Intel and HP Customer Success Story:

Customer: Arabian Automobiles

Business Challenge: Arabian Automobiles needed to transform its business technology infrastructure to support double-digit growth. This required increased performance, reliability, and scalability while adhering to open-standards based architectural principles

Solution: Following internal architectural principles and based on the recommendations of HP Services and Intel, Arabian Automobiles implemented Intel® Itanium processor–based HP Integrity servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the database tier and HP ProLiant server blades based on Intel® Xeon® processors at the application tier

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle E-Business Suite: 38 modules with 20 additional major vertical extensions that support all business units, Oracle 9i RAC

Hardware: HP Integrity rx7640 Servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors, HP BL480c Server Blades with Intel Xeon processors, HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrary

Benefits: Improved customer satisfaction by 15 percent, increased process automation to 80 percent from 40 percent, improved availability to 99.2 percent from, simplified management of IT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standards-based Integrity servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors. This provided a reliable, high-performance, and highly scalable infrastructure for Oracle® E-Business Suite and the integrated application modules running all of the company’s business units

Download the Case Study PDF at Intel.com

Background: One of the largest automobile distributors in the Middle East and the sole distributor for Nissan, Infiniti, and Renault in Dubai and the Northern Emirates. The flagship company of the AW Rostamani Group, Arabian Automobiles believes its greatest asset is ensuring that every customer can leave any of its company showrooms with confidence that they are receiving the world’s finest driving technology backed by a level of service and support second to none.

FAST FACTS

Company: ITI Neovision

Industry: Broadcast media

Geography: EMEA, Poland

Business Partner: Atom-Tech, Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland recommended Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the solution

Business Challenge: ITI Neovision looked to replace its enterprise platform solution, with a virtualized environment that could be supported by local teams.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization and Red Hat Cluster Suite

Hardware: HP BladeSystem BL460c

Migration Path: Gentoo Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: ITI Neovision has deployed a stable, reliable and officially supported platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization has significantly improved hardware management in terms of full utilization of available servers. Red Hat virtualization can easily scale to accommodate the demand for new servers. The company has also achieved significant cost savings and obtained all the required components in one solution.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting the Red Hat solution.”
- Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The ITI Group is Poland’s leading media and entertainment group. It is active in television broadcasting and production, multiplex cinema operations, home video and theatrical distribution, special events organisation and new media. As a subsidiary of the ITI Group, ITI Neovision offers the first Polish DTH (Direct to Home) platform, called “n”. The platform includes High Definition television channels and digital entertainment services broadcasting. The “n” package broadcasts 79 television channels, hundreds of satellite channels as well as a vast library of movies and TV series’ in the Video on Demand package. As the new generation TV, “n” continuously expands its programmes and introduces new services and channels, many of them in High Definition.

The dynamic growth and excellent results of “n” reflects a unique combination of high quality content offerings and innovative services. In June 2008, ITI Neovision launched a triple-play service combining television, internet and telephony. Following the upgrades of the nBox HDTV and nBox HDTV recorder software, subscribers of “n” have gained access to a range of new services and functionalities such as remote recording through internet and mobile phones. In October 2008, “n” launched its pre-paid television service “telewizja na karte”.

ITI Neovision worked with Atom-Tech, a Poland based Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, that focuses on generating measurable benefits for their customers by using the latest technologies and highly qualified personnel”. Atom-tech provides customers with, consulting services, IT services, and assistance with the production of customised software applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ITI Neovision required a new enterprise platform which would allow it to quickly and easily implement new technology solutions and also benefit from fully accredited local support. ITI Neovision’s hardware supplier, did not support its previous platform, Gentoo Linux.

ITI Neovision considered two possible solutions – Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. A positive experience with the Red Hat community version, a well-known brand name and HP’s ability to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux were the main criteria for selecting the Red Hat solution. Local partner Atom-Tech, who recommended the Red Hat solution, proved to be a reliable local partner during deployment.

SOLUTION
ITI Neovision deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 with virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform as its standard platform, all of which is running on HP BladeSystem. Other components of the infrastructure are MySQL database, Apache web server, FTP server, proxy server and SAN Network.

There are five host machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Every host machine supports four virtual machines including all the necessary applications. The virtual machines are also services in a failover cluster including Microsoft Windows 2003 servers. Such a set up offers ITI Neovision a high level of flexibility as it enables the migration of virtual machines between physical servers as needed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures high availability of the virtual instances, which run ITI Neovision’s mission-critical applications.

BENEFITS
It is of the utmost importance to ITI Neovision to have a robust, stable and reliable platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Since deployment the number of outages has been reduced significantly.

Another important benefit is ease of use. The Red Hat solution includes l a number of useful tools, such as clustering which enables the automation of several tasks managed by the IT department, increases work efficiency and saves time on a daily basis. Atom-Tech, the Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland, provides local Polish language support which is crucial for ITI Neovision, as well as excellent IT engineering skills.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has significantly improved hardware management by making the best possible use of all available hardware. Previously, servers were under-used in terms of processing memory because each operating system required one physical machine. Now thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization, ITI Neovision can use one physical machine for five operating systems. ITI Neovision is a fast growing company and with the Red Hat solution it is able to scale to meet any future growth.

“New projects are coming along almost every day and Red Hat virtualization can easily accommodate the demand for new servers. We can literally deploy a new server in a minute,” says Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

The Red Hat solution is less costly compared to proprietary alternatives, particularly because there are no license fees involved. An important added value of the Red Hat solution is that it contains all the necessary components in one solution set.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting Red Hat solution which is very important in the current economic climate,” said Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

FUTURE
ITI Neovision is planning to expand its Red Hat deployment to include the full 24/7 Red Hat support as well as leveraging Red Hat training and certification. As a result of its excellent experience with the current platform Red Hat has become part of the long term IT strategy at ITI Neovision. The company is planning to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more servers and thereby increase the potential for virtualization. Additional virtual instances are currently being installed on the same hardware server as a testbed for other platforms. Further expansion on other Red Hat products is also being considered.

