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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Toronto Hydro Corporation

JBoss Advanced Business Partner: Int3s Corp.

Industry: Utilities: Electric Power

Geography: Toronto, Canada

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: 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

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Queensland Motorways

Industry:Travel & Transportation

Geography:Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

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

Industry: Government

Partner: Software Libre Andino

Geography: Peru

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

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

Industry: Government

Geography: Brazil

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

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

Hardware: x86 commodity servers with Intel Xeon-Based Processors

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

Download the case study[PDF]

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

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

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

SOLUTION
When considering various platform options, STF researched:

• The Federal Government guidelines for open software usage

• STI’s prior experience with Red Hat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANIES: Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) and Optaros

CATEGORY: Extensive Ecosystem

INDUSTRY: Convention center management

GEOGRAPHY: Boston, MA

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

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

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

HARDWARE: Intel Xeon™ – based x86 servers

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Government

Geography: North America

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

Software: MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Local Government

Geography: The Netherlands

Opportunity: Renew part of the city’s IT infrastructure and create a future-proof platform for its heterogeneous environment

Migration Path: Windows and Unix with small amounts of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, including virtualization and clustering

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Satellite Server, Red Hat Consulting, Basis Registratie Systeem (BRS)

Hardware: 6 Dell 1750, 1850, 1950, and 2950 servers

Benefits: Run more applications with less hardware, enable cost- and space-savings, provide scalability, offer capacity to support future growth and deliver disaster-recovery capabilities

“One of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization is that we can install and roll out a new application in 60 minutes to all of our systems, compared to four hours per system previously.”
– Hennie Stam, Senior System Administrator, DS+V Division at City of Rotterdam.

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BACKGROUND
The City of Rotterdam, known for its famous harbour and large city council, is located in the Netherlands and boasts over 600,000 inhabitants. The Maas river is at the heart of the City of Rotterdam’s economical development and is responsible for the shipment and handling of over 350 million tons of goods per year.

Rotterdam’s City Council operates a number of autonomous services, including Dienst Stedenbouw en Volkshuisvesting (DS+V), an organization responsible for town planning, housing, and traffic in the city. The City Council employs nearly 16,000 civil servants, with about 1,000 of these workers making up the DS+V division. DS+V’s IT systems are managed by the Information, Policy, and Procurement department, which includes an IT management team that is responsible for handling the entire IT environment, including the proprietary, UNIX, and Linux systems.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The DS+V IT management team first implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 in 2004 for a small number of specific Linux applications, but was primarily running its applications on a Microsoft and UNIX platform. In total, 40 Dell and HP Servers were running its Microsoft, UNIX, and Linux applications, 10 of which were Linux-based.

As the IT team began developing a new administration and registration application, called Basic Registration System (BRS), for Rotterdam’s real estate activities, the department initiated an evaluation of the existing platform that included the assessment of various alternatives, including Linux. The IT team was looking for a cost-effective solution and a future-proof platform for its heterogeneous IT environment.

SOLUTION
During its assessment of alternative IT solutions, the City Council of Rotterdam’s DS+V IT team ran a pilot during the summer of 2007 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, specifically using the solution’s virtualization capabilities. The pilot aimed to assess the benefits of virtualization for the organization. The IT team compared Red Hat and VMware’s virtualization solutions and discovered that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5’s virtualization capabilities best fit its requirements and was the most cost-effective choice in terms of licensing costs.

After a successful pilot, the IT team migrated its servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and began using the solution’s virtualization capabilities running 10 virtual machines on its 6 Dell servers. Key drivers that led the team to move to a virtual environment included the benefits of less hardware, greater independence in software, the ability to support future growth, and space and cost-savings.

The DS+V department of the City Council of Rotterdam additionally runs Red Hat Global File System (GFS) for storage virtualization. The clustering capabilities of the solution equip the IT team with the ability to eliminate the impact of the fallout of physical servers. It also allows the organisation to optimize installation and patching of applications, improve the efficiencies of SAN resources, and simplify back-up and disaster-recovery systems.

