

BENEFITS: Increased employee productivity, lowered IT operational costs, and increased Web site traffic and e-commerce transactions

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BACKGROUND
Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University which publishes a range of content – both print and online – bridging the knowledge gap between academic and the corporate world. It serves three primary markets: academic, enterprise, and individual managers. With more than 250 employees, the HBP’s mission is to explore and improve management practices around the world. HBP’s major Web properties include the online version of Harvard Business Review (hbr.org), Harvard Business Digital (harvardbusiness.org), and Higher Education (www.hbsp.harvard.edu). Rivet Logic and HBP were selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for the use open source solutions from Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco that have enabled increased stability and the ability to develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions that help organizations engage with customers, improve collaboration, and streamline operations. The company offers a full suite of JBoss professional services – including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack. With complementary expertise in the Alfresco content management platform, Rivet Logic offers integrated, content-rich, and Web-oriented architecture (WOA)-enabled solutions that power a new generation of interactive Web properties, enterprise intranet applications, and collaborative Web 2.0 communities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
To stay innovative and develop new products faster, HBP’s business users require the ability to easily access and use content from a variety of systems across the range of HBP business units. But the existing aging content management system was limiting access to only a few trained power users, which routinely resulted in productivity bottlenecks across all units.

To further challenge the workflow and production of HBP products, critical content resided on various shared drives across the enterprise or was locked up in the proprietary system, making it increasingly difficult for HBP to repurpose existing content into the kind of new digital media products that the fast-moving business information marketplace was seeking.

“Strategically, HBP knew it needed to transform itself from a print organization – which what it was for the past 10 to 20 years – to a digital media organization,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic Corporation, a professional open source services and solutions firm hired by the HBP to reengineer the core IT platform and mission-critical applications.

The growing array of aging and disparate legacy middleware and operating systems used to run HBP’s Web sites was also proving increasingly unstable. The system routinely caused integration hurdles, IT bottlenecks, and escalating operational costs due to personnel overhead and software licensing fees. The lack of easy-to-use Web publishing tools hindered the editorial staff’s ability to deliver fresh and innovative content and, consequently, limited HBP’s ability to drive site traffic and therefore the ad revenue and e-commerce transactions that contributed directly to the firm’s bottom line.

In addition to the financial overhead due to high software licensing and maintenance costs, a large percentage of IT operational costs and human resources were spent just keeping the old systems running, leaving little time and resources for developing innovative new products. The proprietary legacy systems were difficult to customize and integrate, and could not scale to keep pace with HBP’s expanding business.

SOLUTION
HBP recognized it needed to replace its proprietary content management system with a robust, yet easy-to-use enterprise-grade content management system that would facilitate access to its high-value content to its business users and integrate seamlessly with existing systems such as enterprise content repositories, search and merchandising tools, e-commerce systems, ad networks, Web analytics, and community-building applications such as blogs.

HBP required a solution that provided increased flexibility around page design and messaging, easy access to digital products, a uniform user experience, easy-to-use e-commerce experience, and improved visitor experience for user registration and session management. HBP also sought a higher level of performance, scalability, and rock-solid stability.

One absolutely non-negotiable requirement: the new solution needed to be built with open source software and an open architecture with an enterprise Java foundation at the core. It also needed to support rapid, lightweight development at the upper layers of the application stack – most notably at the user interface layer and presentation tier. This requirement would focus on HBP’s business goals and on leveraging HBP’s very high-value content and core capabilities to enable future innovation.

This is where Rivet Logic came in. Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions and offers a full suite of JBoss professional services including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack.

Rivet Logic implemented an end-to-end open source solution that delivered on all of HBP’s requirements. HBP’s production ecosystem was built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell 2950 servers with dual and quad core CPUs, running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Apache, Oracle Database, and the Alfresco Content Management System.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was used as a core component for the dynamic content delivery system and e-commerce experience. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the basis for a WOA that enabled straightforward integration with numerous enterprise back-end systems and third-party Web services, including enterprise resource management (ERP), ad servers, XML repositories, taxonomy management, third-party search, Web analytics, and a user ID management system.

In addition, JBoss Seam served as the rich user interface (UI) framework for an intranet application for enterprise content management, and the public-facing Web applications for the online versions of Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, HBP’s e-commerce site at harvardbusiness.org, and HBP’s Higher Education site at www.hbsp.harvard.edu. In all cases, the JBoss Seam applications were integrated with Alfresco for back-end content management. The intranet application utilized Alfresco’s document management (DM) repository, whereas the Web site applications utilized Alfresco’s Web content management (WCM) repository.

JBoss Hibernate provided the persistence layer for all application logic and user-generated content, and jBPM governed workflow for editorial content and publishing processes. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the foundation necessary for HBP’s mission-critical applications that required high performance and scalability. Rivet Logic used a WOA approach for the need for single-sign-on support, while also enabling integration with a variety of systems, including a blogging platform (blogs.harvardbusiness.org), e-commerce, an XML repository (for HBR article content), and community platforms. Integration with a third-party search engine offered powerful faceted search and navigation functionalities. This content delivery approach also met standards-compliant XHTML/CSS requirements, maintained SEO-friendly URLs, and allowed for straightforward integration of Web analytics. Integration between JBoss and Alfresco was streamlined by using free and open source software from Rivet Logic, including the Remote Alfresco API rivet for Alfresco DM integration and the Crafter rivet for Alfresco.

The JBoss Seam intranet application allows enterprise users to:

- Navigate, search, find and retrieve relevant content quickly through a combination of full-text search, metadata search, and content relationship browsing

- Create and enter new content and associate metadata and relationships

- Manage digital rights of product-related media

- Restrict access to certain types of content through role-based user authorization

“The new JBoss and Alfresco based intranet provides an easy way for end-users to search and find content, as the search results deliver detailed content, such as individual chapters, images, author bios and the public-facing HBP site provides visitors a rich experience for navigating and consuming HBP’s digital content,” said Vertal, “The JBoss and Alfresco based Web content delivery system provides the dynamic and feature-rich functionalities HBP needed in a simplified manner by seamlessly connecting the presentation, application and content repository layers.”

BENEFITS
By using Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco open source solutions, HBP has gained platform agility that enables brand management, broader community functionality, and increased site traffic. The JBoss and Alfresco integrated solution has enabled HBP to gain the stability and ease of use it required to empower business end users and integrate with a host of critical applications and systems. With the new system in place, HBP can now develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

From a developer perspective, HBP’s IT department can now focus on value-added development of new application and site features given the open source architecture and the modern WOA infrastructure. Dramatically less time and resources are now spent on maintaining rigid, legacy systems that carried expensive maintenance and software licensing costs.

The new implementation has enabled HBP to better leverage the value of its branded content, including articles, books and book chapters, blogs, podcasts, and videos – easily, quickly and securely.

“Uniting all content across the enterprise led to the rapid development of new digital media products and richer content on HBP’s revenue-generating Web properties,” said Vertal, “With Red Hat, JBoss and Alfresco, HBP has enhanced the visitor experience with improved navigation, along with much faster Web site performance. By offering fresher and more dynamic content and increasing site traffic, HBP has started to expand its revenue opportunities.”

“This project was as mission-critical as they come,” said Vertal. “It encompassed the back-end repository, the front-end application that internal users deployed to create new content and products, and a customer-facing Web application that delivered those products to customers through a variety of channels. Red Hat Enterprise Linux coupled with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform drove a total transformation of the way that HPB approached product development and delivery.”

Business agility has also increased by orders of magnitude, said Vertal. “Because we were on the new platform, in a matter of months we were able to replace the entire e-commerce front end with a much better user experience and more manageable applications.”

The stability of the system has also proven itself. And, looking forward, HBP has plans to begin incorporating social media into the site using collaborative tools and community applications that will enable its employees to become better engaged with customers. “This will allow HBP to build and maintain better customer loyalty across its entire customer base,” said Vertal.

“We utilized leading edge, open source platforms from Red Hat, Alfresco, and Rivet Logic to implement a large-scale, high-value, business-critical solution that spans internal enterprise collaboration applications, public-facing Web properties and communities, and business-critical e-commerce applications,” said Vertal, “We believe this project demonstrates the powerful benefits that commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss and the open source ecosystem is ready to deliver to major enterprises for the converged world of content, community, collaboration, and commerce.”
CUSTOMER ADVICE

“Any enterprise or government agency that is looking to increase employee productivity and/or improve relationships with customers should seek to leverage next-generation solutions that expand their use of content, community, collaboration, and community. And just as the consumer Web 2.0 was built on open source software, these next generation Enterprise 2.0 solutions are being built on enterprise-grade, commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss, Alfresco, and others. All organizations should seek to leverage commercial open source software as much as possible for any and all future enterprise software initiatives,” said Vertal.

“Businesses should remember that software is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Companies should first focus on business requirements and desired results, and leverage the best-of-breed software technologies that will help them get there. And whether the business needs better internal-facing, content-enabled enterprise applications, improved external-facing Web properties, or e-commerce platforms, JBoss software has proven it can help deliver tremendous bottom- line results,” said Vertal.

FAST FACTS

Company: CME Group

Industry: Financial Exchange

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To migrate from a cost-inhibitive proprietary UNIX platform to a Linux alternative in order to reduce costs and increase performance, reliability, scalability, and agility of the systems on which its critical trading platforms handle billions of derivatives trades per year, worth more than a quadrillion in notional value

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Training

Hardware: 4,000 x86 quad-core servers

Migration Path: Sun Solaris on SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on x86-based servers

Benefits: Achieved reduced latency, expanded flexibility, heightened performance, ease of migration and management, and increased scalability while providing cost savings for the systems responsible for processing CME Group’s millions of daily transactions

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market. We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience.”
–Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group.