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.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Banco Pastor

Industry: Financial Services Banking

Geography:Spain

Business Challenge: Improve payroll and human resource systems management and achieve cost savings performance improvements with an upgrade of the email infrastructure

Migration Path: From distributed platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes

Solution: The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes to run SAP NetWeaver, SAP ERP, and IBM Lotus Notes software

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server v5.3, SAP NetWeaver 7.0, SR3, SAP ERP 6.0 SR3, and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration 7.0.2

Hardware: Two IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes, three and four IFLs

Benefits: The new email platform reduced recurrent costs by 30 percent, improved performance for IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software and SAP applications, and guaranteed an exhaustive and scalable control of resources

“We have chosen Red Hat for the quality of its solutions and its outstanding technical support. Both Red Hat and IBM have clearly understood our project objectives, and together with Banco Pastor have been thoroughly committed to the proposal. We have built a very strong platform. We are delighted with what we have achieved.”
Montserrat Torres, computer systems manager of Banco Pastor

“Through the server consolidation benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class, customers like Banco Pastor can invest in innovative solutions that deliver important cost reductions and improve their services and security. The proven performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z allows Banco Pastor to increase their response capability and the availability of their business applications.”
Carlos Roldan, IBM System z Manager in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel

Download the case study[PDF] This story is available in the following languages: SPANISH

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1776, Banco Pastor has become the seventh largest banking group in Spain with 4,500 employees and 650 branch offices, and has presence in the US, Europe, and Latin America.

Banco Pastor is a bank focused on relationships, and closeness to the customer is a top priority in all their expansion decision making. The bank has firmly opted for new distribution channels, mainly telephone and the Internet, and it has an active presence in the Spanish market in both direct and Internet banking.

Banco Pastor occupies a prominent position in the Spanish banking sector’s rankings; it has the most advanced management systems and a highly effective and well dimensioned organizational structure, flexible and ready to take on the challenges of a rapidly evolving environment. In 2008, it increased its client base by 15 percent from the year before.

Banco Pastor has migrated its critical human resource and corporate email systems running SAP NetWeaver, SAP ERP, and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Through a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10, Banco Pastor has experienced decreased annual IT costs of 30 percent for the platform supporting its email system, improved performance, and increased scalability for the platforms running its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Banco Pastor looked to update its human resources management system. Banco Pastor desired a new operating platform that would help it to scale with growth, reduce costs, and provide flexibility for the infrastructure supporting those applications.

The bank’s email system, based on IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software, also needed an updated operating platform base to provide the reliability, security, and efficiency needed to serve its professional workforce, as well as the critical internal applications that rely on the platform.

When making the decision for a new platform, Banco Pastor looked for a robust, reliable, efficient, and secure alternative to service the bank’s 4,500 employees and the internal applications that rely on the platform, as well as those that support mail exchange, both internally and on the Internet.

SOLUTION
From the various alternatives considered, Banco Pastor selected an SAP solution for its human resources management system, including its payroll, career, and training systems. As part of the overall IT project, Banco Pastor looked for a new operating platform that would enhance the SAP system’s performance, reduce hardware costs, and enable scalability.

Having previously utilized Red Hat Enterprise Linux on distributed platforms, Banco Pastor had great confidence in Red Hat’s technology, support, and ability to deliver reliable, secure, enterprise-class solutions at lower costs than proprietary vendors.

This positive experience, coupled with Red Hat’s close relationship with IBM and SAP, prompted Banco Pastor to select Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating platform for its business-critical SAP and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration applications.

Today, Banco Pastor’s new SAP and IBM Lotus Notes infrastructure is based on two IBM z10 Business Class mainframes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 – one server with three IFLs and the other with four IFLs. Banco Pastor’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 reflects the business’s need for one of the world’s most sophisticated business servers, with the equivalent computing capacity of nearly 1,500 x86 servers, an 85 percent smaller footprint, and up to 85 percent lower energy costs.

“Our consolidation project and upgrade to the SAP system is a critical component of our business strategy, and we needed to ensure that we selected the optimal operating platform and hardware for immediate results and future scalability. We valued the close integration with Red Hat, SAP, and IBM, and with Red Hat’s service and technical support, we knew we made the right decision. The performance of our Red Hat systems has matched our expectations as well,” said Montserrat Torres, computer systems manager of Banco Pastor.

The SAP platform represented a completely new infrastructure for the bank. Red Hat’s scalable solution on IBM System z10 mainframes has enabled Banco Pastor’s engineers to maintain maximum control of the platform’s growth – a top priority for the company. Once the second phase of the SAP project comes into operation in 2011, the bank intends to expand its Red Hat environment and acquire new systems.

“Through the server consolidation benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class, customers like Banco Pastor can invest in innovative solutions that deliver important cost reductions and improve their services and security,” said Carlos Roldan, IBM System z Manager in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel. “The proven performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z allows Banco Pastor to increase their response capability and the availability of their business applications.”

BENEFITS
The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM System z, and SAP applications has provided Banco Pastor with a significant reduction in annual IT costs, a strengthened ability to scale with continued business and IT platform growth, and the ability to manage resources easily and with optimal performance.

“With our Red Hat solution, we have achieved annual cost savings of up to 30 percent in recurring expenses. But more importantly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z has enabled our IT team to plan the resources required to manage the SAP system in a dynamic way, without having to increase the number of machines, and consequently to reduce the complexity of the platform and control the management costs,” said Torres.

“Red Hat provides proven enterprise-class solutions at an affordable price. We make our IT decisions with our business, the required performance, and the associated operating costs in mind. In that sense, running SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers maximum value to our business.”

Banco Pastor is one of the most efficient banking institutions in the Spanish market and has the best efficiency ratio, achieved through a meticulous management of its resources, including financial, human, and technical resources.

The benefits that Banco Pastor achieved by choosing IBM System z Business Class with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to implement its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications includes increased efficiency by maximizing its cost savings, increased control over planning the diverse environments installed within the company, and strengthened control over the platform’s growth, which is one of the bank’s top IT strategic concerns. Banco Pastor has also saved valuable manpower resources in troubleshooting time, allowing its IT professionals to work on other projects to maximize resources.

“We were able to implement Red Hat at substantial savings over competitive offerings and receive premium 24×7x365 support, and in the end all of the improvements will allow us to serve customers better – increasing satisfaction – while controlling mainframe hardware and software costs,” said Torres.

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Queensland Motorways

Industry:Travel & Transportation

Geography:Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a reliable and cost effective solution for its SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning applications that would scale with its growing computing infrastructure

MIGRATION PATH: UNIX-based SMP platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Network Satellite, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle RAC

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

BENEFITS: Reduced costs, improved performance, increased ability to scale and prepared for future growth, increased energy conservation efforts

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BACKGROUND
Verizon Communications Inc., a Dow 30 company, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. With more than 235,000 employees, Verizon was selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for its consolidation and standardization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning applications to reduce costs, increase performance, and allow the ability to scale for growth. The company now runs its servers more efficiently,with minimal need for additional equipment, and Verizon has further bolstered its conservation efforts.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
With a massive global workforce of more than 235,000 employees, Verizon had an increasing need to consolidate and standardize business applications, most notably, its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Due to Verizon’s acquisition business growth and the challenges of implementing disparate systems, and the need to serve its employees, the company needed to migrate its systems to a highly reliable and stable platform that would scale with the growing computing infrastructure while simultaneously reducing costs.