The department’s IT team also selected Red Hat Satellite Server to optimize the management and deployment of both physical and virtual machines in its network. Satellite Server enables the IT team to download and distribute patches and fixes to exiting applications, and advance the user and license-management capabilities in comparison to its previous solution.

BENEFITS
Red Hat solutions have delivered heightened performance and availability for the City Council of Rotterdam’s DS+V IT team’s IT infrastructure. “Performance levels are excellent and the availability is 100 percent because the machines are no longer dependent on the uptime of the hardware,” said Hennie Stam, Senior System Administrator, DS+V Division at City of Rotterdam.

The IT group has seen cost savings since migrating to Red Hat solutions. The new setup requires less hardware, which has decreased the size of the server farm and the space required for the servers. “With our previous solution, the high number of physical servers would soon force us to look for additional space to accommodate the new servers, putting more pressure on our budget,” said Stam. “Additionally, the DS+V has managed to save on energy costs by decreasing the number of physical servers since migrating to Red Hat solutions.”

By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization capabilities, the DS+V, as part of the City Council of Rotterdam, has succeeded in saving on licensing costs. The Linux environment has given the IT team more flexibility in terms of testing and deploying new applications, and adding users to the network. “One of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and its virtualization capabilities is that we can install and roll out a new application in 60 minutes to all of our systems, compared to four hours per system previously,” said Stam.

“We were dedicated to successfully and rapidly roll out Linux and virtualization across the organization. Therefore, we chose direct support from Red Hat during the implementation phase by hiring a Red Hat consultant to guide us through the whole process to educate the IT managers that are responsible for our Linux environment,” said Stam. “We are satisfied with Red Hat’s support and responsiveness to our specific needs. The process was smooth and gave us a reliable platform to build up our Linux infrastructure to its current state.”

FAST FACTS

Customer: The City of Burbank

Industry: Government

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning

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

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

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

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

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

Company: North American Non-profit Medical Research Organization; Vizuri, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner

Industry: Healthcare: Biomedical Research and science education

Geography: US

Business Challenge: Aggregate critical information, reduce operational costs, and increase performance to internal and external users, and increase availability of research to a wider audience, through the use of a foundational portal platform.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform (32-cpu), JBoss Rules (32-cpu), JBoss jBPM (32-cpu), Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, JBoss Developer Studio, Alfresco ECM, Alfresco WCM

Benefits: The Red Hat and Vizuri partnership helped a non-profit medical research organization complete a side-by-side evaluation and selection process that compared the solution benefits of open source software to proprietary software. Through customer experiences, JBoss and Vizuri were able to outline to the customer that the cost savings provided by the selecting an open source solution would allow the customer to leverage Alfresco Enterprise Content Management.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND:
Vizuri is a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner and Preferred JBoss Certified Systems Integrator that specializes in advanced technology and business solutions. The consulting firm has experience with implementation spanning Identity Management (IdM), Business Process Management (BPM) , Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Enterprise Messaging, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Portal, Web 2.0, Seam, and RichFaces. Vizuri is a consulting firm committed to delivering innovation by utilizing open source solutions to provide cost-effective, enterprise solutions for strategic client initiatives.

OPPORTUNITY
The Red Hat and Vizuri partnership helped a non-profit medical research organization complete a side-by-side evaluation and selection process that compared the benefits of open source software to proprietary software. Together, JBoss and Vizuri were able to deliver substantial cost savings to the customer which allowed them to leverage Alfresco Enterprise Content Management.

The Red Hat and Vizuri solution was selected as a finalist against IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic. Vizuri hosted a proof-of-concepof the JBoss Portal Platform, to showcase real world business situations that included many third-party applications to be integrated into the customer’s unique environment.

During the proof-of-concept , Red Hat and Vizuri simulated Integrated Single-Sign-On (SSO) leveraging Oracle Identity Management (IdM) with PKI, and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) from Alfresco that met the customer’s requirements.

By presenting related customer experiences, Vizuri was able to show how the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform with Single Sign-On integrated with Oracle and Alfresco ECM.

