FAST FACTS

Company: Victoria University of Wellington

Industry: Higher Education

Geography New Zealand

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

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

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

Hardware: 4 x Dell 2850 servers with Intel Xeon processors

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Tallahassee Community College

Industry: Education

Geography: United States

IBM Business Partner: Mainline Information Systems, Red Hat

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Companies: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Zimbra

Industry: Higher education; technology (software)

Geography: Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Sunnyvale, California

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Zimbra Collaboration Suite

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

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

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

Download the case study[PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Southern Mississippi

Industry: Education

Geography: North America

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast Facts

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

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

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

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

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

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Sydney

Industry: Education

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Education

Geography: Singapore

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

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

Hardware: HP Proliant G5 servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits:

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Red Hat, Inc.

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

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FAST FACTS

Company: CQUniversity Australia (Central Queensland University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: Australia

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

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

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

Hardware: HP 7000c Blade System and BL460c Blade Servers

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Red Hat has always been known as a leader in reliability and performance, and we’re pleased to see that recognition reflected in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 adoption in cutting-edge environments like Blackboard,” said Brian Stevens, CTO, Red Hat.

Scalent V/OE software enables Blackboard to manage, automate, and failover their mixed physical and virtual hosting environment, improving efficiency and reliability

Palo Alto, CA Nov 11 2008 – Scalent Systems, the leader in Real-time Management and Automation software for virtual and physical infrastructure, today announced that Blackboard Managed Hosting SM has implemented Scalent Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE) software to control and enable Blackboard’s compute cloud. Scalent V/OE enables Blackboard to deploy, change capacity or recover full system environments in minutes, dramatically improving efficiency and asset utilization while maintaining reliability and reducing overall costs.

Blackboard Inc is a public company that hosts mission critical applications for hundreds of educational institutions serving millions of active students and participants. Like many of today’s SaaS providers, Blackboard faced escalating expansion and reaction-time challenges driven by the increased pace of business change, statically allocated server hardware, and mixed physical and virtual environments.

In response, Blackboard combined products from Scalent, Red Hat, NetApp, and Dell to create a flexible, real-time environment – an internal computing “Cloud” – on which to base their next-generation platform.

Scalent’s software is unique in its ability to provide real time data center management, automation, and virtualization across physical and virtual servers, networks, and storage. Scalent V/OE software enables data centers to react in real-time to changing business needs by shifting workloads and connectivity: by dynamically changing entire bare-metal or virtualized systems and associated topologies – including which servers are running, what software is running on them, and how they’re connected to network and storage – without requiring physical changes to the underlying hardware infrastructure.

By using Scalent software to create, manage, and automate their compute cloud, Blackboard reduced deployment, change and recovery time to minutes.

“Blackboard’s customers demand and expect uptime and responsiveness” said Jonas Hirshfield, Sr. Director of Technology, Blackboard Managed Hosting SM. “We started by implementing the right platform foundation for optimal price-performance – using Scalent V/OE, we created a cohesive whole, while concurrently reducing future operational expansion costs.”

“Red Hat has always been known as a leader in reliability and performance, and we’re pleased to see that recognition reflected in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 adoption in cutting-edge environments like Blackboard,” said Brian Stevens, CTO, Red Hat. “Scalent V/OE software complements Red Hat’s existing commitment to Linux Automation by taking care of the underlying ‘plumbing’ differences, blurring the lines between physical and virtual compute resources and associated connectivity needs.”

“NetApp helps Scalent and Blackboard hosting customers to realize the business benefits of a highly-efficient data center build upon NetApp unified storage,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Scalent’s network virtualization, combined with NetApp® FlexClone®, Snapshot™, and SnapMirror® technologies, allow on-demand, near-instant deployment, capacity scaling, cloning, backups, and disaster recovery of entire systems—not just data.Together, these technologies are huge in terms of quantifiable business benefits, like operational costs savings and reducing downtime.”

“Scalent software enables organizations like Blackboard to stop pre-planning and worrying about tradeoffs between bare-metal and virtual, network redundancy and complexity,” said Ben Linder, CEO of Scalent Systems. “The point of ‘cloud computing’ is that it should be real-time infrastructure; Scalent software makes this vision a reality, enabling data centers to set up any servers, any software, any network, and any storage access, with guaranteed failover, in minutes.”

About Scalent

Scalent Systems is the leading provider of Real-time Management and Automation software for virtual and physical infrastructure to data centers worldwide. Scalent’s software enables data centers to react to changing business needs by dynamically changing what servers are running and how those servers are connected to network and storage. The result is a real-time infrastructure, where data centers can transition between different configurations – or from dead bare metal to live connected servers – in five minutes or less, without physical intervention. Using Scalent software, companies have been able to implement cost-effective solutions while reducing server counts, simplifying manageability, and increasing reliability. Many of the Fortune 1000 companies rely on Scalent to support their success, having adopted the software as an integral part of their business continuity, QA test infrastructure automation, and IT operations. Scalent Systems is based in Palo Alto, with offices worldwide. Scalent’s software is available globally both direct and through partners and resellers. Learn more at http://www.scalent.com.

Fast Facts

Industry: Education

Geography: United Kingdom

Opportunity: learndirect provides delivers online education, training, and advice for two million users, facilitating over 50,000 sessions and 10,000 new course enrolments per week. With systems needing to be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per week, there was no room for outages or failure. A reliable, high performance system was needed to replace learndirect’s Visual Basic-based legacy system, which was outdated and costly to support. A requirement to work with the source code and to adopt the most cost effective solution led learndirect to open source solutions from Red Hat.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, JBoss Application Server 4.0.3, Hibernate 3.0.5, JBoss Clustering and current investigating JBossCache 1.4.1

Hardware: 4 x IBM Blade Servers

Services: Gold-Level JBoss Subscription, JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Support, JBoss Training

Benefits: Immediate savings from choosing open source software with zero licencing costs. In addition, learndirect could easily scaled out its architecture as needed with no more incremental licensing costs An increase in system performance and stability with an application server which outperformed its proprietary competitors in extensive testing. The new JBoss-based learndirect system is currently running at 99.989% uptime Rapid development and time to market, thanks to the transparency of the software’s source code

“In terms of performance levels, JBoss Application Server actually came out as the fastest and this was a key factor in our decision as service levels to users are of upmost importance. As the evaluation continued we soon realised that JBoss competed extremely well with the proprietary alternatives and when we considered that scaling JBoss out as far as we liked would not create any extra licence costs on our bottom line, the decision was a very easy one to make – we chose open source from JBoss,” concluded Mather.

Background
Created in 1998 to take forward the UK Government’s vision of a University for Industry in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, learndirect is the largest e-learning network of its kind in the world. The organisation has instructed more than two million people and today delivers 25 percent of all adult skills for life achievement in the UK – an accomplishment that attested to the country’s leadership in the use of web-enabled services for workforce training.

By placing a unique emphasis on flexibility, accessibility, and support, learndirect has successfully individualised the delivery of learning to a mass audience. The learndirect service – comprised of learndirect courses, learndirect business, and learndirect advice – has enabled participants to gain new skills, renew their confidence, and reap new opportunities. On the other side of the divide, learndirect has also become a valuable service for employers, with around 200,000 businesses relying on it to train their employees. To complement its courses, learndirect provides live, interactive advice, and to date, more than 30 million advice sessions have been provided through the online and telephone services.

Supporting this number of users and sessions required a stable, high performing Web infrastructure. Administration for all three strands of the learndirect service is managed and processed by a central IT system based at headquarters in Sheffield, UK.

learndirect’s IT department also manages 600 UK online centres, which provide access to technology and support in using it to an estimated three million people a year. Based in communities across England, UK online centres provide a vital channel for reaching some of the most inaccessible audiences, helping people get online for the first time, learn new skills, and access e-government services. UK online centres have a cross-government role and support a wide range of policy agendas at national, regional and sub-regional level, from adult skills and employability to social and digital exclusion, e-accessibility, and e-government.

Opportunity

Since the launch of the learndirect service in 2000, the organisation had seen a steady increase in the number of users. On average, learndirect facilitates over 50,000 sessions and 10,000 new course enrolments per week. The core platform was responsible for ensuring that users receive the right learning for their specific needs and can be accessed by a number of different user groups, each with different access levels, including the learners themselves, tutors, administrators, and auditors. With systems needing to be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per week, there was no room for outages or failure.

In 2004, Simon Mather, Head of Software Engineering at learndirect, was tasked with developing a new core IT administration system that could handle the high transactional demands now being placed on it. The organisation’s legacy system, coded in common VB (Visual Basic), was not only costly to support but outdated; it was time for a change.

“At the time we had an aging, outsourced system built on common VB and we knew that if we wanted to maintain the levels of service to our substantial user base, then we needed to look at modernising the architecture,” said Mather.

Solution

Mather’s first decision was simple: move off VB. He explained, “This meant evaluating an outsourced. NET proposal against a new in-house Java approach. Either one had to be able to handle large work loads whilst remaining flexible for our future plans.”

Costs for each option were submitted and learndirect eventually chose to bring the project in-house, basing it on Java. Not only was this the cheapest option but Mather realised that by adopting the open, flexible standards of Java, integration would be easier with current systems as well as future-proofed for projects further down the line. Mather noted, “As a charitable trust we do have limited resources, so anywhere we can save money is always going to be favoured.”

The next key decision was to choose a Java application platform that could form the basis of learndirect’s central system. “We really needed a browser independent, highly accessible, scalable, and flexible application server so we decided to evaluate the top three: IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic and JBoss Application Server. I wanted the best tool for the job, whether open source or not,” Mather continued.