Verizon’s existing UNIX-based IT architecture lacked the ability to cost-effectively scale horizontally with the constant business growth.

SOLUTION
Verizon identified the need to migrate its large proprietary UNIX-based SMP platform to standardize on an open source operating system running on x86 based commodity hardware to achieve the required scalability, reduced costs, and equivalent performance, in regards to all of its business critical PeopleSoft and SAP applications.

After a thorough evaluation period in 2007 of multiple open source vendors, Verizon selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the standard operating system for the mission critical business application migration project.

Verizon decided to deploy the PeopleSoft and SAP project in phases. The first phase began in 2008 and started the financial modules, taking about 6 months to complete before moving to production. The second phase consisted of the HR and Payroll modules and due to the better than expected results, Verizon plans to continue the consolidation with its reporting, warehousing, and credit card processing applications. The PeopleSoft and SAP applications were migrated from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Network Satellite and Proxy for Management, Provisioning, & Monitoring running on over 300 Dell and HP Intel/AMD based servers and Oracle RAC.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard based x86 commodity hardware, we are able to scale our growth horizontally and meet the needs of our employee base,” said Michael Blake, director, systems and architecture implementation, Verizon, “The fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was certified with all of our third-party applications, such as SAP and PeopleSoft, allowed us to make this decision confidently and proceed quickly, as the costs continued to mount with the previous solution.”

BENEFITS
Migrating the systems off the proprietary UNIX based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowed Verizon to reduce costs, increased its ability to scale and prepared its architecture for future growth, while at the same time providing increased performance.

“If migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply allowed us to scale at a fraction of the cost, and provided the same performance, we would have deemed the migration a success,” said Blake, “But, the real impact on the business was the increased performance with the same applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

In addition to the cost savings and performance increase, Verizon also realized a two-thirds reduction in power usage in its data center. “This is a very real and valuable benefit and will have a direct impact on our energy conservation efforts,” said Blake.

Verizon was able to increase capacity, reliability and security, allowing end users to work more efficiently. Blake commented that, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has eliminated performance surges and through the consolidation the company was able to identify bottlenecks in the system, providing a more streamlined environment. End users were minimally disrupted by the change in systems but have since noticed a more improved IT environment. The total cost of ownership has been greatly reduced.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a trusted product with excellent value and allowed us to extract the value of the new HP C-Class hardware,” said Blake, “We also saw Red Hat Network Satellite as a strategic component to our deployment, it enhances patch management, and security, and without Satellite it would be difficult to manage our systems. Satellite simplifies this process and frees up our system administrators for strategic business projects.”

CUSTOMER ADVICE
“For companies in similar situations, the most critical component is to run tests, document, and confirm the expected behavior of your Red Hat certified applications as this will drastically reduce the complexities of the migration project. We knew that with Red Hat, we could worry less about the application certifications, and focus more on proving the business case to secure buy-in from the entire IT organization. By running tests and executing numerous examples for specific teams, we were able to prove to our internal customers, that not only would the solution work, but it will perform better, and at a fraction of the previous costs,” said Blake.

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.

Download the PDF case study

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

Download the PDF case study

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.”

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

COMPANY:Allianz Australia Insurance Limited (Allianz)

CATEGORY: Carved Out Costs

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: Australia

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

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

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

HARDWARE: IBM System z10 mainframe, HP ProLiant servers

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

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

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

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

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

Industry: Construction & Engineering

Geography: Headquarters and global operations is based in the Principality of Liechtenstein

Business Challenge: To migrate all SAP® business-critical applications from a
discontinued legacy UNIX environment to a scalable and reliable platform and to eliminate vendor
lock-in

Migration Path: HP Tru64 UNIX on Alpha Servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 on x86_64
commodity based hardware

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System
(GFS), ATIX Open-Sharedroot Extension, SAP applications including SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP and SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), and the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform

Hardware: 185 HP ProLiant servers, the largest machines have 32 CPUs with 128GB RAM

Benefits: Eliminated vendor lock-in; achieved an estimated 50 percent overall cost reduction; increased performance by more than 100 percent; provided ease of management and reliable uptime; reduced electricity costs and carbon footprint; and provided the company with a long-term platform strategy that will help retain expert knowledge and enable the team to be highly responsive to the increasing requirements of a global manufacturing, sales and service organization

Download the PDF case study This case study is also available in: German.

“We migrated to SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers after evaluation and testing. Since migrating, we have have experienced increased performance of more than 100 percent. We also reduced IT costs with a commoditized architecture. Having a tight level of integration between Red Hat and SAP support organizations gives us the confidence to continue along this path and further reduce our costs by migrating all of our SAP environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
– Martin Petry, CIO at Hilti

BACKGROUND
Hilti Corporation, headquartered in Schaan in the Principality of Liechtenstein, is a world-renowned manufacturer of leading-edge technology for the global construction industry. Hilti’s high-performance drills, chisels, cutters, fastening, and measuring systems are used by construction workers around the world. The company’s sales and service organization of 20,000 global employees works directly with customers in more than 120 countries around the world, handling more than 200,000 customer contacts every day.

Hilti boasts an internal IT center, including its own in-house SAP solution-based landscape, and places a strategic focus on technology leadership and innovation.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
An integral part of Hilti’s company philosophy is to sell directly to end customers and provide outstanding service at construction sites worldwide. The company’s sales and service department make up two thirds of its worldwide staff. Besides high product quality and the constant innovation of Hilti’s engineers, the responsiveness and flexibility of its sales and service organization are the main factors that make Hilti stand out from the competition and have ensured the company a loyal customer base.

As part of a family-owned company with a philosophy of sustainable and long-term investment decisions, Hilti’s IT organization aims to meet business requirements with agility. Fundamental investment decisions in IT are made with two key requirements in mind. First, a technology or platform choice needs to be scalable to allow for growth, be able to meet business challenges, and adapt to changes the organization will encounter over the next 15 to 20 years. Second, the platform choice must enable Hilti to retain necessary expertise to manage and develop systems over as many years as possible.

In the early 1990s, Hilti chose to build its mission-critical IT infrastructure on HP’s Tru64 UNIX operating system running on Alpha Servers. With this decision, the company was one of the first global operations to migrate to a 64-bit operating system.

In 2004, HP announced it would discontinue development and support for Tru64 UNIX and Alpha Server. This vendor decision required Hilti to develop a new sustainable technology roadmap and select a software and hardware combination that would comply with its 15-20 year strategy for technology investments.