SOLUTION
Ultimately the non-profit medical research organization selected the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Rules, and JBoss jBPM, to deliver an integrated technology platform that will increase the customers ability to aggregate information, increase performance and meet the needs of its internal and external customers and also bring significant cost savings to the company.

Moving to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform was an essential first step in implementing the non-profit medical research organization’s initiative, as multiple diverse systems and data sets needed to be integrated to collect, process, and disseminate all the relevant customer and operational information.

Because the integrated solution is based on open source industry standards, the customer was able to leverage legacy and custom developed applications that were integrated seamlessly as part of the overall solution.

The Red Hat and Vizuri team identified work flow and rules management gaps due to the different types of research grant application processes and the complex rules for awards. JBoss Rules, JBoss jBPM, and Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (WCM) capabilities were presented in a similar business case scenario that met the stringent requirements and customer needs.

Displaying the impact and value of open source relationships, Red Hat and Vizuri worked with Alfresco, to provide Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Web Content Management (WCM). Two solutions that positioned the customer for growth that would not have been able to be considered due to limited financial resources, if the customer selected proprietary solutions.

“Our ability to provide a robust Portal Platform capable of complex technology integrations coupled with proven client solutions, enabled the non-profit medical research organization to trust that professional open source was strategic to their organization,” said Joe Dickman, Managing Director, Vizuri.

BENEFITS
The non-profit medical research organization needed to modernize its infrastructure, and put a plan in place to build next-generation systems that would allow for agility, growth, and efficient daily operations.

From the very beginning of the project, the partnerships between Vizuri, Red Hat and Alfresco were vital to the success of the deployment. “Through the value of open source, we were able to work effectively and with a strategic mission to standardize and enable next-generation systems, that were positioned for growth,” said Dickman.

“With the costs saved from selecting the open source solution JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, the customer had the ability to purchase the Alfresco solutions,” said Dickman, “The functional advantages and the value of open source software, gave the customer more options than the customer would have had available with a proprietary solution.”

The company did not want to implement legacy and complex custom development projects in a non-standard environment. Te JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform delivered the tools to develop and establish a solid portal reference architecture that simplifies the integration of disparate systems and data.

“The JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform comes with everything we need to enable simplified integration of disparate systems and data. This platform serves as the foundation for many of our client solutions and we trust Red Hat to align with our future objectives and customer needs, and to deliver solutions for innovation,” said Dickman.

The company is also very pleased with the partnership it has forged with Red Hat. Other Red Hat clients can now leverage the experience Vizuri gained during its work with the company, “It’s a win-win situation for both of us,” said Dickman.

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: Government, tax collection

Geography: Ecuador

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry: Transportation

Geography: The Netherlands

Business challenge: Maintaining an uninterrupted rail service. Realizing an uptime of 100 percent.

Migration Path: Migrating existing applications, including those that suffered problems with the performance of BEA Weblogic on OpenVMS. Building new applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Global File System with cluster environment, Red Hat Directory Server, Red Hat Network Provisioning Module, Red Hat Certificate System, Red Hat Consulting, and Red Hat Training and Certification.

Benefits: Easy update policy, stable system, 100 percent uptime in the first quarter of 2008

”We wanted a stable, robust, yet flexible infrastructure and finally chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We also selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for most new projects as the Red Hat operating system best suits our requirements and objectives for future business plans.”
– Mike Bos, infrastructure manager, ProRail

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ProRail manages the rail infrastructure in the Netherlands and is responsible for the Dutch railway network. The organization came into being through a merger of three organizations: the former Railinfrabeheer (responsible for rail maintenance and construction), Railverkeersleiding (rail traffic management), and Railned (rail capacity planning).

ProRail has been active since 1 January 2003. The organization has 2,600 employees who run the railway network, and guarantee reliability and safety. The rail infrastructure manager has an operating area of about 6,500 kilometres of track and carries 1.2 million passengers and 100,000 tons of goods every day. This makes the 6,500 kilometres of railway track in The Netherlands among the most used in the world.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A failure in the system at ProRail has far-reaching consequences and represents a substantial loss for and industry commerce alike.