At the time of the decision to redesign its core IT system on the JBoss platform, learndirect had already been using JBoss in non-critical systems for about two and a half years. This previous experience proved a great fillip to the project, as the company already had JBoss-savvy developers who were quickly able to get to grips with designing the new system.

For its operating platform, learndirect chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Mather has not been phased by the recent acquisition. He commented, “We envisage the acquisition of JBoss as resulting in a scaling up of their offer on support, training and consultancy. Financially I can see opportunities for a simplification in contractual arrangements, and technically there is scope for innovation around products such as JBossON. I see the acquisition as an opportunity for Red Hat to offer service improvements that keep Red Hat Linux and JBoss ahead of the game, and for me that can only be a good thing.” In addition learndirect uses JBoss Clustering for session replication and Hibernate to deliver a highly reliable overall structure. The entire system ran on two pairs of IBM Blade Servers and a 500GB Oracle database.

Despite having a good level of technical understanding within the project team, Mather wanted to take a “bullet-proof” approach to support, so learndirect subscribed to gold level support for JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, and JBoss Clustering, as well as Red Hat support and related training courses. With its JBoss subscription, learndirect also had access to JBoss Operations Networks (ON), an integrated management platform for JBoss Enterprise Middleware-based systems. JBoss ON enables a detailed level of management including: inventory management with auto-discovery; administration and control management; automated alerting, download, and deployment of certified patches; and updates and monitoring of JBoss Application Server.

“JBoss support to date has been a pleasure and I’ve heard nothing but glowing praise from operations,” reported Mather.

Benefits

By choosing to Red Hat open source solutions, learndirect has benefited from a number of key advantages:

• Software licence fee cost savings have been realised not only in the initial instances of each product, but as products have been scaled out, there are no more incremental costs for each extra instance as there would be with proprietary software.

• Speed and reliability have come to the fore and, following extensive evaluation, JBoss Application Server came out as the fastest application server tested and is currently running at 99.989 percent uptime.• Transparency and accessibility of JBoss’ source code combined with the development team’s previous experience with JBoss translated into faster development and quicker time to market with the new system.

• Project costs have been drastically reduced. By choosing an in-house Java solution based on an already familiar platform over an outsourced .NET solution, Mather estimated a total cost saving of 20 to 30 percent.

To summarise the success of the project and the benefits learndirect has witnessed, Mather commented: “For me, JBoss allows us to focus on the systems that we produce rather than worrying about the cost of the infrastructure and the drain it places on resources. Because there is transparency in the code, we are able to build applications more quickly and really have a better idea of what we’re going to end up with. Ultimately we can meet demand more quickly and above all serve the needs of our users to the best of our ability. This would not be possible without JBoss open source software.”

]]> http://customers.redhat.com/2008/07/09/learndirect-teaches-the-benefits-of-open-source-with-red-hat/feed/ 0 Red Hat Customer Reference Team LearnDirect http://customers.redhat.com/2008/06/17/orange-county-public-schools-gives-red-hat-on-sap-an-a/ http://customers.redhat.com/2008/06/17/orange-county-public-schools-gives-red-hat-on-sap-an-a/#comments Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:34:45 +0000 Red Hat Customer Reference Team http://customers.press.redhat.com/2008/06/17/orange-county-public-schools-gives-red-hat-on-sap-an-a/ ]]>

FAST FACTS

Industry:Local government

Geography: Florida

Business Challenge: Running on a costly AIX server that required an expensive maintenance contract and was close to end-of-life, frustrating OCPS’s IT department and draining taxpayer money

Migration Path: SAP on AIX to SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Domain Name Server on Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: SAP running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: HP Superdome and HP BL460s and BL860s

Benefits: Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run business-critical SAP solutions gave OCPS a cost-effective, stable operating system that requires less maintenance and increases security

“Deploying Red Hat alleviated our concern about viruses and the number of penetration points, allowing us to focus on more productive IT initiatives. Running SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has given us the more secure and scalable operating system that we needed to stay within budget without sacrificing performance”

-Thomas McNabb, assistant director, device management, Orange County Public Schools

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND:Orange County Public Schools (OCPS), the public school district for Orange County, Florida, is the twelfth largest school district in the county and the fifth largest in Florida. Nearly 180,000 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade attend the district’s 180 schools. OCPS, which continues to be one of the fastest-growing school districts in the country, employs more than 25,000 faculty and staff members. In addition to traditional K-12 education, OCPS also offers an adult education system with six dedicated campuses, four special education-focused centers, a hospital/homebound program, and several alternative education centers. In total, OCPS boasts 190 locations across the county.The Information, Communications, and Technology Services (ICTS) department within OCPS is responsible for the entire school district’s computing and IT functionality, and must ensure that operations run smoothly, even on an increasingly tightened budget. The department runs and maintains about 1,100 servers spread out over 20 square miles and ensures that Web-based and client/server applications are accessible for students, parents, and staff.

OPPORTUNITY:Originally, OCPS almost exclusively utilized a mix of Microsoft Windows and an IBM mainframe. In 1998, the ICTS department migrated to SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions on AIX for administrative and operational processes and simultaneously brought in Red Hat solutions to run the domain name system (DNS).Shortly after going live with SAP 4.0b on AIX and Windows, the OCPS ICTS department ran into challenges with load balancing, viruses, and integration issues that had potential to cause greater problems. “If we had stayed with the mixed AIX and Windows environment, we would have been forced to rewrite a large amount of custom code,” said Thomas McNabb, assistant director, device management with OCPS. In addition, ICTS noticed memory leaks that caused application failure and unexpected downtime, and identified security weaknesses in the form of several penetration points where unauthorized persons could access data. The high cost of the required AIX hardware and software added to the level of frustration and led OCPS to search for a new operating system solution.

SOLUTIONS:deploying Red Hat Linux 9, and later Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on its DNS server, OCPS was fully satisfied with the benefits provided by the open source solution. Using Windows, the DNS server had to be rebooted every Tuesday with the latest Microsoft patches. With Red Hat solutions, few updates were needed and the server ran much more smoothly.This first deployment of Red Hat solutions in OCPS’s IT environment was so successful that ICTS decided to replace its troublesome AIX servers with two Linux servers to run SAP. When selecting a Linux solution, OCPS evaluated Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE. Ultimately, the ICTS department selected Red Hat solutions due to the company’s early success with Red Hat, and because the internal staff was comfortable using the solution.

“The migration from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was painless and seamless,” said McNabb. “In the previous environment, we were constantly concerned about making sure we had regular updates to protect against viruses, but with Red Hat we have no concern about that and we’ve had no issues with downtime.”

The smooth migration meant that end users were not impacted and were able to keep working effectively while the environment was migrated. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment allowed OCPS to migrate off costly AIX hardware and smoothly run SAP solutions, including human resource functions, purchasing, e-recruiting, and almost all other business functions for the district.

BENEFITS
OCPS’s ICTS department has enjoyed numerous benefits since migrating from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition to hardware cost savings, the department has saved valuable manpower resources in troubleshooting time, allowing IT professionals to work on other projects to maximize resources. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its DNS server, OCPS was able to save money by using a more energy-efficient box. Both the cost and time savings have been critical as the district is faced with a shrinking budget.

Another example of OCPS’s success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the district’s HP Superdome. The Superdome is partitioned into two portions – one that runs on Windows Data Center and one that runs an Oracle database with SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Windows side costs more than $25,000 per year to support and maintain, while the Red Hat side requires just one license and little necessary maintenance.

Red Hat’s patching system, which requires no reboots, has given the district a more stable operating system with less maintenance troubles. With no memory leaks and fewer restarts, the environment has been beneficial to both ICTS staff and end users. “We feel much more comfortable and secure in this environment,” said McNabb. “Deploying Red Hat alleviated our concern about viruses and the number of penetration points, allowing us to focus on more productive IT initiatives. Running SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has given us the more secure and scalable operating system that we needed to stay within our budget without sacrificing performance.”

The use of Red Hat solutions at OCPS has been so successful that the district is looking to move as many systems as possible to Red Hat. Many applications are being re-implemented so that they can be redesigned to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Applications, including spam filters and Web filters, now run on Red Hat. “Whenever someone wants to run a new piece of software, we ask if it runs on Linux. If the answer is no, we try to find an alternative so that we can stay Linux-based,” said McNabb. “When it comes to infrastructure systems that just have to run, we run it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

French Ministry selects open source solutions to avoid vendor lock-in, equipping all of its local education authorities with Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers

Raleigh, NC — September 4, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the French Ministry for Education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This decision was made in line with the Ministry’s strategy to invest in open source solutions in order to free itself from the constraints associated with proprietary software and vendor lock-in.

The French Ministry for Education has long been tied to its suppliers’ solutions through the suppliers’ use of proprietary standards for software and hardware. In order to avoid the growing costs associated with proprietary licenses and forced upgrade cycles, the French Ministry for Education decided to migrate to open standards-based software and hardware solutions, ensuring interoperability and vendor independence for its IT systems.

Having first abandoned GECOS 7 and DPS 7, and gradually the AIX system, the Ministry determined that since 2000 it would drastically lower its costs by definitively decoupling the operating system supplier from the hardware supplier, said Michel Affre, IT systems manager at the French Ministry for Education. In doing so, the Ministry has standardized the information system architecture of each local education authority by running its application servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating on standard servers.