“We were experiencing a classic case of vendor lock-in and the expertise our team had built over many years was suddenly depreciating rapidly,” explains Michael Hagmann, head of Enterprise Server Technology at Hilti. “Trying to extend the lifecycle of the Tru64/Alpha platform was not an option, as we would quickly run into maintenance and hardware issues. We started evaluating alternative platforms with our previous experience in mind.”

SOLUTION
When considering alternative platforms, Hilti’s enterprise server team assessed open source software from the start. The process started in 2005, shortly after HP’s end of life decision. Initially, Hilti wasn’t sure if x86-based hardware would be capable of handling the large amounts of data and tens of thousands of daily transactions its daily business produced. But the prospect of avoiding vendor lock-in completely by building the new infrastructure on open source software made Linux Hilti’s preferred operating system.

Hilti’s enterprise server team had only three months to evaluate hardware and software alternatives before making the final investment recommendation to the Executive Board. A strong argument in favour of choosing Red Hat was that all of Hilti’s application vendors have certified their products to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which boasts an ecosystem of over 3,000 certified software applications. Hilti uses a broad array of SAP applications. Its largest and most critical systems rely on SAP ERP and SAP CRM, each with more than 5TB of data stored.

Hilti’s enterprise server team wanted to continue managing its clustered systems as one single “root disk.” An add-on called “Open-Sharedroot” from Munich-based ISV and consulting company Atix, which specializes in Linux environments and complex clustering projects, provided that for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“In the end, we had the perfect partners for our migration,” said Hagmann. “We had Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the possibility to continue working with a shared root cluster after the migration, plus the commitment from Atix and Red Hat to support our project from start to finish. A migration of this scale had never been done before anywhere, and many believed we would face challenges, but we were confident that the solution’s benefits and performance were enterprise-ready.”

As an SAP customer, Hilti wanted to consolidate, standardize, and expand its SAP software environment to improve its business performance and enhance its systems reporting capabilities.

“Our business-critical systems like SAP ERP and SAP CRM are all centralized at our headquarters,” explained Hagmann. “Our sales and customer service employees around the world rely on these SAP applications to be up and running 24/7, so migration-related downtime was not an option.” Hilti started with moving less mission-critical applications to the new platform in winter 2006/2007. SAP CRM was migrated at the end of 2008 and has been fully
operational and stable since January 2009. As the last step, SAP ERP was migrated and ready for production in May 2009.

ATIX and Red Hat supported Hilti’s migration with a dedicated Technical Account Manager and two members of support staff who had access to duplicate test systems at Red Hat and guaranteed quick responses to support tickets. “With such a large-scale, and mission-critical migration, we built our relationship with Red Hat early and our decision to utilize a Technical Account Manager saved a considerable amount of time,” said Hagmann. “ATIX and Red Hat’s dedication to making our lives easier and pulling this huge migration project off together was an indispensable asset to us.”

BENEFITS
With the new enterprise server environment, Hilti’s business-critical IT infrastructure is scalable and vendor-independent. A key benefit of the migration is that the knowledge about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based infrastructure can be retained in Hilti’s IT organization over many years to come, enabling the company’s own experts to scale the systems to match future business needs.

“We migrated to SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers after evaluation and testing. Since migrating, we have experienced increased performance of more than 100 percent. We also reduced IT costs with a commoditized architecture. Having a tight level of integration between Red Hat and SAP support organizations gives us the confidence to continue along this path and further reduce our costs by migrating all of our SAP environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Martin Petry, CIO at Hilti.

“Considering that we lost a lot of know-how as our legacy Tru64/Alpha servers were switched off, it’s very reassuring to know that Linux and x86_64 processors will be around for many more years to come, independent of the fate of individual vendors or their product decisions. The expertise we have gained is here to stay,” said Hagmann.

The new Red Hat-based platform has additionally brought performance gains to Hilti. Its IT infrastructure is now capable of handling more computing requests with the same number of CPUs as its legacy systems, but now uses less rack space. Lower electricity consumption and a “greener” footprint of the IT infrastructure are additional benefits.

“Running our SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has delivered significant improvements in performance,” said Hagmann. “And the servers are very power-efficient, which means cost savings and a reduced carbon footprint.”

A large portion of Hilti’s cost savings result from the elimination of software licensing fees with open source software. “While it is still early to determine the exact total cost of ownership as we’ve just completed migration, our estimates show that our cost benefits are likely to exceed 50 percent compared to our previous UNIX platform,” said Hagmann.

“As a company driven by innovation and passionate engineers, we’re very happy to have made this big step to standardizing on SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and industry-standard servers,” said Hagmann. “Now we can benefit from faster innovation cycles of standard hardware and be assured that all the software we need, be it for the operating system or the applications, is actually available on-demand. This clearly gives us a competitive edge in our business operations, as the IT department is able to meet new requirements very quickly.”

If you would like to start planning a platform migration to Linux with minimal downtime and want to learn more about how SAP solutions on Linux could enhance and integrate into your current platform strategy, please email: mds@sap.com.

To learn more about migrating your SAP applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, please email: SAP@redhat.com.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware form bedrock for over 120 applications and high traffic web portal

FAST FACTS

Industry: Publishing

Geography: United Kingdom

Business Challenge: To replace inefficient, incumbent systems with a reliable and affordable standardised system

Migration Path: A number of different platforms, including Tomcat, to one standardised platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Hardware: x86 commodity hardware

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform including JBoss Hibernate

Benefits: Gained increased knowledge management, expanded stability, and reduced operational costs

“We are more than happy with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Our 60-strong development team are happy with the implementation and the operation teams understand it, laying strong foundations for the future.”
– Peter Hanlon, chief technical architect, Trader Media Group

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BACKGROUND
AutoTrader.co.uk is the UK’s No. 1 motoring website, with over 10.3 million monthly unique users, who carry out over 106 million searches on new and used vehicles*. The brand is building a competitive position across all effective channels including online, mobile and magazine. (*Source: Auto Trader Audit, January 2009).

AutoTrader.co.uk is owned by Trader Media Group, one of Europe’s largest specialist multi-media groups and provider of market leading websites and its associated magazines, including Top Marques, Bike Trader, Truck & Plant Trader, Ad Trader, Motorhome and Caravan Trader, Farmers Trader – all with the largest reach in their sectors, through web visitors and magazine readership.

Trader Media Group operates in the UK, Ireland, Italy and South Africa. The Group is looking to expand on its winning formula: giving trade customers the opportunity to choose all effective channels to market; building the service and relationship with dealers and manufacturers; and strengthening its portfolio of automotive and specialist classified titles.

Trader Media Group is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax Partners.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Previously, Trader Media Group was using a variety of different platforms to support various applications across the AutoTrader website, posing a challenge to maintain in terms of cost, efficiency, and, in particular, knowledge management.