Download case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
CME Group is the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange. Building on the heritage of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, and New York Mercantile Exchange, CME Group serves the risk management needs of customers around the globe. As an international marketplace, CME Group brings buyers and sellers together on the CME Globex electronic trading platform and on trading floors in Chicago and New York.

CME Group provides the widest range of benchmark futures and options products available on any exchange, covering all major asset classes, including interest rates, equities, FX, commodities, and alternative investments such as weather and real estate. CME Group’s vision is one of ongoing global growth, innovative product development, continually enhanced technology, and the highest level of service available on any exchange.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
CME Group processes millions of transactions per day. In 2008, CME Group’s volume totaled 3.3 billion contracts, worth $1.2 quadrillion in notional value. In order to meet the heavy demands placed on its IT systems, CME Group has rigorous requirements that must be met across the performance, scalability, reliability, ease of use, and costs of its IT infrastructure.

CME Group’s IT architecture must also be agile to scale with rapid system changes in demand and volume. It must reduce latency wherever possible to ensure millisecond response times for its customers, and needs the reliability, scalability, and performance of a mission-critical infrastructure.

Since 1997, CME Group has witnessed a migration of trading volume from the trading floors to its Globex electronic trading platform. Today, 80 percent of CME Group’s volume is handled by its electronic trading platform, with 20 percent of volume still handled on the trading floor.

CME Group previously relied on a proprietary UNIX operating platform, but began looking for affordable, high-performance alternatives in 2002. “Our systems were relying on a proprietary UNIX platform,” said Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group. “As the responsibilities of the UNIX servers grew and the number of applications they ran continued to expand, the cost of running those applications grew too.”

CME Group began investigating alternative platforms and placed an emphasis on examining open source Linux options. After rigorous internal testing, CME Group’s IT team decided that a move to Linux would provide cost, performance, and reliability benefits over its previous Solaris platform. To prepare for the migration, the team created an eight-step plan for moving to Linux.

SOLUTIONS
A key factor in CME Group’s plan to move to Linux was to identify a technology vendor that could provide optimized support for its Linux operating systems. “Our systems are too critical to not have someone to turn to in the event that an issue arises,” said Panfil. “We looked at the players, and Red Hat had the best support infrastructure and the most solid product.”

“We saw the performance advantages of Linux and were looking for ways to reduce costs and increase performance for our customers,” said Vinod Kutty, associate director, Distributed Computing at CME Group. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux fit the bill, and we started to gradually test and deploy it internally. Our organization was an early adopter of open source technologies, and we first deployed Linux in 2003.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the primary operating platform for CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform in 2004. The exchange began by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, and has migrated to all of the latest versions of the leading operating platform through today’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. During the first year in production in 2004, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered a twofold increase in performance and reduced costs for CME Group by 50 percent. Today, 99 percent of its distributed platform runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers support both CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform as well as devices on its trading floors. “We still have a huge interest in the trading floor, but the electronic trading platform is very attractive to those who desire the speed it delivers,” said Panfil. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports both the electronic trading platform and the floor through the server floor displays and hand-held trading devices.”

CME Group’s IT architecture is designed so that every application runs on a minimum of two servers and a disaster-recovery server. “We try to design applications so that failover is seamless and customers don’t see interruptions,” said Panfil.

The move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on commodity x86 hardware goes hand-in-hand with CME Group’s horizontal scalability model. “Red Hat helped us achieve the level of horizontal scalability that we needed,” said Kutty. “Our ability to add incremental capacity to the thousands of servers we maintain daily with the reliability to deal with the great demands of day-to-day trading is only capable because of Linux and our work with Red Hat.”

Given the history and partnering with Red Hat, CME is considering extending that partnership to JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology. “We’ve worked with JBoss architects on solutions in the past and are now determining if JBoss can help us drive the open source software community in the same manner Red Hat has driven the operating system,” said Joel Tosi, lead applications architect for Front-End Systems at CME Group.

Relying on one vendor for support for both its operating system and middleware layers has proved valuable to CME Group. “The coordination between Red Hat and CME Group has been great,” said Tosi. “We knew we wanted to grow the partnership with Red Hat that we had already established and grown for more than six years. With Red Hat, we also knew we’d get the high visibility we wanted for both our operating system and middleware projects.”

BENEFITS
Performance is a key metric by which CME Group is judged by its customers. Many of CME Group’s customers’ highest priorities are reduced latency and speed. “We need a good balance of performance and reliability,” said Kutty. “We need to be able to react very quickly to changes in business. We don’t want fluctuations in performance and cannot have any downtime.”

“One thing we found was that Linux was faster, and speed in this industry is really important,” said Panfil. “We want customers to get as fast a response time as possible, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux we gained speed and reduced costs.”

The reduced costs associated with Linux were an attractive factor to CME Group’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Cost savings was something we were targeting, but we didn’t know how dramatic the cost savings would be,” said Kutty. “We saved during the initial switch from the support perspective, but over time, a combination of Linux and commodity hardware has continued to deliver reduced costs.”

The IT team expects to gain continued cost savings from elimination of licensing with both its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform solutions and through resource reallocation. “We see cost savings not only from both the operating system and middleware infrastructures, but from the productivity of staff too,” said Tosi. “We see productivity gains when our staff has the ability to see into the code and also through the ease of management of the systems.”

CME Group also reduced costs by gaining flexibility with its systems. CME Group strategically executes a multi-vendor strategy in order to avoid vendor lock-in. With Red Hat, it achieved a platform with great flexibility through a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software vendors.

CME Group was quickly able to transition its administrators’ UNIX expertise to its new systems. The team leveraged hands-on Red Hat Training courses to ease the shift of both skills and systems, which resulted in a seamless migration. CME Group also benefited from the skills of its dedicated Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), who offers additional, ongoing Red Hat expertise to the exchange’s IT team. Its TAM is the first line of support and provides one point of contact through which CME Group can collaborate with Red Hat on new technologies and support needs.

“The practical, hands-on nature of Red Hat Training courses provided real value to the transition of our team’s skills to Linux,” said Kutty. “All of our system administrators are Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE).”

CME Group today works closely with Red Hat’s performance teams to demonstrate workloads and tune systems for the great performance and reliability demands it mandates for its mission-critical systems. It builds synthetic workloads that replicate the demands of its systems in order to collaborate with Red Hat for future developments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other products. Together, Red Hat and CME Group form a technology partnership that benefits the entire open source community as well as the vast community of Red Hat customers.

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market,” said Panfil. “We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience. To be competitive in this industry, we have to use the best possible applications, operating systems, and servers. For our mission-critical systems, we leverage Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

FAST FACTS

Companies: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Zimbra

Industry: Higher education; technology (software)

Geography: Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Sunnyvale, California

Business Challenge: The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee needed to replace an aging email system with a new platform that would provide innovative collaboration solutions to their 50,000 accounts

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Zimbra Collaboration Suite

Benefits: Reduced IT administration and support costs by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as primary campus operating system; By migrating the existing email system to Zimbra Collaboration Suite, UWM improved communication and collaboration among students, faculty and staff and provided a single integrated calendar and email solution; increased focus on student retention by providing tools to manage their academic and personal schedules and stay connected with faculty.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the most requested OS today, primarily due to its stability and performance. It was the obvious choice as the primary deployment platform for Zimbra.”
—Ramesh May, Senior Manager, Marketing and Products, Zimbra

“When evaluating integrated email and calendar solutions, we focused on the total cost of ownership—that is, the lifetime cost, not just the purchase cost—of the applications. Zimbra running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux emerged as the clear consensus choice.” —Bruce Maas, chief information officer, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Download the case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
Located in Wisconsin’s largest city, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) serves as academic home to nearly 30,000 graduate and undergraduate students and an employer to more than 3,500 full-time staff and faculty. Formed in 1955 by a merger between the existing University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Wisconsin State College of Milwaukee, UWM encompasses 12 schools and colleges, and offers 156 degree programs. Just five blocks from the shores of Lake Michigan and a 10-minute drive from downtown Milwaukee, the campus spans 93 acres, with satellite facilities located throughout the Milwaukee metropolitan area.

Founded in 2003 (and purchased by Yahoo! in 2007), Sunnyvale, California-based Zimbra is the creator of leading open source email and collaboration software. Zimbra’s state-of-the-art application integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, voice over IP (VoIP), and online document authoring into a single application with a rich browser-based interface. Deployed by more than 500 academic institutions around the world, Zimbra Collaboration Suite is compatible with all standard email clients, features over-the-air mobile sync to iPhone and BlackBerry, and integrates easily with third-party applications. As of March 2009, Zimbra had more than 40 million paid mailboxes.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Building community among students, faculty and staff is a key objective for most universities. And technology—in the form of email, calendaring, messaging, and collaboration solutions—has become an essential tool in achieving that objective. At the turn of the century, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) realized it was outgrowing its communications infrastructure, and in 2004, the IT team began planning for the vital task of replacing its aging and disparate email and calendar systems.

The first step: to perform a “needs analysis” based upon what the community of students, faculty members and staff desired. This was no small task: with more than 50,000 accounts, it took a full year to gather input about what would be required from an email/calendar system capable of meeting UWM’s needs. And it wasn’t until the end of this long process, that the UWM IT staff realized that what community members really wanted was an integrated email, calendar and messaging solution.

“From the moment calendaring entered the picture, deploying a holistic communications solution that would allow us to stay in better touch—especially with new freshman—became our key goal,” said UWM chief information officer Bruce Maas. “Most students that drop out do so during the first semester of their first year. We realized that if we could strengthen students’ connection to the University community in those crucial first six to eight weeks, we could improve our student retention rates significantly.”

By soliciting input from its faculty, staff and students, the University had developed a long list of requirements—more than 40—to drive the selection of the email and calendaring system.