More than 3,000 servers — which represent 80 to 120 servers per local education authority – now operate on Linux, with 80 percent of them running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, said Affre. All of our applications, whether financial applications or tools for managing exams, staff, students or everyday administrative activities, are now supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our applications suppliers, internal developers and external partners now develop on open standards to ensure compatibility with Linux and specifically with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The French Ministry for Education was generally satisfied with the solutions provided by its previous IT suppliers, but were limited by the high costs of hardware, licences, support and business applications development. Moving toward standards-based infrastructure, and particularly toward open source, was a strategic and profitable decision that was enthusiastically received by the young recruits in the Ministry’s IT departments. In 2004, over 95 percent of the servers ran on Linux. Today we are close to 100 percent, since we withdrew the last AIX servers at the end of 2006, said Affre. Due to its professional support services, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the clear choice for our mission-critical servers, which run essential administration systems for schools all over France.

We are delighted that the French Government has once again proven its long-term commitment to promoting and utilizing open source solutions, further freeing themselves from vendor lock-in, said Franz Meyer, country manager at Red Hat France. Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to deliver real value and greatly reduces the cost and complexity of managing data centers whether in major private enterprises or public sector organizations.

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

About Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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Industry: Higher Education

Challenge: Quick deployment of servers in an ever-growing network

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Edition with Red Hat Network; Hardware: IBM xSeries servers; Software: Oracle 9i Enterprise Database central administrative computing conversion in the university’s history. Closely tied to the Oracle installation, Program Link is the cornerstone of the University’s initiative for a totally integrated digital campus, so it was imperative that Wake Forest find an operating system that integrated cleanly with Oracle’s total product line.

Download the case study [PDF]

Why Red Hat?

The Wake Forest team spent months evaluating different alternatives based on cost, performance, support, manageability, and security. They considered other operating systems, but according to Miller, “In the end, Red Hat proved to be the better option in terms of all our needs.”

Security

Security was top priority for both the DEAC computer cluster and Program Link. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux, combined with Red Hat Network Satellite Server, allowed us to readily secure our systems,” said Seth Stein, Systems Analyst for the Wake Forest UNIX/Linux team. “It is essential that we get updates in place quickly and efficiently to keep the systems and users secure. If we had to compile everything from source, it would be a major drain on our time. With RHN we have all the updates we need. It saves us time because the packages have been compiled and tested. As a result, we can provision a server in 30 minutes.”

Vendor support

Wake Forest gained more confidence when they saw that industry-leading vendors backed Red Hat. “The relationship between Red Hat and Oracle is very important to us,” Stein said. “With Oracle’s total product offering supporting Linux, we can make the case to our managers for deploying the entire Oracle environment on a more easily maintained and secured operating system. In the end, that means we save money by reducing administrative time and maintaining longer uptimes for university business. This produces a major benefit in that the students, who access services and data from those databases, have a much better user experience.”

On the cluster side, research revealed that many cluster vendors actually developed their software on Red Hat products, which created additional stability for the environment. Miller said, “Since the DEAC cluster supports multiple research groups, we use a wide range of software: Gaussian, CHARMM, VMD, NAMD, MEAD, Matlab, BLAST, and ClustalW. Some groups maintain their own software analysis packages and utilize freely available libraries, such as ATLAS, BLAS/LAPACK, MPICH and GSL.”

Cost

The final compelling reason in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux versus another Linux distribution was cost. “The new licensing costs for many of Red Hat’s competitors were more than we wanted to spend,” Miller said.

Impressive results

“The University has an extensive collection of computing facilities that serve both academic and business needs,” said Jay Dominick, Assistant Vice President for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer. “Red Hat has played a critical role in the upgrade of our information infrastructure from proprietary Unix-based servers to open source-based computing and the deployment of a cluster-based supercomputing facility. It has also allowed us to standardize our computing support-both scientific and business computing-around one operating system. The advantages for us in terms of support, availability and disaster recovery are substantial.”

Use of Linux and other open source solutions have grown rapidly across Wake Forest as the choice for not only high-performance computing and enterprise infrastructure, like Blackboard, Banner, and Oracle, but also for online and network services like email, DNS, LDAP, and library search engines.

In production now for two years, DEAC serves as the primary research computing resource for Wake Forest’s main campus, heavily utilized by the Biophysics, Physics, Computational Chemistry, and Biomedical Engineering departments. Researchers from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine also rely on DEAC.

And through their Red Hat academic site subscription, Wake Forest students and faculty have unlimited access to the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family, including client, workstation, and server products.

Advice for getting started

Miller offered this advice for companies contemplating a migration to Linux: “Make sure you attack the problem in a structured manner. Plan your deployment and realize the full potential in Linux as it tends to really outperform in areas you least expect. Start with an architectural approach and test your replication plan to make sure it really works. You’ll save yourself a headache later on.”

“Keep an open mind. The perception that open source is not supported, not ready for mission-critical applications is not accurate,” advised Richard Ray, Systems Analyst for the WFU IS UNIX/Linux team. “The community model is much better. Open source has so many eyes looking at it that it is pretty solid. It just grows and evolves over time.”

The future is open

In regards to future plans with Linux, Miller has at least three upcoming projects that will be based on open source solutions. The first will be a grid-based, web infrastructure compatible with the MCNC statewide efforts (http://mcnc.org) using the Globus Toolkit (v4) and various web technologies including Tomcat, XML, and SOAP. “The second project is to evaluate the Red Hat Global File system (GFS) as a potential GPFS replacement,” he said, “and the third is to convert our custom, home-grown post-imaging environment to cfengine.”

“Our experience with open source and Linux has been extremely positive,” adds Dominick. “Because of the support from Red Hat, we will continue to always consider it as a viable option for our infrastructure. We consider Linux as our primary option for our computing resources. The support from Red Hat makes this an easy decision.”

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: New Hampshire

Opportunity: Experiencing major issues and frustration with password replication that caused headaches for end users and IT staff

Migration Path: Sun ONE Directory Server to Red Hat Directory Server

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Directory Server

Benefits: Eliminated replication issues and increased security in seamless transition

Download the case study [PDF]

“The multi-master replication was a huge issue for us previously. Red Hat Directory Server has solved that completely. Students, faculty and staff are our end users and this solution gives them the ability to make password changes effectively and securely so they can focus on their work.”

- Michael Pettinicchio, Systems Administrator, Dartmouth College

BACKGROUND
Dartmouth College is a private, liberal arts university located in Hanover, New Hampshire. A member of the prestigious Ivy League and one of the nation’s oldest universities, Dartmouth has nearly 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students in 29 academic departments, 3 graduate schools and 19 graduate programs. Dartmouth employs close to 600 tenured and tenure-track faculty members and is known for its highly selective and rigorous academic program. In 2007 U.S. News & World Report ranked Dartmouth eleventh among undergraduate programs at national universities.

Technology is an important part of Dartmouth’s academic and residential life, and the school has been ranked as one of the most technologically-advanced colleges in the world by Newsweek and Yahoo!. The entire campus is covered by a wireless network with more than 1,400 access points, while the campus network uses software phones and VoIP technology for local and long-distance calls. Dartmouth’s BlitzMail, the campus e-mail network, is widely used for both academic and social purposes. About 100 public computer terminals around campus are dedicated to BlitzMail use.

OPPORTUNITY
Dartmouth College was previously using Sun ONE Directory Server for identity management across the university but was having problems with multi-master replication. Students would often change their passwords on one computer, only to discover that the change was not enacted on another computer running on a different server. For example, if a student changed their password – as they are instructed to do regularly – on their computer in their residence and then went to a school computer terminal to print a document, the student would discover that the new password would not work on the second computer. The result was confusion and frustration, both for Dartmouth’s students and its IT staff, which had to quickly identify and correct the problem. Michael Pettinicchio, systems administrator at Dartmouth, estimates that the replication issues each took between 15 minutes and one hour of the IT department’s time to solve.

In addition to the time-consuming and frustrating issue of replication for both IT staff and end users, Pettinicchio and his staff were also concerned with disaster recovery and security, two identity management issues that could have a great impact on the large university community and its academic success.

SOLUTION

As the replication issues continued and end users grew more frustrated, Dartmouth’s IT department knew it needed an identity management solution that could centralize user profiles and application settings while maintaining strict security policies. Already using the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Pettinicchio and the IT staff at Dartmouth turned to Red Hat Directory Server to address their identity management challenges. Red Hat Directory Server’s competitive pricing and easy-to-use open source technology made the decision a simple one for Dartmouth’s IT department.

Pettinicchio and his colleagues were impressed by the ease and speed of deployment for Red Hat Directory Server and noted that full deployment took just a few hours. “The migration from Sun ONE to Red Hat Directory Server was seamless, and the deployment was simple and straight forward,” said Pettinicchio. Quick deployment was particularly important to Dartmouth as the college works on a year-round quarterly schedule with many students, faculty and staff on campus even during summer. The Dartmouth IT team made a few customizations while deploying and has enjoyed tremendous success since, placing just one support call in more than a year.

BENEFITS
Since the Red Hat Directory Server deployment, Dartmouth has solved its replication issue . “To my knowledge, we have not had a single instance where a change failed to replicate since deploying Red Hat Directory Server,” said Pettinicchio. “The multi-master replication was a huge issue for us previously. Red Hat Directory Server has solved that completely. Students, faculty and staff are our end users and this solution gives them the ability to make password changes effectively and securely so they can focus on their work.”

The change has helped not only with user passwords, but also with essential campus tasks like user authentication, printing and data maintenance. A web interface tool allows the IT staff to detect a problem so that IT professionals don’t need to check each system independently, allowing them to spot any problems easily. and An internal website also allows staff members to quickly replicate any changes made, eliminating confusion resulting from having disparate information. Pettinicchio also noted that disaster recovery with Red Hat Directory Server seems easy because an administrator can run another system online, maintaining the status quo for end users.