Trader Media Group recognised the need to replace these inefficient, incumbent systems with a reliable and affordable alternative. The objective was to standardise its system on one stack, streamlining the maintenance and support required for applications to run on AutoTrader.co.uk.

From a business point of view, there were significant costs associated with running multiple platforms. From an operational perspective, it also wasn’t logical for the operations team to undergo a steep learning curve to understand various aspects of the platform in order to address specific issues that arose.

SOLUTION
Trader Media Group evaluated a number of open source and proprietary solutions that could offer the flexibility and stability that its critical platform required. The team felt that proprietary applications such as WebSphere didn’t offer the full value at the cost-effective price that the organization desired. Trader Media Group needed a platform that could run Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and Hibernate on an enterprise level and at an affordable price, and it was a natural choice to select JBoss Enterprise Application Platform which integrates a clustered Java EE application server with next generation application frameworks, such as Hibernate.

The migration to standardise the AutoTrader website on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform began in 2006, and because AutoTrader.co.uk was a live site, the process was deliberately gradual. It took two years to complete the migration in total, with around 120 applications being migrated onto JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

The decision to undertake a gradual, low-risk migration was based on cost, resources, and the need to maintain a competitive edge. The AutoTrader IT team had a strategy of migrating the different applications and elements of the site and schedule of when specific projects were to take place. The alternative, which would be to migrate the site in one go, would have been a resource draining project for the whole team over a four-month period, stifling the continuous innovation and development of the site that helps maintain its position as the leader in the market.

The solution deployed included Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for messaging and Web Services, which includes JBoss Hibernate, which is a high performance object/relational persistence and query service. The eco-system also includes core search technology from Endeca.

The Trader Media Group team developed a virtualised image, which means that it can quickly deploy new servers when needed. The combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions allows Trader Media Group to buy, deploy, and redeploy additional servers at very competitive prices.

BENEFITS
Standardising on JBoss has resolved the issues Trader Media Group had with running different platforms. The combined Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss solution has given Trader Media Group a more resilient, high-performing, and stable platform and has ensured that any problems can be resolved quickly by the team.

Trader Media Group’s key consideration is supportability. It is crucial that the operations team can understand and support the software. Internally, the fact that Red Hat offers a combination of technology, spanning the operating system and middleware layers, through one complete solution from one reliable vendor offers value for its internal IT staff.

With Red Hat solutions, knowledge management has been simplified considerably, and because the new platform is open source, it has helped to build a strong community where staff can discuss issues and knowledge can be exchanged.

The resulting stability of the business-critical AutoTrader website is also recognised as an important benefit of the Red Hat solution. The availability, stability, and speed of the AutoTrader website is key to the company maintaining its leadership in the market. Users need to know that they can rely on a fast, accessible site that is available 24 hours per day, seven days per week.

Peter Hanlon, chief technical architect, Trader Media Group, said, “In Red Hat and JBoss we have acquired an integrated platform that includes all the core components required, such as messaging and Web Services, resulting in an enterprise-level infrastructure, out of the box. We are more than happy with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our 60-strong development team are happy with the implementation and the operation teams understand it, laying strong foundations for the future.”

As a leading publication competing in a highly dynamic market, AutoTrader is constantly looking for new ways to both improve the users’ online experience and to carve out costs from its publishing model. With a solid open source architecture now in place, and a vibrant open source development community now established within Trader Media Group’s in-house development team, the future evolution of AutoTrader.co.uk will be built on the reliable Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

FAST FACTS

Company: SNS Bank

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Netherlands

Middleware: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and jBPM

Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Flexible and high-performance platform; fast, standardized development, cost effective, low total cost of ownership.

BACKGROUND
SNS Bank was established in 1817 and is one of the top five banks in the Netherlands with more than 3, 300 employees in 146 branches. It is part of SNS REAAL, a Dutch service provider specialising in insurance and banking, and provides consultation for private and business customers looking for smart solutions to broaden their financial possibilities.

SNS IT is a 300-person branch of SNS Bank that is in charge of the entire IT infrastructure and determines the overall IT strategy including the development, monitoring, and maintenance of the bank’s IT systems. SNS IT ensures the uptime and availability of the systems connected to more than 3,000 workstations, producing the more than 500,000 transactions on a daily basis.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As one of the top five Dutch financial institutions, SNS Bank in the Netherlands made a strategic decision to use technology to empower its customers online by fully automating its business processes. The ability to automate its service channels required SNS bank to apply Business Process Management (BPM) techniques to existing selling channels by revamping both its public and internal process in order to provide its end users with an online, full-scale Straight Through Processing (STP) experience. As a prominent financial institution, the need for online STP was of crucial importance to its cost effective banking model in an ever turbulent and changing financial world.

In order to effectively move towards a full-scale STP experience, SNS wanted to align its goals to be continue to be completed via Open Source Software, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and BPM.

SOLUTION
In an effort to effectively target and increase processing efficiency by eliminated unnecessary human intervention, SNS Bank decided to utilize JBoss jBPM after its use with JBoss Application Server in 2002 proved to be effective. SNS Bank wanted to ensure that its customers were informed at crucial process steps since open communication has always being an important factor in customer experience. In the beginning of 2007 the first full scale STP project was kicked off, with the goal of putting new savings products online in the start of 2008.

There was a shift in component strategy in 2004 from three main commercial suppliers to one where FOSS components are preferred when possible. Open source is quite pervasive throughout the solution architecture of all current projects. Furthermore, the development environment and tooling used to implement this solution consists of almost only open source software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the proven server environment, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is hosting the web services and jBPM is the business process engine, the SNS Bank has a powerful infrastructure for exposing the selling channels.

With the implementation of the JBoss Application Server hosting the jBPM process engine, SNS Bank now has a solution that consists of a web-based front-end that allows customer access to products and services. All customer communications are managed by a document management process that tracks both post and electronic communications. The various back-end systems are accessed via a web services layer. In the event that it become necessary to deal with exceptions or be required by law that human decisions be made in the course of a process, there is a web based interface that uses web services to add, modify or end a customer process. As of 2009 the SNS Bank has deployed multiple projects exposing many products and service processes to its customers.

BENEFITS
In the current situation JBoss and jBPM have proven to be both cost effective in terms of ownership and in terms of speed of deployment. Reliability has been improved, with absolutely no issues since it has been implemented. Having access to the JBoss technical team, the various online open source communities, and a support contract have proven time and again that the choice for JBoss was the right one.

As strategic products made available to customers empowered by JBoss and jBPM, SNS Bank is able to adjust easily to customer needs. Products and product lines can be introduced into existing business processes in a cost effective manner. The flexibility to combine extends beyond products, product lines, and selling channels to become a very effective tool to reach customer bases in a timely and personalized fashion.