Three of these emerged as absolutely critical elements in evaluating the new solution: 1) The University needed to employ a single email, calendaring and messaging environment to serve all members of the campus community (students, faculty and staff) replacing the previous distinct systems for different departments; 2) The environment needed to be user platform-independent and provide the same level of service regardless of desktop or laptop computer; and 3) The environment should be able to scale to 50,000 accounts.

SOLUTION
With its requirements defined, UWM embarked on a lengthy selection process that involved sending requests for proposals to virtually every vendor in the email and collaboration software business. In the end, UWM received proposals from five vendors—Microsoft, IBM, Sun, CommuniGate, and Zimbra—but the Zimbra solution quickly rose to the top of the list.

The No. 1 reason: the low total cost of ownership (TCO) while meeting all requirements. Said Maas, “We focused on the TCO—that is, the lifetime cost, not just the purchase cost of the application—and Zimbra emerged as the consensus choice.” Indeed Zimbra’s own studies show its TCO to be 20 percent to 30 percent lower than that of Microsoft Exchange, according to Ramesh May, senior manager of marketing and products for Zimbra.

Another critical element in the decision was the fact that the University had standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux several years earlier. With close to 400 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux—which also serves as Zimbra’s primary development and deployment platform—the UWM team felt confident that Zimbra Collaboration Suite would be optimized for the UWM environment. Add to that Zimbra’s rich feature set, open source technology, administrator-friendly architecture, compatibility with campus systems, and ability to synchronize with other desktop clients, and the choice was clear.

In 2007, UWM inked a contract with Zimbra, and by the summer of 2008, it had migrated both its email and calendar functions to the new system.

BENEFITS
Today, UWM is employing Zimbra Collaboration Suite to support the email, calendar, messaging, and collaboration needs of the vast majority of its 50,000 accounts.

“We’re looking to help students get through a life transition and stay in school when they’re dealing with many more degrees of freedom than they’re accustomed to,” said Maas. “We view the calendar as a way to achieve this because it helps them better organize their multiple roles, whether academic, student life, or personal.”

According to Maas, feedback from the campus community has been very positive. “The fact that we can automatically populate calendars with key dates such as financial aid and tuition payment deadlines, or class schedules and exam dates, and then make it easy to subscribe to these calendars, is a major service enhancement to those using the service, and this level of interaction will improve communications with our students at UWM,” he said.

With a pre-negotiated long-term contract and annual maintenance fees locked in, the TCO estimates have been spot-on. As a result, “we’re delivering an integrated calendaring and email solution at a total cost of around $10 per account annually,” said Maas, “Which is cost-effective for the business and academic value, and greater efficiency we receive from a unified environment.”

On top of the cost savings associated with Zimbra, UWM also benefited from significant cost savings with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And Red Hat Enterprise Linux played a major role in the success of the project. Not only did standardizing on it allow UWM to increase IT worker productivity and reduce its support and overhead costs, but Zimbra chose it as a development platform because of its reliability, performance, and scalability.

“Because Zimbra is a highly sophisticated product, we needed a rock-solid development platform,” said May. “The stability and performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the best in the industry. It was the obvious choice as a development platform for Zimbra.”

David Crass, UWM’s chief enterprise architect, echoed May’s sentiments: “We have a relatively complex environment, and we’ve found the tools included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux suit our environment well,” he said. “What’s more, due to Red Hat’s enterprise class support, we know we can rely on them to provide service when needed.”

As for the future, UWM has big plans for Zimbra. For starters, the school is looking to integrate its homegrown tutoring and mentoring system.

“With Zimbra, we can let faculty, staff and students incorporate their personal lives into their calendars, and subscribe to a large number of academic and organizational calendars based on their personal interests, which helps them better able to juggle all of their responsibilities and in effect further connects them to the UWM community,” said Maas.

FAST FACTS

Company: National City Corporation

Industry: Financial services

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Reengineering the datacenter infrastructure with a cost-effective and scalable platform that provided mission-critical reliability and superior performance to accommodate fast-paced business expansion

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle DB

Hardware: 600 Intel Xeon Processor-based x86-based physical and virtual HP ProLiant DL580 servers

Migration Path: From UNIX systems, including Sun Solaris, running on proprietary RISC machines to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon Processor-based HP ProLiant servers

Benefits: Reduced IT operating costs down to two cents per transaction which has the potential to save millions over the life of the systems, provided the ability to scale for business growth, and reegineered datacenter without unscheduled business interruptions

Download the PDF case study

“In addition to its ability to scale, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has rock-solid reliability and has been extremely stable. Our decision to standardize on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure was key to enabling rapid business growth while maintaining customer service levels.” – Thomas McGinnis, platform engineer, PNC (formerly National City Corporation)

BACKGROUND
Prior to being acquired by PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (www.pnc.com), National City Corporation was the eighth largest financial holding company in the country, with core businesses of commercial and retail banking, mortgage financing and servicing, consumer finance, and asset management. As a part of PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. one of the nation’s largest diversified financial services organizations – which provides retail and business banking; specialized services for corporations and government entities; wealth management; asset management; and global fund services – PNC will become the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits.

The acquisition of National City is expected to place PNC fourth among U.S. banks based upon number of branches, and will give PNC the No. 1 deposit share position in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky and the No. 2 position in Indiana and Maryland.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Due to increasing business demands, rising costs, and an aging database infrastructure, National City had made the strategic decision to reegineer its datacenter infrastructure.

National City decided that reegineering its datacenter by migrating from costly proprietary RISC machines running Sun Solaris and other UNIX distributions to commodity x86 blade machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux would enable future growth. Two things drove this decision: a directive from senior management to cut costs, and the need to scale capacity quickly to accommodate the rapid growth of the business.

“Our processing needs were going up, and we needed to find a way to meet those needs at the lowest possible cost,” said Thomas McGinnis, a platform engineer at what was then National City, in Cleveland. “Clearly, this pointed to the deployment of Linux on commodity hardware as opposed to building an entirely new datacenter.”

SOLUTION
Reegineering National City’s datacenter infrastructure was vital in enabling the continued growth of the bank’s business. The existing datacenter contained costly systems running UNIX, with no opportunity to scale for growth. The datacenter’s new infrastructure runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a combination of physical and virtual HP ProLiant DL580 servers in a production environment.

In evaluating Linux vendors, it became quickly apparent to National City that the choice was between Novell SUSE or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. National City asked its internal developers and administrators for feedback and their response was quick and decisive: Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Their reasons centered upon the richer functionality and performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided, as well as their familiarity with that particular Linux distribution,” said McGinnis. “For our users, Linux was synonymous with Red Hat, and we were also impressed that we would get superior performance, reliability, and stability at an attractive pricepoint.”

The Intel Xeon Processor-based HP ProLiant servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux support the bank’s most business-critical applications, from Oracle financial software, to JBoss Enterprise Middleware-based applications, online transaction processing (OLTP) systems and customer-facing loan application systems. All are replicated with immediate storage back-up.

National City’s datacenter has deployed 150 HP ProLiant servers running 400 virtualized instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “We did this primarily for cost reasons,” said McGinnis. “We were purchasing increasingly powerful hardware, and needed a way to condense things down. We’re at a point where we can get as many as 1,100 guests running on a single rack of blade servers natively running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

One of the crown jewels of National City’s IT infrastructure was a new high-density facility featuring water-chilled racks, each of which could hold 54 blade servers. “It really improved our ability to provision hardware quickly, as we could pre-deploy the hardware and pre-stage it,” said McGinnis.

A homegrown application allows users to request resources, and the application designs and deploys the servers they need automatically. “Users put requests in and we can satisfy the requests within the day,” said McGinnis.

“In addition to its ability to scale, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers rock solid reliability and has been extremely stable. Our decision to standardize on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure was key to enabling rapid business growth while maintaining customer service levels,” said McGinnis.

BENEFITS
The price-performance of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform has proven exceptional. In 2007, PNC evaluated the best platform to run Oracle Financials Software.

“We tested UNIX running on a variety of machines including a RISC server that cost a quarter of a million dollars and is one of the most powerful boxes you can buy, and compared it to a Intel Xeon processor-based HP Proliant DL580 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said McGinnis, “The Intel Xeon processor-based HP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux combination blew everything away. Given those performance results, we started migrating our Oracle applications over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux immediately.”

“Red Hat is acknowledged by everyone in our organization – from senior management on down — as key to supporting the growth of our business,” said McGinnis. “It has allowed us to scale at a cost we could not have achieved with any other vendor.”

As Red Hat’s reputation within National City grew, the bank’s business divisions began asking for their applications to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today it is the the standard operating system. “The internal performance related adoption made things a lot easier for us, as it allowed us to phase out even more of our UNIX machines in favor of Red Hat,” he said. The bank continues to perform benchmarks to validate that its strategy is on course.

“We were able to improve the price-performance of our financial applications on the Red Hat and Intel processor-based HP ProLiant servers to achieve two cents per transaction, which will translate to millions in savings,” said McGinnis, “and was far lower than what we were able to achieve with the UNIX based systems.”

The large – and growing – community of application vendors that certify their software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux accelerated adoption throughout the bank. “A lot of vendors were initially cautious, but we gradually saw more and more application certifications as more businesses moved to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from proprietary operating systems,” said McGinnis. “This is now one of the major attractions of Red Hat.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also paved the way for other, indirect, cost savings. For example, its ease of use made it possible for the bank’s IT employees to be more productive.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a lot more user-friendly than Solaris, which has a very high learning curve,” said McGinnis. “This allows our team to do more. That, coupled with the fact that Red Hat’s business model provides more for less, gave us the opportunity to achieve even more significant cost savings.”