The security features of Red Hat Directory Server have given Dartmouth the confidence that the appropriate people are accessing the appropriate information. “The security features of Red Hat Directory Server are strong,” said Pettinicchio. Users can access what they need to and no more. We don’t worry about students seeing faculty-only materials or vice versa because we know the identity management system is secure.”

“Red Hat training is a big reason why we’ve been able to keep things running smoothly.
The best compliment from our average end user is nothing at all and that is what we’ve heard since the RHEL deployment.”

Jon Cutler, Director of Systems Administration, Marshall University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: West Virginia

Opportunity: Running on a slow and expensive older system caused frustration for many at Marshall

Migration Path: SunGard Banner on HP AlphaServer with Open VMS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: SunGard Banner on RHEL

Hardware: Dell

Benefits: Enjoying increased performance, improved speed, and enhanced hardware options in a simplified environment

Marshall University is a state-supported research university located in Huntington, West Virginia, offering two- and four-year undergraduate degrees as well as graduate degrees. Founded in 1837 and named after the late Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, the school has an enrollment of approximately 10,000 undergraduate students and 4,000 graduate and medical students. Marshall offers 26 associate programs, 47 baccalaureate programs and 49 graduate programs and boasts a faculty of more than 700.

Marshall’s Division of Information Technology is responsible for the vision, policies, planning, development, implementation, and administration for the university’s vast technology system. The division is comprised of Computing Services, Distributed Education Technology, Libraries, and the Marshall University Technology Outreach. Marshall’s robust IT division employs more than 100 IT professionals, committed to helping the university fulfill its mission of being an “Interactive University.”

OPPORTUNITY

Marshall uses the popular Banner suite from SunGard for important administrative and academic tasks, including human resource functions, payroll, class registration, and financial aid. Used in almost all facets of campus life, Banner provides students with a way to manage and monitor class schedules, registration, and financial information while giving faculty and staff members a unified system for academic administration, finance, and student evaluations. The Banner suite is widely used on campus and its deployment has spread to the Marshall University Alumni Association and the Marshall University Foundation.

Prior to deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), however, the university’s IT staff was experiencing subpar performance that slowed these critical campus activities. “Systems infrastructure was a big pain point for us for several years,” said Jon Cutler, Marshall’s director of systems administration. Banner, running on aging HP AlphaServer systems with OpenVMS was using older direct-attached, SCSI storage subsystems, and the University Computing Services (UCS) staff determined that a large-scale upgrade was needed to improve speed while increasing flexibility and maintaining a manageable architecture.

SOLUTION

Once Marshall decided to upgrade systems, the choice to go with Red Hat was an easy one. SunGard recommended RHEL to run its solution suite and noted that RHEL was a SunGard supported platform. The Marshall UCS staff was confident in Linux and happy with the less expensive hardware options open to them when using RHEL. Already using Dell hardware and storage from EMC, UCS benefited from Red Hat’s strong partnerships with those companies and SunGard. “Our application vendor, storage vendor and hardware vendor were all on board with our decision to go with Red Hat and we were happy to be able to take advantage of less expensive hardware options that were previously unavailable to us,” noted Cutler.

The UCS team began pre-deployment testing in late 2004 and the system was live in May 2005, the next time available for upgrades due to the academic calendar. Members of the UCS Enterprise Systems and Systems Administration staff received Red Hat training prior to going live and continued training post-deployment, with a few becoming Red Hat Certified Technicians. “Red Hat training is a big reason we’ve been able to keep things running smoothly,” said Cutler. “A number of us at UCS would like to continue training to take full advantage of the benefits of RHEL and become Red Hat Certified Engineers.”

BENEFITS

Since the RHEL deployment, Marshall UCS has noticed improved performance and a dramatic increase in the speed of many critical applications. Marshall’s infrastructure is now able to handle the workload at peak usage times like course registration. Additionally, the IT department has been able to shelve the peak usage contingency plan that many other colleges still have in place. “We’ve been able to stay ahead of the growth curve on many things with RHEL,” noted Cutler. “It’s a great advantage not to have to worry about our infrastructure being able to handle a high volume of users or updated technologies.”

In addition to enhanced performance, Marshall has enjoyed cost savings, not only with RHEL itself, but also with hardware choices previously unavailable to the school. “Along with being cost effective itself, RHEL has made a big difference in hardware acquisition and support costs. We needed to replace some of our older hardware and running RHEL gave us the option to purchase something more affordable,” stated Cutler.

Support issues with Red Hat have been virtually nonexistent. Since the deployment more than two years ago, Marshall has had just one support ticket , while finger pointing among vendors when a problem arises has ceased. A simplified environment has helped with maintenance, as patch management is very easy via Red Hat Network and Red Hat’s many partnerships allow Marshall to receive updates quickly. “It’s common in higher education to have too few people running too many systems, but running RHEL has helped us greatly with our workload and mindshare,” said Cutler.

Marshall’s “power users” – those who use SunGard’s Banner and many other applications frequently – have noticed the increased performance while other end users have been able to conduct business as usual during and after the migration. “The best compliment from our average end user is nothing at all and that’s what we’ve heard since the RHEL deployment,” stated Cutler.
Marshall’s Red Hat deployment has been so successful that both the Marshall University Alumni Association and Marshall University Foundation have migrated their SunGard suite to RHEL at the advice of UCS. The UCS team is also looking to move other servers and databases over to Linux to take advantage of the many benefits.

Category: Certified Service Provider

Winner:Amentra

Submitted by: Amentra Team

Industry: Amentra = Technology / La Petite Academy = Education

Geography: Virginia

Overview
Selected for helping enterprises deploy mission-critical business systems on JEMS through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Read Amentra Case Study

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Amentra, Inc. offers a distinctively different approach to business and IT consulting. By helping clients deploy mission critical business systems through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program, Amentra has earned industry accolades for combining two areas that have historically been separate service offerings into a single solution: deliverable-based project solutions integrated with IT Mentoring. Amentra has great expertise in retail, insurance, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and finance. Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Amentra also has regional offices in Reston, VA and Charlotte, NC. Amentra’s web address is http://www.amentra.com.

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The project had several significant business and technical challenges as outlined below:

Although these challenges were significant, they each also had reasonable solutions that could be addressed by a combination of proper project implementation and proper utilization of the JEMS stack. The challenge with the most far-reaching impact was the issue of the long-term implications of technology migration for the management of the IT department. This challenge alone had several major components:

– Any of the previous risks can negatively affect the total cost of ownership and return on investment – the gold standard of business success.

Although these risks are evident in every technology platform migration, they are rarely directly addressed and can often lead to the long-term failure or underperformance of a technology adoption effort and can poison the reputation of a product or technology solution.

3. What was the desired solution?
Amentra worked with the client to formulate a solution that involved two tightly integrated components: a traditional IT implementation with a focus on iterative implementation and heavy business involvement and a parallel mentoring approach that targeted developers, architects, IT support staff, and key business leaders.

Implementation and Architectural Approach

[ Note: At JBoss’s request, Amentra can describe every aspect of the business and technical solution (confidentiality agreements notwithstanding) in exhaustive detail. However, given that Amentra’s proposed innovation is its mentoring model for technology transfer and adoption of the JEMS stack, a brief overview of the technology solution will be provided for context while more attention is devoted to the mentoring aspect. ]

Amentra utilized its industry-leading expertise in J2EE implementation to help the client design a service-oriented architecture based on the JEMS stack. The architecture was specifically designed to provide scalable, reusable business and infrastructural services that would assist in the development of future applications. Amentra’s status as a JBoss partner also gave it additional insight into the future viability of various technology solutions on the JEMS stack, allowing further customization and refinement of the architecture.

A standard logical view of the architecture is provided in the JBoss World Innovation Award Submission
Mentoring Approach

The following section briefly explains Amentra’s mentoring approach as applied to this engagement and will provide a concrete case study of the mentoring process on a JEMS-centric project. The mentoring process is very flexible and based upon the level of the client staff’s experience and the client’s desired end result for mentoring, determined during the initial stages of the engagement. The process behind this methodology can be broken into several high-level steps:

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
Mentoring Topic Customization
Delivery Process Planning
Periodic Review and Adjustment

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
At project inception, Amentra met individually with each member of the technical staff who would be developing or supporting the application in order to establish a basic understanding of the backgrounds and relevant experience of those to be mentored. Amentra focused on obtaining information such as the person’s job description, education and experience, as well as asking each person to complete a self-assessment on their specific business or technology skill sets. It was important that Amentra included support staff as well, as the platform would eventually impact every single person in the IT department.

The resulting feedback received from these individuals along with the end result expectations as described by client management was used to select not only the high-level topics to be covered during the initial mentoring sessions, but to calibrate the level of detail and focus that was targeted for specific topics. For example, even though the development staff all came from Visual Basic 6 and RPG development backgrounds, all of the team members had a solid basic understanding of SQL and basic relational database usage. Identifying this at project inception allowed Amentra to skip classroom training for that area and reallocate the time to discuss less well-understood areas like practical object-oriented design.

Amentra had similar, but more subtle, conversations with key business stakeholders. This allowed Amentra to help IT leadership craft an effective message that emphasized the platform’s strengths, but also communicated the platform’s limitations as well.

Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
As the initial skill set evaluation was concluding, Amentra conducted a review of the client’s business processes, requirements management approach, and/or software development lifecycle processes as appropriate to determine opportunities for refining, augmenting, or reducing process in order to become more consistent with current best practices for the new business and technology environment. In this case, the client had a fairly sophisticated business requirements gathering approach that would work well with the new technology platform. However, the development and testing approaches would benefit from different approaches that better aligned with modern J2EE development. Mentoring in these approaches was thus added to the mentoring plan.