Customer communication are now personalized and tailored to specific processes, products, and customers personal needs as the data generated by their behavior within the processes is documented. There have been very positive reactions from customers with regards to the speed, quality, and the level of detail in communications.

With an ever growing base of BPM process definitions it is clear that the time to market for similar products is much quicker. SNS Bank has projects with estimates ranging from one third to one half of the initial development hours put into initial projects.

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

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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

Industry: Airlines/Travel

Geography: The Netherlands

Business Challenge: Renew, update, and unify the heterogeneous IT infrastructure created by the merger of Air France and KLM to create an affordable and scalable platform

Migration Path: IBM AIX and Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5; IBM WebSphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, SAP, KARMA, (KLM-Air France Revenue Management Application), Alfresco Document Management System, TIBCO, Oracle

Benefits: Delivered reduced costs expected to amount to approximately 11 million Euros by the end of 2011; a homogeneous, universal platform; an open architecture with impressive performance and reliable support

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“There is no internal discussion. The best product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux: End of story. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we work more effectively and productively and we save significantly on manpower and continuity.”
— Rene Matla, ICT production manager Linux at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

BACKGROUND
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is a worldwide company based in the Netherlands. It encompasses the core of the KLM Group, including KLM Cityhopper and Transavia airlines. In 2004, KLM and Air France merged to create the Air France-KLM holding company, creating the second largest airline partnership in the world in transported passengers. It is also the world’s second-largest cargo transporter.

KLM’s core businesses are passenger transport, cargo shipment, and aircraft maintenance. Its cargo activities have been fully integrated with those of Air France since 2007. The two transfer airports are Air France’s home base, Paris Charles de Gaulle, and KLM’s home base, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

In the fiscal year 2007-2008, running from April 1 to March 31, the KLM Group transported approximately 23.4 million passengers and 657,022 tons of Air France- KLM cargo. Today, the KLM Group has a modern fleet of 203 aircrafts, and employs 33,002 staff (FTEs). With more than 1,000 business applications, the company supports more than one million customers and 50,000 desktops. It maintains three datacenters located in Valbonne and Toulouse, France and Schiphol, the Netherlands.

CHALLENGE
When Air France and KLM merged in 2004, the unified company faced a heterogeneous IT infrastructure that presented a complex cost burden. Both of the airlines used a different operating system for their midrange systems. KLM was utilizing IBM AIX, while Air France was deploying Sun Solaris. Because of the tremendous prior investment by the respective companies in these IT systems, cost considerations made it difficult for the unified company to migrate completely to either Solaris or AIX.

In the face of its IT challenge, Air France-KLM chose to focus on a joint IT future. It decided to phase out Solaris and AIX and migrate the IT systems of both Air France and KLM to a Linux alternative. The organization wanted a more universal and flexible solution that could reduce costs without compromising on performance. It established the internal project BLUEhat with the goal of UNIX-to-Linux migration, including a middleware solution shift from WebSphere to JBoss.

“Linux is made for and by a large open source community. It is a proven platform that offers reduced costs in comparison to AIX and Solaris and allows us to purchase, deploy, and manage many Linux servers at a fraction of the cost of our previous solution,” said Rene Matla, ICT production manager, Linux at KLM.

SOLUTION
To gain synergy between Air France and KLM, the unified airlines began planning for a UNIX-to-Linux migration. “As there was no flexibility in our legacy solutions, we decided to open up our systems. The step toward open source was logical, and our selection of Linux was a very important move. Open source offered us the possibility to innovate from the bottom up with no vendor lock-in and significantly reduced costs thanks to less-expensive hardware and no licensing costs associated with Linux,” said Matla.

The airlines considered open source vendors SUSE and Red Hat during its evaluation of open source operating systems. The choice to deploy Red Hat was obvious.

“Red Hat is one of the biggest players in the open source industry and is a great innovator in the community. It has a worldwide network and a big user base. And its work, such as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, is a very important and transparent part of the innovative open source model. Red Hat has a strong product portfolio, including both Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions,” said Matla. “The support we’ve received from Red Hat has also been irreplaceable. “To us, Red Hat is a trustworthy partner. We chose a supplier who can cover as much of our portfolio as possible.”

KLM also selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware for both its mid-level and low-level web environments. KLM has one million bookings and 40 million customer check-ins per year, and 50 million hits per day on our systems. With more than 350 web applications covering everything from booking to check-in, including luggage handling, marketing, and customer relations programs, the KLM web environment is critical.

The migration is not focused on speed, but rather on steady replacement of aging systems as they approach the end of their lifecycles. “We just turn off something if it is at the end of its lifecycle, and then make the move to Red Hat. Our plan is to migrate slowly, and with each new release, we’re one step closer to homogeneity,” said Matla.

Currently, the airlines run a combination of three systems for its web applications, including AIX/WebSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/WebSphere, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, with the goal of standardizing on the Red Hat and JBoss combination.

“During the past years, Red Hat and KLM have created a strong relationship and partnership that has resulted in the creation of the first Red Hat Enterprise User Group. This group allows companies like KLM to share experience, knowledge, and best practices. Discussions focus on technology and future needs to share with Red Hat, but also includes a focus on the procedures and organisational changes needed to best work with open source. KLM truly understands the value of open source,” said Robert Molijn, key account manager at Red Hat.

BENEFITS
By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, KLM has significantly reduced IT costs.

In terms of manpower, the new team is 60 percent of its original size. Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, have delivered heightened performance and the Linux environment has given the IT team more flexibility and more effective performance results.

“Also, we are extremely happy with Red Hat’s support and responsiveness to our specific needs. If we have problems, we discuss them directly with knowledgeable Red Hat experts. In a complex environment with a great number of suppliers, is it great that Red Hat is also able to help us with problems that can fall between two suppliers. To have a company on whom we can rely reduces the amount of complexity we must deal with. The process is smooth and gives us a reliable platform to build up our Linux infrastructure to its current state,” said Matla.

To gain further Linux knowledge, KLM’s IT teams have also invested in Red Hat Global Learning Services. “The excellence of the Red Hat Training program is that it is practice-based. As far as I know, it is the only certificate program that is so thorough. Somebody who is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) actually knows how to run a Linux environment. He is able to solve certain problems in the specified amount of time. You also see this excellence in the quality of people who have gained the certification,” said Matla.