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Download the PDF case study

FAST FACTS

Company: Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation (OL&T)

Industry: Transportation: Managed logistics services for the chemicals and process industries

Geography: Headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut with international offices in North America and Europe

Business Challenge: Needed to cost-effectively scale its infrastructure to meet exponential growth in the business

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle Database, Oracle ProC

Hardware: 33 multi-core Intel® Xeon® based IBM xSeries servers

Migration Path: HP-UX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and multicore Intel Xeon processor based servers

Benefits: Ability to add transaction processing and storage capacity quickly and cost-effectively as business continues to expand. Ensures uptime and reliability to customers relying on Odyssey Logistics & Technology to run mission-critical supply chain operations

“Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat. Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”
– Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services, Odyssey Logistics & Technology

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Odyssey Logistics & Technology provides global logistics management services to the chemical industry and other process manufacturers. OL&T delivers a comprehensive portfolio of logistics services to the chemicals and process industries so that clients’ products are delivered safely, reliably and economically, with the advantage of shipment visibility and actionable data across all modes.  

OL&T presents a unique scope of industry knowledge, experience and technology, applied to client supply chain operations in two distinct outsourced logistics contexts: Managed Logistics Services and Third Party Services. The OL&T team of chemical engineers and logisticians brings unparalleled expertise—they are chemical and process industry insiders, intimately familiar with the supply chain complexities and hazardous materials requirements. Its technology backbone, the Odyssey Global Logistics PlatformSM features a net-native transportation management infrastructure that supports highly integrated, flexible and data-rich service offerings.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2005, OL&T ran its business primarily on HP-UX and Windows systems. But that infrastructure simply couldn’t support a business growing as fast as OL&T’s. First, there were cost issues. Adding proprietary RISC/UNIX hardware to handle its rapidly rising transaction volumes was prohibitively expensive. “So we began looking at ways we could handle growth by using standard based servers rather than simply buying more UNIX boxes,” said Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services for OL&T.

Then there was reliability. As OL&T’s customer list grew to include some of the largest and most recognizable names in the chemical industry, it simply couldn’t afford any downtime. “UNIX and Windows are not the friendliest environments to operate,” said Massey. “With the growth we were experiencing, we had a lot of concerns about the stability and scalability of our systems. We needed to make sure we could handle all of the new customers we were implementing.” According to Massey, the impact of downtime would be serious to OL&T’s customers. “We’re integrated right into our customers’ supply chain operations, and have to respond in real time to their needs 24/7,” he said. “We’re mission-critical to them, which means that having a stable infrastructure is mission-critical to us,” he said.

Over the past three years, OL&T has seen an 83% compounded growth rate in transactions through the system. Given the firm’s rapid rate of growth, the ability to scale was critical. OL&T decided it needed to implement a virtualized environment so that it would be able to scale on-demand.

SOLUTION
To address all these challenges, OL&T decided to do a complete infrastructure “refresh” that involved migrating all of its HP-UX and most of its Windows systems over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers. Today, OL&T deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM xSeries servers and virtualized on IBM 3850 M2 servers. It also implemented Red Hat Satellite to manage provisioning and administration of its Red Hat systems. “Through our use of Red Hat Satellite, Odyssey has realized: centralized configuration management and compliance, faster patch deployment and more streamlined server deployment,” said Massey.

On the decision to move to Red Hat over other Linux distributions, Massey said there was hardly any discussion at all. “Red Hat is the market leader, period,” he said. “Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat.”

Though the majority of the company’s mission-critical systems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the deployment is “ongoing,” Massey said. “We started with our Oracle database, and our HP-UX batch processing, and were so pleased with the results that we have continued to progress toward making as much of our infrastructure as possible run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

BENEFITS
The migration went extraordinary smoothly, and was accomplished “virtually painlessly,” said Massey. And, the cost savings were immediate. There were direct savings, as OL&T was able to keep up with its exponential growth by replacing its proprietary RISC/UNIX boxes with virtualized x86 based systems. And because it had deployed Red Hat Satellite, these virtual machines could be provisioned in a matter of just minutes rather than the hours it previously took to get a new server up and running.

Then there were indirect savings due to increased IT worker productivity. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just so much easier to manage than either UNIX or Windows,” said Eric Brown, database administrator. As a result, OL&T can do more with fewer people. “Even with our tremendous growth, we’ve been able to continue to manage our IT operations with a reasonable staffing level,” said Massey. “And given the kickstart and configuration management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite, our workers can add a lot more value to our organization

About the quality of the support OL&T receives from Red Hat, Massey said it’s a moot point. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux just works,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it.” He said he can count on one hand the number of support calls he’s had to make – but stressed that those support calls were promptly and professionally dealt with. “The attention and care that Red Hat provides to its customers is truly enterprise-class,” he said.

As far as the workloads that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is capable of supporting, Massey said that it’s been able to handle everything OL&T has thrown at it. “We’ve migrated our Oracle databases over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Windows and our mission critical batch services for planning and rating from HP-UX over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he said. “In fact, we’ve completely eliminated UNIX from our environment.” OL&T is currently also in process of moving its Java workloads from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”

SOA allows the Defense Information Systems Agency to better support the joint warfighter in times of war and peace.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Government

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Fusion of information, logistics, engineering, planning and transportation technologies to enable military mobility and versatility

Software: MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform

Benefits: Ability to use legacy systems in DISA’s Net-Centric environment, increased security of information shared across agencies and task forces, enabled America’s troops to be more mobile and versatile, in any location, at any time

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is responsible for planning, developing, fielding, operating, and supporting command, control, communications, and information systems. DISA serves the needs of the President, Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Combatant Commanders, and the other Department of Defense components under all conditions of peacetime and war.

CHALLENGE
Fast developing problems and hot spots around the world require governments to respond quickly with the right teams and the proper support. Many of the systems in place today need to be leveraged to maximize their value in support of troop deployment, the ability to capture essential data, transform it into usable information, and gain information superiority is paramount to the success of maintaining force readiness and winning conflicts.

Recognizing the need to provide commanders in the field with a better and more integrated source of logistics information, DISA has developed the Global Combat Support System-Joint (GCSS-J-J), a current operational capability.

GCSS-J is an initiative that integrates existing combat support information to gain efficiency and interoperability in support of the warfighter. One of the major elements of war is ensuring the flow of personnel and supplies to and from the battlefield throughout all phases of an operation across military commands. In order to develop and sustain this flow, logistics commanders in the field need to have information that will allow them to completely see and understand both the tactical and logistical situation. The current combat support environment does not fully achieve system interoperability and asset visibility because of several shortfalls, including:

• Stovepipe information systems
• Lack of visibility and limited access
• Inability to present a common picture
• Limited joint decision support tools

SOLUTION
DISA selected Red Hat’s MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform to support the GCSS-J Program in its transition to a new Enterprise Information Integration (EII) strategy. MetaMatrix enables the transition from stove-piped systems to a loosely coupled service-oriented architecture, DISA’s Net-Centric environment.

Information integration and management solutions from MetaMatrix enable the GCSS-J to provide real-time information from transportation, supply, maintenance, personnel, acquisition, health services, finance, and engineering systems. MetaMatrix makes distributed data accessible and manageable, breaking through the traditional barriers of location, structure, semantics and context.

BENEFITS
MetaMatrix supports GCSS-J data integration and legacy migration requirements.
MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform ensures that all information is visible, accessible, and understandable.

The MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform is the only comprehensive EII solution to address both data management and information integration in a scalable, standards-based manner. The MetaMatrix metadata repository enables users to discover, share, and analyze information and the way information is being used. Through standard interfaces reporting tools can provide the visibility developers need so they can find information entities, understand the context of those entities, and provide access to the right information.

MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform creates loosely coupled data environments, eliminating the development of stove-piped solutions.

MetaMatrix uses a model-driven approach to integration. Authoritative information sources and data entities are represented in metadata models; the integration of information is achieved through these models. This approach decouples the information consuming applications from the authoritative information sources, creating a flexible information environment. MetaMatrix delivers uncompromising security.

A key requirement in information integration is information security and information ownership. MetaMatrix does not move data; the data is stored and maintained on its native system. The MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform integrates with the data sources security systems. MetaMatrix enforces security on the Virtual Databases within the system and offers features to manage users, groups, and entitlements. In addition to the run-time security, MetaMatrix also supports design-time security, ensuring that developers have access to only data entities for which they are entitled.

MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform provides integrated real-time access to disparate information.

With unsurpassed extensibility and the most complete set of information source connectors, MetaMatrix enables organizations to integrate information across physical and political bounds. With MetaMatrix, organizations can create cross-agency applications to support joint responsibilities. The MetaMatrix system provides bidirectional access to information on native systems, delivering the most up-to-date information possible.
MetaMatrix retrieves and aggregates data from multiple data sources and makes it available to client applications through a single query against the virtual database.  This provides a simple client interface and contributes to a modular architecture with applications loosely bound to data sources.

MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform extends legacy applications to modern Service-Oriented Architectures.

MetaMatrix is unique in its ability to expose integrated information, including legacy or proprietary data, as standard Web Services. One key feature of the MetaMatrix System is that it does not impose an XML Schema on the user; instead, the user selects a schema as an end-point or goal of the integration and maps data entities to the schema. In addition to publishing data as a Service, the MetaMatrix System provides query access to integrated data sets through a SOAP interface, and supports both SQL and XQuery. In Service-Oriented Architectures, MetaMatrix can be both a consumer and a provider of Web Services.

MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform supports migration to the Net-Centric Environment.

Driven by transformation, U.S. forces now enjoy rapid decision superiority, streamlined logistic support, and effective information operations in a true joint forced world. The DOD is transforming intranets into Service-Oriented Architectures under the Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) program. The Global Combat Support System is one example of the agency modernizing its information technology systems under this program. MetaMatrix provides a common data environment capable of integrating and including virtually any information source. The MetaMatrix System couples the metadata management and the information integration capabilities necessary to support this modernization effort.