In order to maximize relevancy, Amentra’s mentoring process has been designed to be extremely flexible in its ability to be incorporated within any lifecycle methodology. Amentra has its own iterative methodology for delivering turnkey projects and will utilize this process if the client has not yet developed a process. In this example, the client chose to be mentored on portions of these processes and incorporate these portions into their enterprise direction. Amentra has substantial experience in incorporating its mentoring strategy within very rigid environments for some of the largest companies in the world, including heavily regulated environments like the pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, and financial industries.

Mentoring Topic Customization
Using the findings from the staff skill set evaluation and the current status review, Amentra customized a mentoring approach for the client and the team being mentored. The approach highlighted multiple key business processes, technologies, and methodology topics as high-level subject categories for the mentoring effort as listed below. A non-exhaustive list of the mentoring topics covered includes:

Agile Methodology
Requirements Gathering
Test Plan Development
Unified Markup Language (UML)
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section I
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section II
Advanced Java Programming
Java Server Faces (JSF)
Java Messaging Service (JMS)
The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Database Design
Hibernate
Logging
JUnit and Grinder
Subversion (SVN) Configuration Management
Ant
Maven

Amentra’s extensive experience helped to focus on the most appropriate foundational mentoring topics for initial efforts in order to help prepare the client team for more detailed and nuanced mentoring later in the project.

Delivery Process Planning
Amentra worked with the client’s management team to coordinate the mentoring plan with the overall project plan for the engagement. Like the project plan, the mentoring plan had formal deliverables, timelines, and milestones. The mentoring plan was designed in compliance with Amentra’s following guidelines:

Delivery of mentoring topics were coordinated with the project schedule so that topics relevant to the current stage of a project are covered just prior to and during that stage whenever possible. These topics sometimes spanned different groups participating in an overall mentoring approach and were executed in parallel with these groups by different members of the Amentra consulting team.
Classroom training was always confined to a limited period of time as knowledge retention drops off sharply in long training sessions.
Mentoring material preparation time for extremely customized mentoring topics was considered. However, since Amentra has already created a significant library of mentoring presentations and material, additional preparation time was typically quite small.

Mentoring Delivery
Amentra then iteratively implemented the mentoring plan with the client. Initial iterations for each topic covered involved relatively short (1-4 hour), highly interactive classroom training sessions. This helped establish a baseline among the team for new topics and provided some structure for how the new technologies and skill sets could best be used. Most classroom training sessions had a corresponding set of “homework” assignments for the team to complete individually. This allowed the team to immediately reinforce the learning. Just as importantly, the assignments provided Amentra with immediate feedback on the amount of comprehension that occurred on an individual basis. In one or two cases, training sessions were repeated or extended based on the results of the assignments. In other cases, planned follow-on sessions were eliminated when the team demonstrated immediate understanding of the subjects.

The classroom training sessions were carefully scheduled to be executed immediately before a corresponding opportunity to use the knowledge in practice. One the classroom training established a baseline of comprehension, Amentra immediately targeted follow-on project tasks that helped ensure retention of the knowledge. As the staff attempted to apply their new knowledge to a project challenge, Amentra consultants worked with them individually at various points each day to ensure that they were progressing towards an effective solution, and shared additional, more refined techniques as the staff demonstrated increasing confidence and competence with their new skills. This carefully planned, one-on-one mentoring approach is unique to Amentra and has been critical in helping dozens of clients migrate from legacy platforms to more modern solutions.

It is worth reiterating that Amentra’s mentoring was not just applied to developers. Key business stakeholders and analysts were mentored in the software methodology and requirements gathering sessions. QA staff members were mentored in the test-related topics. Administrators and support staff were mentored in the introductory and administration-related topics. This holistic mentoring approach ensured that all stakeholders were up-to-speed in the new platform and techniques that were being adopted.

Periodic Review and Adjustment
The effectiveness and progress of the mentoring plan was periodically assessed and adjusted throughout the project as Amentra worked with the client to design and implement the application. This iterative approach to mentoring allowed for adjustments to be made as Amentra saw evidence of strengths and weaknesses in the new approaches, creating an optimal learning experience for the project team.

Summary
Amentra’s mentoring model ensured the long term success of the effort by addressing each of the following risks:

Potential Loss of Personnel/Business Knowledge – Amentra’s evangelization and individualized attention helped initially convince the client staff that they would continue to be vital members of the organization after the adoption of the new platform and would continue to be strong contributors to ongoing project success. As the mentoring process progressed, the staff became even more excited about the new skills that they were learning and applying on a daily basis. In fact, the IT department experienced no attrition at all among legacy developers during the project span.

Critical External Leverage – By training the client team in all aspects of product development and administration with the JEMS stack and other technologies, Amentra ensured that the client would be able to support and extend the application without any outside assistance.

Failure to Realize Productivity Gains – Amentra’s critical contribution to the long-term reduction in total cost of ownership was to mentor the team in optimal development practices using the JEMS stack and related technologies. This not only included detailed training in sophisticated development areas like remote application server debugging using JBoss-IDE, but also in software development best practices like designing for reuse, automating integration builds, and test-driven development.

Failure to Realize Integration Savings – Amentra’s vast experience in large-scale enterprise integration helped make this challenge simple for the client. Even before Amentra was formally engaged by the client, Amentra helped the client understand the attractiveness of an integration solution based on a reusable enterprise service bus. Once engaged, Amentra then provided critical mentoring that allowed the client to understand how to extend the integration implementations required for this project.

Increased Total Cost of Ownership – The shared knowledge provided by Amentra in each of the preceding bullets helped to ensure the smooth transition from the legacy technology platform to a JEMS-based platform and guaranteed that the client staff had sufficient in-house expertise to continue to deliver systems efficiently on the new platform.

Inappropriate Long-Term Expectation Management – As noted above, Amentra’s mentoring methodology has evolved over time to include informal mentoring of key business stakeholders specifically to ensure that expectations are properly managed.

Amentra’s innovative mentoring approach to project delivery and the client-consultant relationship has delivered initial project success on the JEMS stack for customers while ensuring their satisfaction with JBoss and Java for years to come.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
Amentra worked with the client to evaluate the JEMS stack along with several other commercial software vendors and several partial J2EE-based solutions (e.g., standalone portals, standalone servlet engines) for features, adoption costs, expected productivity, support capabilities, and licensing costs. JEMS was the clear winner in each of these categories.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
At Amentra’s urging and with full client agreement, JEMS products played critical business and technical roles in the solution. JEMS products are used at every layer of the implementation, including:

Presentation Layer – JBoss Portal has provided the presentation infrastructure for the effort and has served as the interface into several of the reusable services designed for this effort (e.g., authentication/authorization, reporting).

Business Layer – JBoss Server has provided the central hub for the application and hosts the services that comprise the application.

Integration Layer – Hibernate has been used exclusively for all database integration and has drastically reduced the development time for this layer.

With Amentra’s encouragement, the client adopted Eclipse as the IDE of choice and leveraged the JBoss-IDE plug-in as well to help speed development.

Although the JEMS stack played an absolutely mission critical role in the technology stack, its most critical contribution was to allow the adoption of an enterprise-class, fully-supported J2EE solution at a price point that led to quick return on investment. Without this capability, the project might well have languished in the planning stage.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
Amentra’s mentoring approach gave the client the confidence to include a significant amount of functionality in scope for the first release of the platform. This created several critical and immediate positive benefits for the business:

Reduction in Labor Costs – Within seconds of any student or employee arriving or departing any of the client’s branch locations, the system is notified and recalculates the appropriate labor staffing ratio based on regulations at the state, county, and municipality level. Management in the field is instantly alerted if staffing is too high and can react appropriately. Managers can then react appropriately and with iron confidence to minimize overstaffing. This significantly reduces labor costs, the largest single expense for the client, while maintaining excellent quality of service for customers.

Increased Regulatory Compliance – State, county, and municipal ratios are now automatically calculated based on centrally maintained information instead of being calculated manually at each branch location. This eliminates any chance of inadvertent non-compliance at the branches.

Greatly Increased Operational Visibility – For the first time, corporate management now has near-real-time reporting capabilities on attendance data. This allows for true auditing capabilities from the corporate office, increasing management efficiency in the field and ensuring that every location is meeting or exceeding all appropriate staffing regulations at all times. The use of JBoss Portal as a web interface and delivery method also allows district and regional managers to use the system for self-service reporting when traveling, a critical capability for an organization where some districts cover tens of thousands of square miles.

The savings and operational improvements noted above fully justified the implementation on their own. However, Amentra used their longstanding J2EE expertise to help the client design the system as an extensible, service-oriented platform that can quickly and inexpensively support additional capabilities in future versions such as:

Improved Strategic Reporting – Because of Amentra’s mentoring approach, the client now has the JBoss Portal expertise required to easily deploy existing reports to executive and field management through the JBoss Portal-based interface designed as part of this application. This will also allow the client to further leverage the common authentication/authorization service built during this effort. Further, strategic reports can now be updated on a daily basis instead of a weekly basis due to the ESB-based common data collection infrastructure (q.v. above).

Yield Management Analysis and Improved Pricing Models – Amentra helped the client design the business rules service in a manner that will also support rule-based pricing as part of a future effort. Utilizing more sophisticated pricing methods will allow the client to increase their revenue in the future without a corresponding increase in labor costs. The common data collection infrastructure is a necessary prerequisite for this capability as well, allowing for models that react instantly to changes in student attendance and staffing levels.

Centralization and Portal-Based Delivery of All Applications – The success of this JEMS-based rollout and the low associated development costs have made it likely that more of the applications that are currently executed at the branch will be centralized. This will eventually allow complete central data storage, reducing the computing needs at the branch level and eliminating the existing data protection needs at each branch.