Red Hat customers also have access to the open source user and developers community, which is a valuable resource that helps drive quality products that are delivered rapidly to customers. “This could be the model of the future. You make it open to the community and you become less dependent on one solution provider. With Red Hat, we trust in this model and its reliable products and support,” said Matla.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Transportation

Geography: Singapore

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry: Education

Geography: United Kingdom

Business Challenge: To launch an extranet service that would be available to its external users of more than 35,000 examiners and moderators

Migration path: Proprietary, closed solution to a more cost-effective and flexible platform based on JBoss Enterprise Application platform

Solution:

Hardware – HP ProLiant Servers

Software – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Alfresco ECM, Enterprise DB

Benefits: Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including cost and efficiency savings of £250,000 per year, and freedom from vendor lock-in

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) is the largest of the three English exam boards. It is the leading provider of qualifications for UK schools and colleges, awarding 49% of full course GCSEs and 42% of A-levels nationally. In total, over 3.5 million students take exams with AQA each year.

AQA is an independent registered charity, with no shareholders, therefore all of its income is used to run examinations and carry out research and development to improve its qualifications and services.

AQA employs 1050 permanent staff across its offices, headed up by its Executive Board. The organization also works with about 35,000 teachers, lecturers, advisers and consultants who assist in setting and marking exams.

AQA is committed to using modern technology to enhance the quality and accuracy of the examination process for the benefit of candidates and is always striving to modernize its assessment process.

OPPORTUNITY
AQA needed a secure extranet service that would be available to its external users of over 35,000 examiners and moderators. This extranet would contain valuable and important documentation allowing users to mark exam papers more effectively, eliminating the previous paper based process of printing and posting.

Security was a big consideration as all examination papers and marking schemes were held on the system along with overall guidelines on marking the papers. AQA needed a secure platform that would not be openly accessible. It was also important that the new system allowed users to access a variety of documentation twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

AQA had a system built around a more traditional, proprietary architecture that was too restrictive and costly to maintain. In order to reduce the costs associated with licenses, support and maintenance, AQA decided to replace all the proprietary software with open source solutions. This migration allowed AQA to benefit from an end-to-end open source solution deployed on open standards and at a value point that would allow AQA to continue to innovate into the future.

“We were spending six-figure sums every year on printing and posting documentation to examiners alone. We wanted to develop an extranet that could replace our paper-based manual processes with electronic documentation that could be easily updated,” explained Peter Morris, Programme Manager, AQA. “Prior to the implementation, we considered all the major vendors, but chose an open source strategy as it offered similar and even superior levels of functionality, security and quality, but at a tenth of the cost.”

Because of the high demand for AQA’s services the entire solution needed to be deployed, tested and put into production in just six weeks.

SOLUTION
AQA evaluated a number of open source solutions that could offer an alternative software delivery model to its existing closed proprietary solution.

AQA had an existing relationship with Red Hat and had been using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its servers for some time. Knowing that the same high quality support structure, value and superior technology development extended to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, AQA decided to migrate to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as well. The overall stack proved to be far more cost effective than its competitors and significantly less expensive than keeping the existing legacy systems in place.

The solution AQA has chosen is based on an open source stack comprising Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Alfresco and Enterprise DB, and will provide a strategic platform for future collaboration.

AQA used systems integrater Optaros to aid the smooth integration of the new open source platform. Optaros enabled AQA to create a customised user experience that focused on ease-of-use and utilised Rich Internet Application technologies to improve the overall experience. Optaros supported AQA in the adoption of an Agile Development strategy which reduced the timescale for development to around four weeks.

The extranet was initially rolled out to a pilot group of 200 examiners whose feedback has been resoundingly positive.

BENEFITS
Key requirements for the migration to open source technology were cost and efficiency savings. AQA calculated that it was 10 times less expensive to implement a solution from Red Hat than to extend the previous proprietary solution to this external audience.

Red Hat’s subscription model now provides AQA with increased value as it can consolidate onto a single subscription. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced, and printing, posting, licensing and other ongoing operational costs are significantly reduced. By automating its manual process online and enabling users to update details themselves, they have improved accuracy and administration staff are now free to carry out other tasks.

As a result, AQA expects to save £250,000 or more than $340,000 annually.

The other important consideration was that migrating to an open source platform facilitated the rapid and agile development of the system, enabling two or more developers to work on different aspects of the project at the same time. This had not been practical with the proprietary technologies previously used and was another area where Red Hat’s solution helped the developers to meet the challenging completion deadline of six weeks.

AQA also utilised Red Hat’s expertise through its training and consultancy services to enable them to take the application stack and server to build a version that is ready to use and web facing. This had a significant impact in enabling the system to go-live within a very short timeframe.

AQA is no longer dependent on individual technology suppliers and now has the flexibility to decouple, plug and unplug solutions as and when required without impacting the whole stack. This has given AQA a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The migration to open source solutions has helped AQA meet the commercial challenge of staying ahead of its competitors while improving the level of service for its customers, examiners and candidates.

Peter Morris from AQA commented: “The first phase of our project with Red Hat has been a great success. We will continue to innovate and grow the technology stack. The new system has changed the way we work and has had a massive impact in terms of cost and efficiency savings. Red Hat pulled out all the stops to deliver over and above our expectations. We are now looking to migrate further services to open source as it will give us the competitive advantage to maintain our position as market leader and stay ahead of our competitors.”

FUTURE
The first phase of the project has moved exam materials online for operational cost savings. The next phase will involve messaging capabilities that will help communication across the organisation. This includes adding more exam papers, marking schemes and even training material such as online demos and screen captures to further enhance the user experience. AQA would also like to implement a forum so users can participate in conversations and discussions, creating an online community to share thoughts and learn from each other.

Eventually, AQA’s plan is to open up its information to candidates and a broader range of teachers. This will require a system capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users; AQA believes its open source system will be able to scale to meet this demand.

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: Discount Tire Company

Industry: Consumer – Automotive Retail

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

Business Challenge: Support the rapidly growing e-commerce side of the business while keeping costs contained and complying with strict PCI security standards

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite, Apache, WebLogic, IBM Lotus Domino Server, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: 50 Dell x86 servers

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Provided an easily managed, secure, and utterly reliable platform for Discount Tire’s e-commerce business. Enabled compliance with PCI security standards. Increased IT staff productivity and contained costs due to the ability to easily provision, maintain, and manage servers.

“I’ve been in the IT industry for about 20 years now, and Red Hat is far and above any other company I’ve ever worked with. Not only are its products of the highest caliber, but it is incredibly responsive to all our needs. Red Hat support is top-of-the-line, and the Red Hat phone number is on my phone’s speed dial, and it is going to stay there.”
– Will Darton, senior server support administrator, Discount Tire.