FAST FACTS

Company: Gap Inc. Direct

Industry: Clothing Online Retail

Geography: San Francisco

Business Challenge: Ensuring security and payment card industry compliance while managing system level access across the enterprise

Migration Path: UNIX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Likewise Enterprise

Hardware: 1,500 Intel-based IBM blade servers

Benefits: Savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on reduced administrative and hardware costs associated with compliance and security requirements. Compliance with PCI and SOX requirements through automatic authentication of users across a mixed systems environment.

“The ROI [return on investment] of the Red Hat-Likewise solution is up to several hundred thousand dollars annually once you add all of the hardware and software savings to the reduced costs associated with manually auditing the systems. Likewise Enterprise’s compliance enhancements allowed us to control user access and permissions, thus enabling us to grow our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.”
– Jeff Arcuri, senior manager, IT for GAP Inc. Direct

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Gap, Inc. is a specialty retailing firm that operates more than 3,100 retail and outlet stores within the United States and internationally. Founded in 1969, the Gap sells casual apparel, accessories and personal care products for men, women, and children under the Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Piperlime, and Athleta brands. Through its Gap Inc. Direct line of business, it also offers its products through gap.com, bananarepublic.com, oldnavy.com, piperlime.com, and recently launched athleta.com Web properties. Headquartered in San Francisco, the Gap currently employs more than 150,000 workers around the world, and generated $14.5 billion in revenues in 2008; online sales through Gap Inc. Direct Web sites accounted for approximately seven percent, or $1 billion.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In late 2003 the Gap Inc. Direct needed to revamp its entire end-to-end business technology platform – from the customer-facing front-end system, to the back-end order management application, to the business tools that supported the company’s long-term growth strategy. Previously, the Gap Direct’s e-commerce platform was largely built on Microsoft Windows. The need for new features – as well as concerns about the platform’s ability to scale given the retailer’s ambitious growth plans drove Gap Inc. Direct to evaluate alternative solutions to the Microsoft platform.

“Our growth was very strong and projected to continue for the foreseeable future, and we needed to scale to meet that growth,” said Jeff Arcuri, senior manager, IT for Gap Inc. Direct. “We knew we wouldn’t be able to do that cost-effectively with our existing systems and tools.”

GID’s team performed in-depth testing of three different platforms for the revamped infrastructure: UNIX, Linux, and Windows. The decision turned out to be an easy one. Linux outperformed the other platforms.“We were seeing a lot of momentum in the retail industry toward leveraging open source in general, and Linux in particular,” said Arcuri.

Once Linux was chosen as the operating system, his team put all the different flavors of Linux through testing using five key criteria. “It had to meet our performance objectives; it had to be secure; and it had to be scalable and manageable within a large enterprise-class implementation, and fit within our budget,” he said. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the clear winner.”

Although Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the new standard operating system across the enterprise, Gap Inc. Direct still had systems running UNIX platforms IBM AIX and Sun Solaris, as well as Microsoft Windows. As with all retailers, Gap Inc. Direct needed to perform audits to meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance requirements.

Gap Inc. Direct uses Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) for administrative tools to grant and control end-user permission, but AD by itself doesn’t support Linux or Unix, this resulted in the need for several systems administrators and analysts to analyze all of the logs of hundreds of servers every time an audit needed to be performed – a task that took IT employees away from their day-to-day responsibilities. With the implementation of Likewise Enterprise, GAP Inc. Direct has reduced the time commitment to approx. 40 hours per quarter.

SOLUTION
The Gap Inc. Direct needed an identity management solution that would communicate between Active Directory and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to automate the control of user access and permissions throughout the company.

To automate more of the process and free up systems administrators for more valuable work, as well as make user access permissions in this mixed operating environment simpler, Arcuri deployed an identity management tool from Likewise Software.

Likewise Enterprise, built with Red Hat technologies, enables enterprises to securely authenticate users in mixed operating systems environments that include Linux, UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows systems, with Microsoft Active Directory, and includes world-class migration, group policy, audit, and reporting modules.

The Gap Inc. Direct has set up group profiles for several different kinds of employees, so administrators don’t have to configure profiles individually. Likewise Enterprise also produces reports by user, by date, and by server.

BENEFITS
Today, Gap Inc. Direct is a Red Hat shop and “proud of it,” said Arcuri. “We run the majority of our systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and utilizing Likewise Enterprise has enabled us to control and manage system access for identity management, and has enabled us to increase the number of Red Hat systems,” he said. The support Gap Inc. Direct has received from Red Hat and Likewise to make this run smoothly has been superb, said Arcuri. “Whenever we have a high-impact issue, both Red Hat and Likewise are there for us – through upgrades and patches – even with us pushing the operating system to its absolute limits,” he said.

As far as benefits go, first and foremost, Gap Inc. Direct has realized tremendous cost savings. “The ROI [return on investment] of the Red Hat-Likewise solution is hundreds of thousands of dollars annually once you add the hardware and software savings to the reduced costs of manually auditing our systems. Likewise Enterprise’s compliance enhancements allowed us to expand our use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Arcuri.

The scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also been more than what Arcuri had hoped for. Gap Inc. Direct recently added a new brand of women’s sporting apparel – Athleta – which involved creating another Web site in addition to the existing gap.com, bananarepublic.com, oldnavy.com, and piperlime.com sites. “Building out another brand was easy, because we were able to leverage the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure, plus with Likewise we had all of the access policies and permissions in place,” said Arcuri.

Finally, the reliability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers has been exemplary from the start according to Arcuri. “By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Likewise Enterprise, everything just fell into place,” he said. “Once we achieved compliance and realized just how stable, reliable, and high performing the operating system was, we were free to concentrate on getting the applications themselves developed and out the door. Our need to support five world-class brand names requires a world-class infrastructure, and that’s what Red Hat and Likewise have provided.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Red Hat

Industry: Open source software

Geography: US – Raleigh, NC

Opportunity: Implement and build a reliable, high-performance platform using SOA to meet growing business and performance demands

Migration Path: Tomcat 5 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle BPEL and, Mule ESB to JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Established a reliable platform with zero unplanned downtime, reduced hardware costs by more than 50 percent, increased performance by more than 25 percent, and increased resource efficiency for the IT organization

“The JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio is the cornerstone in our middleware infrastructure and our IT architecture vision. We have laid the groundwork to establish a world class technology stack, largely based on the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.”
–Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer, Red Hat.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, offering choice to customers building open source IT infrastructures. Its unique business model provides open source subscriptions for its high-quality, affordable technology. Its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and service-oriented architecture solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware, deliver industry-leading value. The company is based in Raleigh, NC and has more than 60 offices around the world. Red Hat’s internal IT organization serves more than 2500 global employees with data centers in Phoenix, AZ.

OPPORTUNITY
In 2007, Red Hat was growing exponentially in employee size, and faced increasing demands on the internal IT systems, thus challenging the existing infrastructure. Red Hat’s internal IT organization was faced with increased system integration and support issues, that were consuming considerable time and taking focus away from strategic issues. The IT organization needed an enterprise grade solution that was stable, simple and scalable.

The IT organization was handling internal maintenance and devoting critical resources to solving commodity solutions which reduced cycles available for solving critical business problems. The IT organization devoted resources to developing and building custom solutions for Tomcat including: security solutions to support single-sign-on, a clustering implementation to handle high scalability, a transaction and persistence solution to support functionality similar to the Java Transaction Architecture (JTA) and Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) transaction support, deployment solutions to segment large application deployments into multiple contexts, and scheduling service implementations utilizing Quartz that were non-cluster aware and inefficient.

“We tightly coupled our in-house custom solutions to our internal processes in order to reduce the development effort. As a result there was no ability to upstream our contributions and we took on the burden of maintaining them,” said Mathew Hicks, IT manager, Red Hat. “The cost of this effort eventually became high enough to minimize our consumption of community updates and our systems were in danger of becoming dated.”

“Our team spent considerable time and resources creating valuable custom solutions to ensure we met the growing demands of our users. But as we grew we encountered server sprawl issues that constrained our resources. First, our custom solutions didn’t scale for high availability scenarios and the fragility of the infrastructure increased along with the number of solutions,” said Hicks, “We needed a solution that would reduce the burden of custom solution maintenance, eliminate single points-of-failure, and optimize the IT infrastructure for scalability,” said Hicks.

SOLUTION
Red Hat obviously had experience with JBoss Enterprise Middleware products, but the decision to deploy on the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and SOA Platform for internal systems was a strict business decision that would benefit the technical advances of Red Hat IT and better serve the entire company. Red Hat IT operates with its own performance requirements and those requirements were the drivers for choosing to implement JBoss products internally.

Red Hat IT decided to implement a modular based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace its organization’s traditional IT infrastructure. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform includes a next-generation ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) for service mediation, jBPM Framework and the JBoss Rule engine for business process automation infrastructure, which enables superior business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective, open platform. One of the features of an SOA is that it allows companies to build composite services in which business processes can be extended over a number of different applications. The first phase of the migration involved deploying JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Red Hat needed a supportable, enterprise-caliber solution that leveraged commodity solutions, maintained by the community.

Red Hat IT required:

• A framework to allow them to identify solutions
• Ability to work more closely with the business to understand future needs
• Better way for teams within IT to collaborate
• Means to scale their efforts and to expand capabilities
• Desire to collaborate with the community inside/outside of Red Hat
• Use products that allow for common system administration capabilities such as configuration management and RPM based packaging

Red Hat IT decided to migrate its customer facing Java application infrastructure, including the including 30 web applications and services, from Tomcat 5 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

By deploying the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat was able to replace a complex clustering solution and utilize the JBoss clustering capabilities to dynamically size the application server cluster to any processing load the organization could encounter. Red Hat IT also replaced their custom single sign-on functionality with a JBossSX-based, cluster aware single sign-on solution.