Increasing Automation of Complex Business Processes – The client’s newly acquired ESB experience has enabled them to more aggressively target automation efforts that span systems. This has created a paradigm shift for the client that will likely support years of future projects that generate further incremental cost improvements. Detailed knowledge of existing systems and processes will be equally as important to the success of these efforts as ESB expertise, but Amentra’s ability to retool the development team with ESB skills has ensured that the system knowledge acquired over years of experience at the client has been preserved for the future.

Amentra’s expertise helped the client correctly design the initial services to readily support these future initiatives for very low effort. Amentra’s mentoring methodology ensured that the client developed their own in-house expertise to implement these initiatives with little or no outside support.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
Confidentiality agreements with the client prevent Amentra from disclosing details of savings and expenditures at this time. However, some of the savings created by using JEMS was used to help implement additional services in the service-oriented architecture that will greatly lower future implementation costs for the client.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
In order to fully leverage the client’s existing infrastructure standards and investments, the following hardware/software stack was used:

Presentation/Application Servers: JBoss Portal, JBoss Server, Hibernate, Windows 2003, on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Enterprise Service Bus Servers: Cape Clear ESB, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Business Rules Engine Server: Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor

Database Server: Microsoft SQL Server, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Server

Business Intelligence Server: Information Builders WebFOCUS on existing hardware.

In order to meet the client’s needs, the application will support thousands of simultaneous users and hundreds of thousands of messages per day from over six hundred branch locations.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
At Amentra’s suggestion, the client purchased JEMS support to guarantee support, warranties, and indemnification equivalent to that provided by a closed-source platform. Due to Amentra’s support and mentoring, the client has enjoyed the best possible experience with their support – they have not yet had cause to use it at all!

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
The obvious licensing cost and standardization savings resulting from the adoption of professional-grade, open source platforms have traditionally been countered by the perceived difficulty in quickly retooling existing staff to effectively use these platforms. The combination of JBoss’s demonstrated commitment to platform excellence and the proven results of Amentra’s mentoring methodology for retooling legacy developers from COBOL, RPG, VB6 and dozens of other programming backgrounds have overcome this challenge and drastically lowered the entry cost for J2EE platform adoption.

2008 JBOSS INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR

Category: Ecosystem
Winner: Rivet Logic Corporation
Submitted by: Mike Vertal, CEO/President/Owner
Industry: Rivet = Technology Partner / Kaplan = Education
Geography: Reston, VA

Overview
Rivet Logic, a provider of professional services focused on open source solutions, and Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, a premier provider of educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses, were selected for their use of Alfresco’s content management platform in support of the upgrade of Kaplan’s online presence from a legacy system to a JBoss-centric solution. The teams employed JBoss Seam (and Facelets), JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and jBPM to create a next-generation platform for the www.kaptest.com site that can deliver personalized applications and dynamic, targeted content. The results include a 26x performance improvement over the legacy content authoring/delivery system, much faster page load times and a “fresher” web presence for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.

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

This is a joint submission by the following three companies:
Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions (KTPA) Nearly 70 years ago, Kaplan pioneered the test prep industry. Today, as a division of The Washington Post Company (NYSE:WPO), Kaplan has become the leading educational services company in the world—helping more than 3 million individuals achieve their educational and career goals through programs ranging from high school and college admissions consulting to graduate school, professional licensing, and English language training. Kaptest.com is the company’s portal to these programs. The site is divided into unique communities where customers can find programs, read articles, access special events, tools, and more—all geared towards their specific goals and interests.
Alfresco Software Ltd. Alfresco is the first and leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It is the first company to bring the power of open source to the enterprise content management market, enabling unprecedented scale and a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems.
Rivet Logic Corporation – Systems Integrator of Open Source Software; Red Hat Advanced Business Partner; Alfresco Gold Partner and North American “Partner of the Year” Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions that help organizations engage with customers, improve collaboration, and streamline operations. We 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 SOA-enabled solutions that power a new generation of interactive web properties, enterprise intranet applications, and collaborative Web 2.0 communities.

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

KTPA’s primary web presence for its potential and actual customers is www.kaptest.com, which includes 10+ domains, 14,000+ unique pages, and 250,000+ contens, and a personalized experience for hundreds of thousands of students. The legacy system challenged business operations in terms of time, resources, usability, and performance.

• Time: The legacy system sometimes required a 2 week publishing cycle because of technical issues.
• Resources: The legacy system required IT involvement to support both web content authoring, and publishing content to the web content delivery system.
• Usability: The legacy system had an editorial authoring environment that was not user friendly.
• Performance: The legacy system was not performing well as traffic load increased, and scaling it out required additional high cost licenses.

What was the desired solution?

KTPA required a solution that:

1. Supported publishing on demand.
2. Required no IT involvement during content authoring, content review/ approval/workflow, and publishing to the web.
3. Supported robust enterprise architectural principles, such as clean separation of content from presentation, and web content management from web application development.
4. Had an intuitive and user-friendly authoring environment.
5. Incorporated a fast, high performance application stack and content delivery framework. Further, it should be scalable, stable, enterprise level, inexpensive and be based on Java.
6. Allowed KTPA to pay for support, not for licenses.
7. Enabled reuse of components, as supported by Seam, Facelets, and JSF.
8. Support an open source, Java based CMS (Alfresco).
9. Quality support should be available and good community background.
10. Should use open standards (not proprietary).
11. Support a designer-friendly framework for the presentation and a pluggable, middle tier framework. Templating, re-use of content, and ease of design/development were top priorities for the presentation framework.
12. And session management was a key requirement to the project. Components that can be controlled based on the scope of the session was a key technical requirement for the platform we were going to choose.

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

One of the primary reasons JBoss was selected over other open source frameworks/stacks was KTPA’s past experience with Red Hat/JBoss support, which in our experience was always outstanding and extremely responsive. In addition, the following attributes of the JBoss/Seam/Facelets stack were critically important:

1. Cutting edge technology, allowing us to start innovating with our web presence.
2. Very high performance.
3. Open architecture, Open source
4. Easy integration with the Alfresco web content management platform.

Furthermore, the JBoss Seam + Facelets combination helped our content delivery system framework to achieve a true, enterprise-class modern web presence and platform.

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

The entire kaptest.com infrastructure is now running on what we call the Enteprise Content Authoring and Delivery System (ECADS), which was built by Rivet Logic and KTPA using JBoss AS, Seam, Facelets, Hibernate, jBPM, and Alfresco. ECADS is a system for authoring and publishing of web content for multiple, commonly hosted, websites. ECADS leverages the robust Alfresco XForms-based, multi-sandbox, layered versioning, content authoring system as a foundation for web content authoring (along with jBPM for workflow); and combines that with JBoss Seam’s powerful bijection, fine-grained scope management, and JSF extensions for content delivery. The content delivery framework portion of ECADS was built on JBoss Seam and EJB 3.0 with Hibernate-based JPA. The bulk of the delivery framework was built using Seam-wired POJO-based services with various scoping to accommodate the different life-cycle requirements. Lower layer services provide a foundation and an abstraction for the upper layers and is application scoped; where as higher layers that present data to the user were session scoped Seam Listeners answering directly to JSF components. The layers comprising the content delivery framework are:

1. WCM Layer: Abstracts the run-time instance of the Web Content Management System.
2. XML Layer: Handles the parsing and merging of the XML descriptors.
3. Accessor Layer: Domain specific layer that shares the context (from a terminology perspective) of the content-rich application (website).
4. Presentation Layer: Renders the final result to the user.
5. URI Transformation Layer: Transforms inbound/outbound URIs based on a pluggable transformer pipeline The presentation layer is especially interesting as it makes heavy use of Seam bijection to render the final page to the end user. And Alfresco was extended to support JBoss Seam for both preview and final publishing of websites.

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

The new kaptest.com was launched in early November 2007, and since then the value gained has been manifold:

1. Streamlined business operations and improved productivity. The KTPA editorial team has complete control over the content authoring and publishing process, with no involvement from IT required.
2. Better customer experience through much higher performance. We are seeing up to 26x performance improvement with the JBoss-based web application/content delivery system when compared to the legacy system. Specifically, current kaptest.com page load times are typically less than 1 second even under high load (which is remarkable for a dynamic web site!), whereas the legacy system took up to 13 seconds for a page load. Browse www.kaptest.com to see a high-performance JBoss/Seam application in action.
3. Improved productivity and a “fresher” web presence through on-demand web publishing: KTPA editors can now author and publish new content to the web within 8 minutes, contrasted with days and weeks with the legacy system.
4. Much higher ROI because of zero licensing costs. KTPA resources are now focused on support and development of innovation, instead of software licenses.

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

The production environment for kaptest.com is a multi-tier, multi-node system in a high-availability configuration. Key specifications include: Hardware nodes include: 8GB RAM 64bit CPUs Software installed includes: Red had Linux 2.6.9 EL Apache2 Mod JK JBoss AS 4.0.5 Java 5 – JRockit on 64 bit hw Facelets JSF RI 1.2 JBoss Seam 1.2.1 EJB 3(JBoss Hibernate) EHCache standard OS libraries like Apache Commons Alfreco WCM v2.0.1 Oracle 10g.

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

For the most part, the JBoss stack and Seam framework were very stable. We utilized JBoss support for a handful of issues, mainly related to advanced, cutting edge features in Seam. JBoss support was very responsive, providing bug fixes and patches to resolve issues. JBoss (and Alfresco) consulting and development was provided by Rivet Logic.