Download the case study [PDF]

Read More about Discount Tire in the press:
INO.com
LinuxBIZZ.com
Manufacturing Central
SYS-CON Media
Xtreme Open Source

BACKGROUND
Discount Tire, the world’s largest independent tire and wheel retailer has displayed tenacity and a can-do attitude from the day it opened its doors. Its founder, Bruce Halle, started out in 1960 with six tires and a portable air tank that he would refill at a local gas station since he didn’t have an air compressor. Over the next nearly fifty years he built the company – literally tire by tire – into one of the industry’s leading success stories. Today, Discount Tire has more than 725 stores in 21 states, and both Tire Business and Modern Tire Dealer have ranked Discount Tire Company as the No. 1 independent tire retailer based on number of retail outlets and annual revenues. The firm is also listed by Forbes magazine as No. 171 of the top 500 privately held companies.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2000, Discount Tire Company decided to bring management of its e-commerce infrastructure in-house after having outsourced it for several years. The IT team originally tried building a new e-commerce system on a Windows platform, “but that was failing miserably,” said Will Darton, senior server support administrator for Discount Tire. The team decided to test whether Red Hat Enterprise Linux might be a suitable alternative. After various tests and load balances, The team discovered that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was more than capable– due to its rock-solid reliability and stability. “We started out small with a very simple e-commerce site with a very basic shopping cart,” he recalled. “And our online presence and business activity experienced tremendous growth.”

By 2005, Discount Tire’s e-commerce business had grown so large, Darton realized he needed help managing the proliferating number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers deployed. Provisioning and patching began to use more and more of the team’s limited resources given the number of servers, and Darton now had to comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards set by the PCI Security Standards Council to ensure adequate protections against fraud, hacking, and other threats during processing of credit card payments were in place. “The ability to comply with PCI standards is absolutely critical, as failure to do so can result in stiff fines, suspension of rights to process credit card payments, or both,” said Darton.

Discount Tire had also been using IBM Lotus Domino Server running on Microsoft Windows for its business-critical internal email system. The reliability and performance of the Lotus applications was a critical aspect of the company’s ability to succeed, but consistent reliability and downtime issues on Windows was directly impacting the day-to-day operations of Discount Tire.
Discount Tire’s IT team was spending a great deal of its time dealing with tactical systems issues rather than issues that were more strategic to the business.

SOLUTION
Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports what Darton describes as an “enormous e-commerce environment” of 50 Red Hat Enterprise Linux physical servers and dozens of virtual machines that include Apache servers, WebLogic servers, and several dozen quality assurance (QA) and development machines. The firm currently runs its entire e-commerce operation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as numerous internal applications, including its Lotus Domino server application.

With the increasing Lotus-on-Windows performance issues, the opportunity to migrate Lotus on to Red Hat Enterprise Linux arose, and the decision was made without hesitation. Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the reliability and performance of Lotus Domino has increased. IT resources were freed up to focus on more strategic issues, and updating the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers with new patches now takes just one to two hours a month.

To manage its Red Hat systems, in 2005 Discount Tire deployed Red Hat Satellite, an easy-to-use systems management platform for Linux infrastructures. Built on open standards, Red Hat Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities such as management, provisioning, and monitoring for large Linux deployments. “My Red Hat account rep came to me and said ‘here is something you should implement once you grow a little bigger,” recalled Darton. “Our architecture was currently ten servers and I was realizing the need for a management tool, I took one look at Red Hat Satellite and said, ‘I want this now.” With the help of Red Hat Consulting, Discount Tire had it installed, configured, and performing within a month, and we have never looked back. “Satellite is my Swiss army knife – I haven’t found anything I can’t make it do,” he said.

BENEFITS
The use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Discount Tire started over eight years ago, and due to measurable results and reliability, it has since garnered the attention of the C-suite because of the success it has made possible in the e-commerce arena. “Our e-business has been a huge win for us since its inception, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been a key part of that. It’s given us a lot of visibility within the company,” he said.

In terms of reliability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has surpassed all expectations. “Obviously, our e-commerce environment has to be available 24/7/365 at 99.99 percent availability. That was absolutely mission-critical,” said Darton. “And our internal applications running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux include inventory management and email – things that people cannot live without. We have been able to trust Red Hat explicitly that everything will just work.”

Today, whenever his team gets requests for new applications or hardware, their first question is, “will it run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux?” said Darton. “At this point, we’re trying to minimize placing anything new on Windows. It has its niche, but in terms of reliability and scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has it beat.”

And Darton said that today he could not live without Red Hat Satellite. “It’s the difference between running around the data center repeatedly loading CDs and DVDs, and hitting a couple keystrokes,” he said.

“Previously, provisioning was a time burden for our team as we were adding or re-provisioning about 5 servers per month and it would take 3 hours per system to provision. Now When I use Satellite’s provisioning capability, I can provision new servers, with a specific build, at the push of a button. It saves me over 2 and a half hours per system or about 13 hours per month. Which for one person, is a considerable gain in productivity,” said Darton.

With about 5 new servers or re-provisions per month, the time savings with Satellite has resulted in important productivity gains for Darton. Previously when deploying a new server, it would take more than three hours by the time Darton positioned it in the rack, built and configured it. “Now I just press a button and away it goes,” he said. “And to me, time is money.”

Like many others in today’s challenging economy, Discount Tire is in “conservation mode,” he said. “We’re managing our expenses carefully and trying to find more efficient way of doing things.” Satellite has enabled him to do this while maintaining the quality of the service he delivers to both internal users and external customers. And if it weren’t for Red Hat Satellite, Darton would need a much larger staff. He estimates that without Satellite, he’d have to hire at least two additional system administrators.

And his ability to stay on top of PCI compliance grows more critical every day as Discount Tire’s e-commerce business continues to expand. “Because Red Hat Satellite ensures that I am up to date on my patching, it has saved us enormous amount of time and countless headaches there,” said Darton.

With Red Hat Satellite, Discount Tire has access to Red Hat Network updates and has the ability to maintain local control over the management, administration, and monitoring of our systems, which provides Discount Tire with the ability to easily comply with PCI security standards, increase staff productivity, and successfully scale our e-commerce business,” said Darton. Moving forward, Discount Tire will be taking a close look at Red Hat Directory Server integrated with Active Directory, to fully utilize the management capabilities.

“Now that we have deployed Satellite, I can enhance our e-commerce environment with it’s provisioning capability in minutes. This has the ability to allow Discount Tire the opportunity to increase revenue through our e-commerce site in a shorter timeframe. And as I mentioned before, Time is Money!” said Darton.

“I’ve been in the IT industry for about 20 years now, and Red Hat is far and above any other company I’ve ever worked with. Not only are its products of the highest caliber, but it is incredibly responsive to all our needs. Red Hat support is top-of-the-line, and. the Red Hat phone number is on my phone’s speed dial, and it is going to stay there,” said Darton.

FAST FACTS

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

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

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

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

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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