“By removing the need for a dedicated clustering database, we realized a 4:1 reduction in hardware and the use of JGroups-based clustering yielded increased performance per transaction and higher availability,” said Chris Alfonso, enterprise architect, Red Hat. “We are taking full advantage of the high-availability solutions offered by JBoss including in-memory caching, clustering, HA-JNDI, and automatic discovery.”

Red Hat’s growth as a company and the constant addition of end-users, made dynamic scaling capacity a priority for the IT organization. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform enabled an increase in cluster capacity through the ability to auto-discover additional nodes, and the means to decrease the overall footprint when not in use.

“This gave us the flexibility to not invest in a ‘high watermark’ infrastructure,” said Hicks. “We were able to segment the cluster to manage workloads, with minimal impact to the infrastructure. This resulted in a more efficient use of our resources and ability to scale for future demands.”

Part of the overall initiative was to replace an existing Oracle BPEL and Mule ESB implementation with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. It provides a means to integrate vendor systems while transparently mediating their inherent incompatibilities and orchestrating the interactions.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform implementation operates in a clustered environment, interacting with messaging queues backed by both Oracle and MySQL. The MySQL queues utilized database replication to provide database fail-over and high availability across the cluster.

“From a performance perspective, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform has proven to handle our heaviest workloads very well. During the peak of our workload, we receive about 7,500 messages an hour, yet the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can handle approximately 7000 messages in 15 minutes, on a single node cluster,” said Rico Hendriks, manager of Middleware and Services, Red Hat. “This tells us that we have the ability to scale the business from a rate of more than $650M annually to a rate of more than $2.5B annually in transaction flow with our existing capital investment.”

As early adopters of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Red Hat IT leveraged Red Hat Consulting for the implementation to assist with an aggressive scope and time line to ensure stability, and a seamless, uninterrupted, successful integration.

“The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the features that enabled us to ‘right-size’ our middleware infrastructure,” said Hendriks. “Mainly, with automatic discovery of cluster members and a cluster aware Enterprise Service Bus, we can now monitor utilization of the application server and appropriately resize to any given processing needs.”

BENEFITS
With JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat IT now focuses on helping users increase productivity and solve strategic business issues. There is also a focus on making the organization as a whole more competitive, rather than handling technical issues. Red Hat was able to reduce hardware costs, increase performance, maximize resources and rely on quality support.

“Red Hat IT made a conscious decision to utilize JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as opposed to JBoss.org Community projects, because it did not want to be in the software integration and support business, but rather focus on business goals. The availability of quality support, with no more than 24-hours before issues were closed, was a major benefit for the company,” said Lee Congdon, chief information officer, Red Hat.

Initial measurements of the performance under JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform were significantly improved compared to our existing messaging solution. “In benchmark testing, the results showed a substantial improvement in the response times for almost all transactions represented in the test,” said Alfonso. “The maximum time was reduced from 6.2 seconds to 392ms, and the average was reduced from 742ms to 304ms. Resulting in JBoss performance exceeding our existing messaging solution by 25 percent.”

Furthermore, “Through implementing JBoss solutions, we were able to reduce the hardware footprint by more than 50 percent, which significantly reduced long term costs on hardware, power and cooling. Additional IT benefits were speed and cost of implementation, including simplicity, openness and cost effectiveness,” added Alfonso.

“We depend on JBoss.org Community projects to drive the innovation and JBoss Enterprise Middleware to deliver the stability and support that we need. With all the moving pieces that go into a solution like JBoss, it’s very valuable to have a working combination of components so that we can focus on building solutions for our customers,” said Congdon.

Whenever new products or refreshed versions of product come out from the engineering groups, Red Hat IT is one of the first groups to evaluate integrating them into the production environment. “As Red Hat continues its investment in management tools such as JBoss Operations Network and oVirt, we envision introducing those solutions, to streamline our processes and better serve our workforce,” said Hicks.

“The JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio is a cornerstone in our middleware infrastructure and our IT architecture vision,” said Congdon. “We have laid the groundwork to establish a world class technology stack, largely based on JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.”

Red Hat provides the University of Southern Mississippi with time-saving solution

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Southern Mississippi

Industry: Education

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Reconfiguring servers that were not based on the same hardware platform lead to an increase in errors and demanded much of the IT team’s time and financial resources

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite

Benefits: Streamlined the university’s IT environment and standardized the systems management process, reduced overhead, minimized errors, and saved time and financial resources

“We transitioned to Red Hat solutions very easily. It was just flipping a switch. It was easy.”
– James Daniel, system administrator at the University of Southern Mississippi

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The University of Mississippi, located in Hattiesburg, serves more than 14,000 students and 700 faculty members. The university, which was established in 1910, offers over 90 academic programs and approximately 250 clubs and organizations.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Managing close to 80 physical servers with limited technical resources can quickly become a challenge for any organization. Purchasing and maintaining subscriptions for each of these systems requires diligence and excellent management skills, as the IT team at the University of Southern Mississippi discovered in 2008.

None of the servers that System Administrator James Daniel worked with in the data center were based on the same hardware platforms, which meant that he had to consistently manually reconfigure the servers.

“When you have a farm of 80 plus servers, it’s very time consuming to manage,” Daniel said, “and our former process was prone to error.” Between taking care of the heterogeneous servers and keeping up individual subscriptions, the department technicians were stretched thin.

SOLUTION
Looking for a solution to help ease its systems management challenges, the University of Southern Mississippi IT team turned to Red Hat for a reliable solution. Red Hat provided Red Hat Satellite, a reliable, advanced systems management solution that is based on open standards, and a campus-wide Site Subscription to the high-performance Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating platform.

“We transitioned to Red Hat solutions very easily. It was just flipping a switch,” Daniel said. “It was easy.”

BENEFITS
The new Red Hat Satellite solution streamlined the university’s IT environment, reduced overhead, and minimized errors, according to Terri Lowery, systems administration manager at the University of Southern Mississippi. Instead of individually updating each server in the data center, the university’s technicians can now update all of the servers at the same time with one click of a button.

With Red Hat Satellite, the IT team has saved at least the annual salary of one full-time employee. In addition, the team can now reallocate the resources previously spent manually updating the heterogeneous servers. Red Hat Satellite also helps the team manage their Sun Solaris systems and virtual environments.

The Red Hat Satellite systems management solution has worked so well for the University of Southern Mississippi tech team that Lowery wants to expand its use throughout the campus. “We would like to have a long-term, university-wide systems management solution,” Lowery said, “not just a technology department solution.”

The university today utilizes the Red Hat Site Subscription for the entire campus. Since Lowery initiated the subscription more than a year ago, she hasn’t had to worry about running out of entitlements or money. Previously, when faced with the need for additional entitlements, the team had to pull entitlements from other groups because the budget didn’t allow for additional purchases. “We had to keep licenses individually and be really stingy with them,” Lowery said.

They also had some entitlements that they didn’t use, but that situation changed when they switched to Red Hat, Systems Engineer Charles Wright said. “We didn’t have 20 or 30 extra entitlements sitting out there that were collecting dust every year,” Wright said. Now they have the flexibility to do what they need to do, when they need to do it, without worrying about anything, according to Lowery.

“We also didn’t have to tie a particular entitlement to a particular server to a selected budget. It was more of a blanket, so it cut down on the logistics,” said Daniel. “We’ve pretty much been able to set up development boxes on the fly, which has streamlined our research and development as well.”

The Red Hat Site Subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the use of Red Hat Satellite have allowed the university’s tech department to standardize its systems management process, cut back on errors, and use less manpower. Today, the university’s technicians have better control over their IT environment, and are able to focus their resources on other critical university projects.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Healthplan Services (HPS)

Geography: North America

Industry: Healthcare

Migration Path: Sun Solaris 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform; Sun SPARC servers to virtualized Linux instances on HP ProLiant DL380 servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Network, Apache webserver, MySQL databases, IBM DB2

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 servers

Benefits: Increased performance, usability and convenience; enhanced support, and reduced cost with a Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration on HP ProLiant servers

“The speed is going to increase: we’ll see people working faster, and we’ll be able to process more claims, all by switching an operating system. I can’t believe it was that cut and dry.”
– Adam Atkinson, UNIX administrator at Healthplan Services

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Healthplan Services (HPS) is the nation’s largest independent provider of service and technology solutions to the insurance and managed care industries. HPS offers customized administration and distribution services to insurers in the individual, small group, and voluntary markets supporting health insurance and ancillary product lines (i.e., dental, life, disability, accident, cancer, etc.).

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
HPS faced three major business challenges with its aging Sun Solaris on SPARC hardware with RISC architecture. First, the Sun UNIX-based solution delivered limited application performance and support. In one year, HPS dealt with four service degrading incidents. Second, the escalating cost of the SPARC systems were becoming a drag on HPS’ limited IT budget. Third, employees were experiencing slow response times, and the developers complained about usability issues with the Solaris operating system.

HPS needed an operating system that could interoperate with Microsoft Windows Active Directory, and desired a reliable platform that optimized performance and was easy to upgrade. Because its customer service applications were experiencing page loading delays, HPS needed to increase computing performance to meet the needs of its customers and employees.

SOLUTION
Adam Atkinson, HPS’ UNIX administrator, manages some 200 web, database, and FTP servers, 30 of which were pure UNIX systems utilizing Solaris 9 on Sun SPARC servers. After recognizing the organization’s UNIX systems were becoming outdated and obsolete, Atkinson decided to conduct research to find a high-performing alternative solution.

Atkinson investigated three primary options for the HPS operating system migration: Novell SUSE, Solaris 10, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. Quickly eliminating Novell SUSE because it was not a standard in his organization, the decision came to Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. Atkinson decided to run benchmarks to compare the operating platforms. His testing revealed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was superior for each benchmark. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform ran pages at more than three times the speed (452 pages per second) of Solaris (135 pages per second) in one test. “That’s a massive difference,” said Atkinson.