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

JBoss Seam and Alfresco WCM is a wonderful platform for enterprise-grade, high-performance, rich content delivery for next generation web sites.

Category: Increased Return on Investment
Submitted by: Andrea Zissler: Director, Information Technology
Industry: Education and Information Technology
Geography: Ann Arbor, MI
Website: http://www.proquest.com

Overview

An innovative approach to drive out cost and achieve measurable ROI as a result of implementing a Red Hat solution. Results could include financial return or percentage increase in productivity, yield, efficiency, quality, or uptime performance.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

With approximately 1,240 employees, ProQuest CSA combines the strengths of two leading and historic information technology firms: ProQuest CSA Information and Learning and CSA. As ProQuest CSA, the company provides seamless access to and navigation of more than 125 billion digital pages of the world’s scholarship, delivering it to the desktop and into the workflow of serious researchers in multiple fields, from arts and literature to science, technology and medicine. ProQuest CSA is part of Cambridge Information Group.

ProQuest CSA’s vast content pools are available to researchers through libraries of all types and include the world’s largest digital newspaper archive, periodical databases comprising the output of more than 9,000 titles and spanning more than 500 years, the preeminent dissertation collection, and various other scholarly collections. Users access the information through the ProQuest® Web-based online information system, Chadwyck-Healey™ electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print resources, eLibrary® and SIRS® educational resources, Ulrich’s Serials Analysis System™, COS Scholar Universe, and Serials Solutions resource management tools. Through the expertise of business units Serials Solutions and COS, ProQuest CSA provides technological tools that allow researchers and libraries to better manage and use their information resources.

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

Up until 2000, ProQuest CSA was running on a combination of large, expensive SGI boxes and EMC storage. The company was experiencing exponential growth with additions of 1,000 to 1,500 users per year. With this growth came extremely large jumps in cost for the company’s systems, challenging its bottom line. Additionally, ProQuest CSA began to notice a combination of technical and business challenges in terms of capacity. As soon as the company was able to get one customer past ProQuest CSA’s capacity limits, it had to buy two more boxes and an additional EMC unit, costing the company millions of dollars. Challenged to find a more cost-effective, but still high-functioning solution, ProQuest CSA investigated Linux solutions and chose to migrate to Red Hat Linux 7.2 and eventually Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

The project began in 2000 when ProQuest CSA migrated its large mid-size servers to Red Hat Linux 7.2. The company migrated from a handful of big iron boxes to a number of smaller Intel boxes from HP. The migration included shifting from a few hundred machines to an environment of thousands of machines, bringing up initial worries about how this would change the company’s support model, operations, etc. Having made the decision to shift to Red Hat solutions, migration was a success and ProQuest CSA saw an increase in performance with higher uptime and improved availability. It also enjoyed incremental cost reductions, saved millions and consequently was able to keep costs lower for their customers. Consequently, the company was able to purchase a few additional HP Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and simply add the additional capacity to augment the architecture. With its migration, ProQuest CSA was able to scale horizontally rather than vertically, giving it increased reliability.

What was the desired solution?

ProQuest CSA desired a platform that could provide a low-cost, fast-deploying, performance-boosting and capacity-building opportunity for its digital library archiving products.

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

In choosing to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, third party vendor support was incredibly important. ProQuest CSA’s backup software was unsupported by others and the company wanted the stability of knowing there was support available if necessary. The company considered using SUSE, but chose Red Hat because its solutions were more dependably supported and ProQuest CSA’s System Engineering team had a greater familiarity and trust in these solutions.

What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

In recent years ProQuest CSA has experienced great growth and with it, a migration from a mixed SGI Irix and Sun Solaris based infrastructure to one that primarily based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux across multiple product lines. Migration to Red Hat solutions began in 2000 and has continued into the present, providing increased performance and significant cost savings to the company and its customers. With this migration, ProQuest CSA has incorporated Red Hat solutions into every company product line. ProQuest has also used JBoss (currently using JBoss 3.2.7) as the application server for the Middleware component of its online system. JBoss provided an application server that faithfully implemented the J2EE specification along with a modular architecture that allowed us to install and configure only those components that were needed. In addition, JBoss provides additional capabilities, such as Intercepter stacks and Service Archives, that our development staff was able to take advantage of. As a result, the application provides more functionality and monitoring capabilities than would have been available with other non-Open Source application servers. JBoss also provided superior performance in a highly distributed environment.

What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

With ProQuest CSA’s original SGI and EMC solutions, the cost to support the company’s 91 million documents was over three million dollars. After migrating to Red Hat solutions on HP hardware, the cost for the same 91 million documents was lowered to just $250,000. After savings millions of dollars migrating to Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA was able to expand its infrastructure to initially include 21 DLs running Red Hat 7.2, allowing the company to support an additional 47 million documents. This initial SGI/EMC to HP/Red Hat migration allowed for a linear growth as capacity warrants. Previously, 45 million documents required an overhaul and roughly $1.5 million to maintain. With Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA was able to become more granular in it’s spending of a mere $15,000 for every seven million additional documents.

Additionally, ProQuest CSA saw a significant reduction in support costs and maintenance contracts for hardware with Red Hat/HP solutions. Instead of spending money on hardware maintenance contracts, the company established a self support model in which it bought extra pieces of the necessary hardware and merely switched the pieces out as failures occurred. This allowed for rapid recovery in an environment with real redundancy at the system level, available to ProQuest CAS for the first time. For previous installations redundancy was out of reach financially. This “parts depot” mindset allowed ProQuest CSA the ability to save capital and enjoy greater flexibility.

What value did you gain from implementing Red Hat solutions? If a gain in efficiency, how were those additional resources allocated within your company?

With its cost savings in the millions, ProQuest CSA was able to gain significant value in allocating this money to other areas of development. Since migrating to Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA can now buy N+1 boxes for a particular product, allowing for a scaling approach that reduces outages. With this approach, if an application goes down, end user capacity is still maintained. Maintenance can be completed on the problem box with only the loss of a node in the grid. Previously ProQuest CSA would have had to buy two big iron boxes to fix such problems. With Red Hat solutions, availability to all of ProQuest CSA’s products was dramatically increased.

ProQuest CSA also saw value in its increased capacity. The company put out a product based on Solaris and discovered that it was unable to perform to capacity. Unfortunately, buying additional Sun boxes to boost capacity was too expensive. With the switch to a Red Hat and HP solution, ProQuest CSA saw a 3 -to-1 CPU increase that allowed the company to launch the same product without the outages experienced with Solaris. Where weeks of outages had occurred with the Sun platform, capacity and performance were perfectly maintained after migrating to Red Hat.

Similarly, ProQuest CSA saw value in terms of its flagship product, ProQuest for Smart Search. The product was migrated to Red Hat solutions in under a year and displayed the features that product management needed. Without Red Hat solutions and a java implementation, it would have been 2-3 years for the same cycle. Even with the greatly reduced time spent on the product, the product launch was a critical success. Eventually ProQuest CSA Smart Search was voted by librarians as the “Best Specialist Search Product” by the International Information Industry Awards, an award given to the most innovative product that best helps a user through the search experience.

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

In 2000 ProQuest CSA replaced its six SGI Origin 2000’s and EMC Sym Storage with 39 HP DL360 (DLs) G-2’s running Red Hat Linux 7.2. Next, ProQuest CSA added additional DLs to support additional documents: in 2003 60 DLs, in 2004 56 DLs and in 2005 51 DLs, all on Red Hat Linux 7.2. In 2006 SSS (Search Sub System) was migrated from DLs to Blades running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Here, 75 Blades replaced 167 product SSS DL servers providing additional capacity, a smaller footprint and a cleaner install.

Additionally, in 2004 ProQuest CSA began testing for a “core” ProQuest migration to Linux. In 2005, 49 SGI servers were replaced by 87 DLs at a fraction of the cost, providing a more realistic environment in comparison to product and a smoother and easier addition of addition resources as capacity warranted it. In 2006 ProQuest CSA replaced 527 DLs with 322 Blades and 28 virtual hosts, all running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

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

ProQuest CSA uses Red Hat support services for limited support engagements, as the company follows more of a self-support model. The ProQuest CSA staff is highly knowledgeable in Linux and while it realizes that sources are readily available, the company has a resilient horizontal layout that allows for ample time to correct outages or other problems internally.

ProQuest CSA has engaged Red Hat support from a sales perspective, looking for guidance on particular smaller projects. When the company rolled out Red Hat years ago, it patched in an XFS kernel before the code became part of the standard kernel. Initially, the base 2.4.x kernel was 20 percent slower than the XFS patch. The application specific performance that ProQuest CSA was accustomed to achieving with the XFS patch was surpassed with the 2.6.9-22 and later kernel. With continued innovation, ProQuest CSA was able to upgrade and match the speeds of the kernel and the XFS patch. Throughout this implementation, ProQuest CSA consulted and received guidance through varied conversations with Red Hat experts. Later in the process, Red Hat traveled to ProQuest CSA offices and conducted Oracle testing and installation and gave guidance on managing Oracle systems. This project was successful, with the help of Red Hat support, and provided a sustainable opportunity to use the platform with cheaper Oracle support.

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

ProQuest CSA did not jump into its Red Hat migration and associated projects lightly and encourages other companies to research potential solutions heavily. The company notes that Linux is very stable, very scalable and provides great performance results. With the company’s initial conversations about expanding from hundreds to thousands of machines, there were concerns of how the company and its IT department would be changed. After investing in Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA has seen excellent results and benefits including cost savings and more with the same staffing levels. The company’s only regret is that it didn’t invest in Linux and Red Hat sooner. Their advice? Just do it.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Basel University

Industry: Education

Geography: Switzerland

Opportunity: Replace two obsolete OpenLDAP servers to guarantee a greater level of reliability

Migration Path: Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Directory Server

Hardware: Three servers with 3 GHz Intel Dual Core Xeon processors, each with 4 GB RAM and each with 2 x 76 GB SAS hard disk drives, distributed to two server rooms.

Benefits: Increased reliability, ensured stability at peak access times, enabled monitoring and failover functionality, enabled the modification of configuration during operation

Download the Case Study PDF
Download the German Case Study PDF

BACKGROUND
Basel University was founded in 1460 and is the oldest university in Switzerland. Throughout its 500-year history, it has always been a forward-looking institution in terms of research, teaching, and internal organisation. The university’s attractiveness as a place to study and quality of offered courses are subject to its ability to take on new developments and subjects and make these accessible to students and teaching staff alike. The task of the university’s IT Department is to provide its 15,000 IT users with permanent access to the corresponding electronic resources. This also includes ensuring that students can access both the University’s database and its archives.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2007, the team headed up by Professor Dr. Fritz Rösel, Head of IT at Basel University, made plans to replace the existing OpenLDAP servers, which provide user-access control to services on the network. The existing servers ran on the Fedora Linux distribution in a master/slave configuration that could not provide the reliability and availability necessary for the university’s systems.

“Our directory is a central component and one of the most important services of our infrastructure. Because of its importance, we needed the commercial support of a reliable source, like Red Hat,” said Bernd Sindlinger, Project Manager of Basel University’s computer centre.

SOLUTION
In search of reliability and strong support, Basel University turned to Red Hat solutions. “We had been intending to set up another Fedora Directory Server, but then we decided to implement Red Hat Directory Server because we didn’t want to go without the support that could be provided by Red Hat,” said Sindlinger.

For preliminary planning and conception of the Red Hat implementation, the university contracted the services of an external consultant, Jens Kühnel, a professional consultant who specialises in open source and directory servers. Throughout the entire testing and installation phase of Red Hat Directory Server, Kühnel supported the university, providing both advice and practical assistance.

After a short evaluation phase, the IT department began installation of the production system. The required measures were worked out and prepared during a three-day feasibility workshop with Kuhnel’s external expertise. Simultaneously, a necessary tweak to the directory structure involving an installation and adjustment period of around 10 days was completed.

The complete solution combines Red Hat Directory Server, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux onthree servers with 3 GHz Intel Dual Core Xeon processors, each with 4 GB RAM and 2 x 76 GB SAS hard-disk drives, distributed to two server rooms.

“By using multimaster replication and installing a load distribution system, monitoring, and failover functionality, the Red Hat Directory Server solution meets our requirements,” said Sindlinger.

BENEFITS
After completion of the university’s initial implementation phase, there are 15 running server services and a large number of applications accessing the directory, including e-mail services, SAP, practical training rooms, web applications, and file servers. In addition, Red Hat Directory Server now guarantees the desired high-degree availability needed to support the university’s IT systems.

Since installing Red Hat solutions, administrative costs for Basel University have been considerably reduced in comparison with its previous OpenLDAP solution. In addition, the university also has the reliability of Red Hat’s professional support to leverage in the event of a problem or query.

“The ability to apply central management to the entire Directory Server environment is one of the greatest benefits we have gained with our migration to Red Hat Directory Server,” said Sindlinger. “It was also extremely helpful for our users to experience complete transparency during implementation.”

Industry: Public Sector/Education
Challenge: Keeping costs to a minimum
Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
Benefits: Better efficiency, reliability and enhanced cost savings
Website: http://www.ycusd.k12.ca.us/

• Download this success story as a PDF: Letter | A4

With over thirty years of experience in the industry, IT Director Steve O’Toole at Yuba County Unified School District (YCUSD) in Northern California finds that open source and Red Hat provides the efficiency, reliability and cost savings which he needs to keep the department ahead of the curve. YCUSD is running Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP also known as “LAMP” for web, front-end firewalls and filtering in the mid-tier range. “Today, the district runs QSS financial systems on MPE and next year we’ll be running it on Linux,” says Steve O’Toole.

Currently, his staff is covering 14 schools, over 6800 students with an additional two schools being built on the way. With two techs for 4000 computers and one network specialist for 40 servers, he looks to open source and Red Hat to to make things work.

“My driving goals in the IT department is efficiency. Efficiency consists of choosing systems with proven reliability while saving money and that is where open source comes in.

“From a budget perspective what it costs in maintenance fees on our HP 3000 mainframe, I’m going to be able to purchase a much faster HP dual quad processor server running Linux. I’ll improve our disaster recovery strategy by butting two systems to make us fully redundant. And after that it’s savings back to the school district’s general fund.”

“The surprising thing is when I tell my guys that I’m going to bring up a Red Hat server and run multiple domains. I tell them we are going to do all this cool stuff with web management and it will be up and running by lunch.” Their response? “They all laugh but by lunch you’re done and you never have to touch it again and in two years time, your maintenance has consisted of updating your web pages.

“I’ve known about Linux for a long time and I really admire the robustness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Fedora project. The story I tell is that when you take the time and setup a server running Red Hat, it is reliable and cost efficient and in this business, that means everything.”

Everything to gain and little to lose with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Higher Education

Challenge: Regain top notch performance

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Edition with Red Hat Network

Hardware: HP DL-series servers

Software: Oracle 9i Enterprise Database Server, Oracle 9i RAC, Oracle 10g RAC, Oracle 9i AS (J2EE), Blackboard Course Management System 6.1, Several custom-developed applications

Benefits: 60% cost savings over comprable HP-UX solution. Higher performance to keep pace with data storage needs increasing by 1000% annually. Easy transfer of strong Unix skills.

Download the pdf: [  ]

Technology and the Hallowed Halls

Ranked consistently in the top tier of U.S. colleges and universities, Vanderbilt University is internationally known for its cutting edge technology and research programs coupled with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University is not only central to the city it calls home; it is also central to the economy and cultural development of the entire state. This independent, privately-supported university of just over 11,000 students is the second largest private employer based in the state.

For any world-class research institution, the need to stay at the leading edge of current technologies is paramount. At Vanderbilt, technology leadership permeates every business decision. Because open source technology is built with best practices of software development, it’s appealing to the University. A central MIS staff supports the University and Medical Center, so high levels of performance and reliability are critical to their continued leadership and long term success. That’s why Vanderbilt is migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Departing the 20th Century

Historically an HP-UX and HP3000 shop, Vanderbilt’s MIS department relied heavily on Unix and Oracle for its computing environment. Beginning in 2002, however, it became evident that their HP-UX systems were reaching the end of life in terms of maintenance and performance. The University’s needs for data storage alone were increasing by 1,000 percent each year, and the HP mainframe environment wasn’t keeping pace. In weighing the options, it was important that any new solution be compatible with the Oracle environment which had become a core competency of the MIS team. At the same time, Vanderbilt’s loyalty to HP prompted them to ask HP for pricing on two potential solutions for replacing their aging infrastructure: a newer HP-UX solution, and an equivalent 32-bit platform. The proposal for an Intel and Linux solution came in at more than 60 percent less!

Testing for Success

While Vanderbilt was looking to replace five HP-UX boxes, Oracle was making a big push toward Linux. “That was a factor,” according to Kevin McDonald, Program Manager for System Administration, “that really opened our eyes.” After attending a seminar with Oracle on their Linux-based offerings, “we immediately got four test boxes: three for data warehousing, and one for On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP),” says McDonald. Assistant Director for Architecture and Operations Darryl Boone adds, “One of our OLTP applications is a Java-based product called People Finder, which is becoming integral to the duties of a significant population among our user base. We put the OLTP database on a dedicated Enterprise Linux box running Oracle9i RAC, because high availability was crucial. Our testing went very well, showing us that we could get three times the server power and performance for the dollar, plus greater system availability.”

As McDonald puts it, “The cost advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Editions with Red Hat Network (RHN) are just too attractive to turn down. It’s a huge bargain, and when we considered the added benefits of Red Hat’s support assistance with patching, security, and the RHN GUI console, we felt we had everything to gain, and very little to lose.”

Building on Experience

As Vanderbilt researched alternate solutions, they found the skillsets of their IT staff securely entrenched in the Unix camp, another reason that a broad migration to Linux made perfect sense. “Following our successful tests, we made the decision to implement a broader migration. Looking back, it was a pretty simple task for our experienced Unix administrators,” McDonald remarks. “We took the Red Hat Certified Engineer Rapid Track course, and as soon as we returned to campus, we were able to hit the ground running.”

Since then, Vanderbilt has undergone a steady transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They now have over 30 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.2.1 servers supporting the University’s Finance and Human Resources applications, student applications, and alumni development infrastructure. Recently, a plan was put in place to migrate the Medical Center, which sees 300,000 patients per year, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux too.

The first to make the migration was a data warehousing system in the Alumni Development area. Then, finding Red Hat Enterprise Linux particularly well suited to J2EE applications, they also moved some Web applications from proprietary Sun hardware. More recently, Vanderbilt began implementing Blackboard, an application used to encourage online collaboration in teaching and learning, into their Enterprise Linux environment. It had previously been powered by Windows servers. Looking ahead, Vanderbilt has solid plans to transition it’s “bread-and-butter” PeopleSoft ERP system from the legacy Unix system over to Enterprise Linux.

“Ultimately it’s about performance and TCO. The performance is definitely there with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” explained McDonald. “We saw lower TCO in three areas: initial acquisition of hardware, software purchasing (which is usually priced according to platform), and system administration because our skills easily transferred. And with Red Hat’s Academic offering, we see a big future for Linux at Vanderbilt.”