In addition to performance testing, cost was also a primary consideration in identifying a solution. When comparing Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the optimal platform was obvious. “Upgrading Solaris is hard to do. With a migration to Solaris 10, due to high costs associated with SPARC servers, we would have needed to migrate our hardware platform from SPARC to Intel, which would have required me to recompile nearly all of my modules and applications. If we were going to make a big technology move like what Solaris 10 would have required, we decided to look at all of our opportunities, and that meant hosting Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers became a truly viable option for us,” said Atkinson.

Atkinson, who was familiar with Red Hat’s usability benefits, also evaluated support comparisons between Red Hat and Sun. “Solaris support is fine as long as you’re using new equipment and Sun’s latest operating system version, but you will pay an extreme premium as soon as your version begins to age. We did not use Sun’s Solaris support because it was too expensive. Instead, we had third-party support.” HPS recognized a cost savings in Red Hat’s subscription model and was especially impressed with Red Hat’s patch management and package management capabilities available through the reliable Red Hat Network systems management platform.

Another valuable advantage provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform is the solution’s integrated Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) technologies for no added price. Red Hat Global File System is comparable in speed and performance to Veritas. But, Veritas comes with an added cost and additional vendor relationship, while with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, HPS would receive its file system clustering solution integrated with the operating system free of charge.

“Red Hat’s integrated file system clustering technology was important to us. I was paying Veritas for support every year, whereas with GFS through Red Hat, it’s free with my subscription and the support is there too,” said Atkinson.

The cost and time savings delivered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, coupled with the solution’s enhanced performance and support, as well as the increased ease of use for customers and employees, convinced Atkinson, his team, and his company to select Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform to replace its unreliable Solaris systems.

HPS is currently in the process of migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant DL380 servers with virtualization capabilities, superior uptime and effortless management. The company expects Red Hat to be fully in production in August 2009. “We’re moving our systems technology-to-technology instead of server-to-server in more of a piecemeal fashion. It’s more consumable to us that way,” said Atkinson.

BENEFITS
HPS is most excited about the impending performance benefits that will result from its migration away from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “The speed is going to increase: we’ll see people working faster, and we’ll be able to process more claims, all by switching an operating system. I can’t believe it was that cut and dry,” said Atkinson. The company also recognized great benefits in the general manageability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “To stage a Solaris server, it takes a lot of time to do even simple tasks,” said Atkinson. “Red Hat frees up my time. Tasks that took 30 minutes with Solaris take five minutes with Red Hat. Installing one package across all systems with Red Hat might take an hour, as opposed to a full day with Solaris.”

The collaboration of the vast open source community is expected to provide an additional benefit to HPS with the Red Hat migration. With the open source community, innovation happens more quickly and provides greater technology enhancements than the alternative proprietary model. “If I run a search for a quick ‘Solaris’ fix, I might get 10 results as opposed to the thousands I receive when I search ‘Red Hat,’” said Atkinson. Red Hat takes the innovation that happens in the community and certifies and tests the technology so that HPS knows it will work seamlessly in its IT infrastructure. With the backing of Red Hat support and the consistent management capabilities provided by Red Hat Network, Atkinson and his coworkers save time, which allows the reallocation of staff resources to more business-critical tasks.

HPS is expecting a three-year return on investment (ROI) once its full Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration is complete. “After three years, we’ll be generating money,” said Atkinson. “I feel that we will immediately see an increase of revenue with the speed difference. The return on investment being 3 years is purely technology, we will see it much sooner at the business level.”

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

Customer: Aviza Technology

Industry: Electronics

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning

Business Partner: IBM

Migration Path: Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun SPARC to IBM System x

Business Need: When end-of-life issues on the company’s existing Sun hardware began impacting the availability of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), Aviza sought a cost-effective systems solution from IBM.

Solution: Aviza implemented a two-tier Oracle configuration, with Oracle EBS v11.5.10 on one IBM System x3850 4-socket server and Oracle Database 10g on one IBM System x3950 16-socket server—both running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. IBM System Storage N5200 provides 2.4 TB of data storage. The development environment has six test instances running on five x3850 servers, with a second N5200 providing 7.2 TB of data storage.

Benefits: Aviza Technology achieved a multifold increase in solution performance, enabled new levels of systems scalability and flexibility across the company’s global IT infrastructure, and better positioned the company to meet unforeseen IT system challenges.

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview
Aviza Technology designs, manufactures, sells and supports advanced semiconductor equipment and technologies for the global semiconductor industry. The headquarters office in Scotts Valley, CA, provides IT services to approximately 700 employees in the U.S. and in 9 counties across Europe and Asia.

Running a global business is no small feat in today’s competitive environment. But Aviza Technology has been rising to the challenge since its founding in 2003. With approximately 700 employees worldwide, Aviza designs, manufactures, sells and supports advanced semiconductor equipment and technologies for the global semiconductor industry.

“Our biggest challenge is serving the world 24×7 with reliable hardware and software,” says Dale Spencer, vice president of information technology and corporate services at Aviza. From the company’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, CA, Aviza provides IT services to offices in 9 countries across Europe and Asia.

Aviza had been running Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) on Sun Solaris-based systems, but end-of-life issues began affecting the company’s ability to meet its service and availability goals. “We started having some errors and unexpected failures that resulted in downtime,” Spencer explains. “When you have a worldwide business, you have to resolve these issues around the clock.”

A cost-effective solution
Aviza was looking for a cost-effective solution that would resolve the reliability issues, provide better performance and enable new levels of flexibility across the company’s global IT infrastructure. To meet those goals, the company chose an IBM solution that includes IBM System x3850 and System x3950 servers with the high-end IBM X3 chipset, and IBM System Storage N5200.

“We evaluated a number of other vendors, but we were concerned about uptime, maintenance and the need for specialized skills,” Spencer says. “We were comfortable working with IBM. They were very informed, and they did a good job of laying out the options for us.”

Aviza has a two-tier Oracle configuration, with the production application running on one x3850 4-socket server and the database running on one x3950 with 16-sockets—both driven by Intel® Xeon® dual-core processors. An N5200 provides 2.4 TB of data storage. The development environment has six test instances running on five x3850 servers, with a second N5200 providing 7.2 TB of data storage. IBM Premier Business Partner Sycomp provided installation and support services.

Exceeding expectations
Aviza saw immediate benefits from the solution; in fact, Spencer reports, “IBM System x has exceeded our expectations around reliability and performance.” Spencer and his team are also pleased with the scalability that the System x technology enables. “We may end up with three or four tiers at some point,” he explains, “and this equipment lends itself to that.”

Spencer says the migration from Sun to IBM System x went extremely well. In addition to migrating from Sun to IBM and from Solaris 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Aviza upgraded from Oracle EBS 11.0.3 to 11.5.10 and from Oracle Database 8i to 10g. Aviza runs a full complement of EBS components, including all financials, manufacturing, order management and service modules.

Although the reliability and performance improvements are felt across the company, Aviza’s finance group in particular appreciates the new systems. The department’s monthly cost roll-ups used to take anywhere from eight to 18 hours to run, and now they take less than four.

“We’re getting positive comments from everyone,” Spencer says. “And with the IBM solution, we’re a lot more flexible than we were before.”

For more information about Aviza Technology, visit: www.aviza.com

FAST FACTS

Company: MedQuist Inc.

Industry: Clinical Documentation Workflow Solutions

Geography: Mount Laurel, New Jersey

Business Challenge: Enabling a rapidly growing, high-volume, 24×7 business, through the creation of an agile and highly productive development environment for building and running mission-critical applications.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: x86 servers

Migration Path: From many database centric Windows platform components towards a SOA enterprise architecture providing service orchestration, platform independence and loose coupling of coarse-grained application modules. The latter allows for an evolutionary approach to re-platforming of a very large enterprise system without a large up-front cost and significant business risk.

Benefits: A highly productive, flexible and robust application development environment that enables MedQuist to proficiently produce innovative functionality for customer-facing solutions and to quickly take advantage of newly acquired applications by efficiently integrating them into its DocQment Enterprise Platform.

“Our applications are mission critical and absolutely need to be available 24×7. Red Hat’s JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux products just work, enabling us to focus on building industry-leading software, which in turn helps our customers reduce their costs and improve patient care.”
– Dan Garnett, Vice President of Product Development, MedQuist.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
MedQuist Inc. is a leading provider of medical transcription software and related services. By delivering solutions that automate document creation and workflow to hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers, MedQuist helps its customers efficiently manage large volumes of complex clinical information.

The company has two separate but connected sources of revenues. First, it offers comprehensive software solutions that include digital voice capture, speech recognition, electronic signature, medical coding systems and services, and mobile dictation devices. It currently sells these solutions to more than 1,500 healthcare organizations throughout the United States. Secondly, MedQuist employs more than 4,000 skilled medical transcriptionists who process approximately 2 billion lines of text annually. The company employs more than 7,500 employees and earned $327 million in revenues in fiscal 2008.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Because of rapid growth since the early 2000s, MedQuist was looking for innovative ways to keep pace with ever-increasing system demands.

“We process more than 100,000 distinct dictated medical reports and notes per day,” said Kirk Elder, director of software engineering for MedQuist. “Our systems have to categorize them, classify them and route them through our workflow processes – from the time we receive the digital recordings until the final report is delivered to the customer.”

MedQuist currently has 10 clusters of speech recognition servers with each cluster containing 30+ servers, for a total of more than 300 servers to perform the all-important task of converting voice recordings to text-based documents. The voice recordings and related text files are than sent to medical transcriptionists (MTs) to correct and edit. After the MT finishes transcribing the report, the MedQuist platform sends the report to physicians to electronically sign the documents. Those documents are then routed back to the hospitals or clinics to printers, automated systems and/or their electronic health record (EHR) system, depending on whether the customer requires the information to be in paper or electronic form.

Before 2007, most of the MedQuist software used for this complex workflow routing was developed using various proprietary technologies, including C++ among others, making it more and more challenging to quickly respond to new market requirements and opportunities. Because MedQuist was quickly growing through acquisition, it also became difficult to efficiently incorporate the systems of newly acquired companies into the MedQuist DocQment Enterprise Platform.

“We are in the process of moving to an n-tiered SOA architecture based on Java middleware. With the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, we are positioned with the tool set to evolve our product suite towards towards SOA, without the upfront costs of re-writing everything at the same,” said Brian Ellenberger, development manager at MedQuist.

SOLUTION
Due to the economics of re-platforming a system this large, MedQuist has taken an evolutionary approach to moving its application platform to a JBoss-based environment. In fact, Elder’s group chose JBoss in 2002-2003 when their division was a separate company. At the time, there were two reasons for doing this: price and performance.

“As JBoss is open source, it was much less costly than proprietary application server options,” said Elder. “JBoss was a bargain compared to proprietary application servers.”

There were technical advantages to the platform itself. “JBoss seemed to be a very good platform for our developers, as the open architecture gave us lots of options. It was high performing too, and easy to understand,” continued Elder.

When his company was acquired by MedQuist, the IT team at the parent company evaluated what Elder’s team had done using JBoss, and was so pleased with the results, that it decided to make JBoss the platform for developing new software modules.

“We have 20 to 50 software modules that run on hundreds of servers that must all work in concert with each other,” said Kirk. “Previously, because of all the acquisitions, there was not development standards for making sure everything worked together.”

Today, the JBoss Application Server is embedded in the developer platform that Elder’s team releases to all MedQuist’s software engineering teams each quarter. “So everyone is developing software in a standard way with standard third-party libraries,” said Ellenberger. “Because we do development all over the world, this keeps us in sync and helps us maintain efficiency, while simultaneously reducing our overall development costs.”

Today, in addition to the JBoss Application Server itself, MedQuist uses Hibernate. Although just starting to use JBoss Seam for reporting, it is considering basing all future thin-client development platforms on Seam.

Underpinning all this, in mid-2007, MedQuist moved from a Microsoft Windows-based infrastructure to one based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“When we were looking to upgrade our enterprise database operating system to a more scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution than windows, Linux was the obvious choice. We looked at which company would be a partner and help ensure our success. Red hat proved it then and every day since,” said John McKenna, Director of Software Engineering.

BENEFITS
The fact that JBoss is built using open standards has been a major boon for MedQuist. Indeed, its JBoss implementation has been so successful that MedQuist made an enterprise-wide decision to eliminate its dependence on vendor-specific solutions.

“We like the fact that JBoss is so open,” said Elder. “With the JBoss micro kernel architecture, we can even replace JBoss modules with other modules without any trouble. This allows us to avoid the vendor lock in we had experienced before.”

How critical are JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to MedQuist’s business?

“Our applications are mission critical and absolutely need to be available 24×7. Red Hat products like JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux just work, enabling us to focus on building industry-leading software, which in turn helps our customers reduce their costs and improve patient care,” said Dan Garnett, Vice President of Product Development, MedQuist.

The open nature of the JBoss platform has delivered other benefits as well. For example, in the case of JBoss, “His team “can debug all the way through the code, and work around and fix even the most complex development issues by utilizing the source code,” said Elder. “JBoss also integrates well into our build process. We’ve been very successful at creating build scripts that get standard JBoss environments up and running for new developers or projects very quickly and painlessly.”

Finally, Red Hat as a company has proven to be solid and reliable. “Over time, we’ve developed a solid relationship with Red Hat and JBoss, and anticipate that our partnership will only get better over time,” said Elder.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Sentry Data Systems

Industry: Healthcare

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Information Infrastructure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Server Consolidation, Virtualization

Business Partner: IBM

Business Need: Sentry’s core infrastructure required substantial computing power and high-speed storage. Four difficult-to-administer racks of large servers supported the company’s day-to-day business processes, costing much energy, effort and money to run. Sentry wanted to accommodate its growing business while simplifying the design and administration of its underlying IT infrastructure.

Solution: Sentry began by consolidating on an IBM BladeCenter® H chassis that supports 14 IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new solution greatly simplifies system administration by enabling the company to access and manage all hardware remotely from a single console. All cabling is integrated within the BladeCenter technology, reducing the amount of wires previously needed for power and remote access.

Benefits:

• Reduces operating costs and offers remote administration
• Increases storage capacity and performance
• Reduces server footprint and amount of cabling

“Besides consolidating our servers, we reduced our cabling significantly. Out of the box, the IBM BladeCenter required just a few uplinks—power, Ethernet and fiber channel—and immediately all 14 servers were connected.”
– Sentry Data Systems

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

OVERVIEW
Sentry Data Systems (Sentry), based in Florida, serves pharmacies and hospitals in over 20 states throughout the United States. From compliance and pharmacy transaction processing software to a healthcare business intelligence platform, its software focuses on easing healthcare specific processes and challenges.

CHALLENGE
Performing over 110 million operations per day, Sentry’s core infrastructure required substantial computing power and high-speed storage. Four difficult-to-administer racks of large servers supported the company’s day-to-day business processes, costing much energy, effort and money to run. As Sentry’s growth increased its data volumes, the resulting processing loads pushed the company’s storage environment to its capacity limitations. Sentry wanted to accommodate its growing business while simplifying the design and administration of its underlying IT infrastructure.

SOLUTION
Sentry began by consolidating on an IBM BladeCenter® H chassis that supports 14 IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new solution greatly simplifies system administration by enabling the company to access and manage all hardware remotely from a single console. All cabling is integrated within the BladeCenter technology, reducing the amount of wires previously needed for power and remote access.

To boost capacity within its storage environment, an IBM System Storage™ DS4700 Express disk system offers better performance and 33.6TB of high-speed physical storage capacity to accommodate Sentry’s growing data volumes. And to consolidate its switch fabric and increase reliability, Sentry deployed redundant IBM SAN Switches.

BENEFITS

• Reduces operating costs and offers remote administration
• Increases storage capacity and performance
• Reduces server footprint and amount of cabling

FAST FACTS

Customer: The City of Burbank

Industry: Government

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning

Business Need: The City of Burbank needed to bring its multi-vendor infrastructure onto a scalable platform that supports multiple operating systems.

Solution: The City consolidated on IBM BladeCenter® and IBM System Storage™ DS4300 while migrating to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.

Benefits: As a result of the implementation, the City achieved better performance, significant space savings, and reduced costs for hardware, power, cooling, maintenance, monitoring and licensing.

“We’re running the complete Oracle ERP solution–the application and the database–all on one BladeCenter with four-processor blades.” That solution includes Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database 10g, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It’s easier to maintain, from an administrative perspective, and it’s less costly because we are licensing for only one production server.”
– Mahesh Saraswat, Lead Database Administrator, City of Burbank

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview
Three years ago, the City of Burbank was taxed with maintaining a complex mixed-vendor infrastructure that included Sun, HP and IBM, with applications and databases running on four different operating systems. The City began to consider a new approach for the data center—a solution that would provide the hardware scalability they needed as they began migrating to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. The City chose IBM BladeCenter® as the consolidation platform and IBM System Storage™ DS4300 for SAN.

When Mahesh Saraswat joined the City of Burbank three years ago, the organization’s data center was at a critical juncture. The IT staff was already taxed with maintaining a complex mixed-vendor infrastructure that included Sun, HP and IBM, with applications and databases running on four different operating systems. Soon the organization began facing hardware limitations.

“We needed to upgrade our Oracle ERP application from 10.7 to 11i.10, as well as upgrading other Oracle-based applications,” says Saraswat, the lead database administrator who manages a team of Unix® system administrators and database administrators for the City of Burbank. “But in order to do that, we needed more disk space. And we didn’t have the flexibility to add more disk to our big Sun boxes.”

A new approach
It was at this point that the City began to consider a new approach for the data center–a solution that would provide the hardware scalability they needed as they began migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After evaluating all the options available to a multi-vendor organization, the City of Burbank chose IBM BladeCenter as the consolidation platform and IBM System Storage DS4300 for the SAN.

Saraswat says there were a number of reasons the City chose IBM over other major hardware vendors, such as previous success with IBM hardware and confidence in IBM customer service. But as Saraswat explains, “We chose BladeCenter specifically because we still had applications running on IBM AIX® and Microsoft® Windows®. We can run everything we have on the IBM blades.”

The City currently has two BladeCenter chassis, each with 10 blades. One chassis is in the primary data center, and one is located off-site as part of a disaster recovery arrangement with the City of Burbank Police Department. They also have a DS4300 in both locations, including an expansion unit in the primary data center, giving them over seven terabytes of disk space.

Making the most of BladeCenter
According to Saraswat, the City is making the most of the BladeCenter, especially when it comes to their Oracle implementation. “We’re running the complete Oracle ERP solution–the application and the database–all on one BladeCenter with four-processor blades,” Saraswat explains. That solution includes Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database 10g, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It’s easier to maintain, from an administrative perspective, and it’s less costly because we are licensing for only one production server.”

Besides enabling a sleek Oracle implementation, the IBM solution has provided the City of Burbank with a number of key benefits, including reduced requirements for cabling and space. Saraswat says they’ve already consolidated from five racks down to two, and after the migration of a few remaining AIX applications, they’ll soon be down to one. The City is also seeing significant cost savings as a result of reduced power and cooling costs, reduced maintenance and monitoring costs, and reduced hardware and licensing costs.

But cost savings isn’t everything, which is why Saraswat has also kept a close watch on the performance numbers. “Performance-wise, we’ve definitely seen an improvement,” he reports. “And the feedback I get from the users is that it’s better than before.”