The technical challenge for ProRail, and the basis for achieving 100 percent uptime, was the introduction of a sound operating system. This means that the application has no unplanned downtime. ProRail works with OpenVMS (Virtual Memory System), a high-end computer system originally designed by Digital Equipment Corporation and now sold by HP.

OpenVMS, a multi-user, multiprocessing virtual memory-based operating system, functions satisfactorily. But in early 2000, the system was no longer available for all the products that ProRail wanted to launch.

Mike Bos, infrastructure manager at ProRail, explains: “At the time Open VMS was running behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows in terms of layered product applications available. The J2EE applications had performance issues. The need arose for a second operating system. With the addition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are moving to a shorter time to market model.”

SOLUTION
ProRail did not intend to replace the existing OpenVMS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It would have been an enormous job to migrate every existing application,” said Bos. “The applications that were easily migrated and/or had problems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Another decision ProRail made was to allow each new application to be built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “After all, you have to use the best tool for the job. We are working to achieve long-term objectives,” said Bos.

Red Hat assisted ProRail by implementing Red Hat Network Satellite for the testing and training environment. With Red Hat Network Satellite, different ‘virtual’ systems can be controlled as a single system. This means that systems can be added to a controlled environment. The ProRail IT network is spread across The Netherlands in 13 local offices. Red Hat Network proxies have been set up at those locations. Every system is installed and managed by the central Red Hat Network architecture, including custom software which needs to be delivered in RPM format by the projects. ProRail also acquired a mix of Premium and Basic Red Hat Enterprise Linux support subscriptions.

Pro Rail is also using Red Hat Global File System. Global File System contains embedded clusters, jointly providing an integrated software framework. ProRail needed to design a complete infrastructure for a new open source solution within its data centres. To help define the organization’s needs and design this new architecture, ProRail engaged Red Hat Global Professional Services, Red Hat’s consulting practice. The new architecture consists of an array of Red Hat tools and software, including:

• Red Hat Network products for provisioning and management
• Default installation profiles that consist of only the products needed by ProRail
• Red Hat Directory Server providing multiple master setup for the centralized user management and application needs.
• Default Red Hat Cluster Suite setups, including Global File System as shared file system with Oracle Real Application cluster
• Default High-Availability Loadbalancer setup (active/backup)
• Develop custom applications for current monitoring systems
• Plans call for Certificate System to be implemented Global Professional Services helped ProRail to develop a custom default architecture design to
  maximize its technology investment.

A Red Hat Consultant, specifically a Dedicated Enterprise Engineer (DEE), installed the framework within the production environment and continues to perform third-level support on-site at ProRail.

The DEE is also responsible for product development and implementing new products from which ProRail can profit. Examples include:

1. Creating a default workstation install, from which several different workstations could be installed. Before this, every workstation type (differs by application use), had its own installation profile and was built by different partners, so every setup looked different and cost a lot in maintenance effort. The new default modular approach significantly reduces maintenance costs.
2. Virtualization setup within the test/training environment. This makes it possible to mix test setups and training instances on a small amount of hardware and is a good start ahead of Proof of Concept for virtualization within the production architecture. ProRail asked Red Hat to help them define the skills needed and execute a training program giving ProRail’s system administrators the appropriate knowledge to support projects which would use the new architecture and set the default framework in production. This service was also delivered by its (DEE) consultant. Together with the Red Hat DEE, ProRail set up a training track for the current operations managers, so they can cover first-line support on the new architecture using Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) skills. To get the maximum performance out of the system, the operations managers at ProRail had to take two Red Hat training courses. “We wanted our people to benefit from thorough training and examination,” said Bos. Besides training its own personnel, for second-line support ProRail hired Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCEs).

BENEFITS
Thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ProRail now has a stable and flexible environment. In the first quarter of 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux satisfied the requirement of an uptime of 100 percent. “There have been no incidents so far. Hopefully, by the end of 2008, we can realize our goals. Thanks to Red Hat,” said Bos.

The maturity and robustness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is important to ProRail.

“We don’t want any new, unproven products. Infrastructure managers are conservative,” said Bos. “Red Hat’s expanding presence in the market is proof of its reliability, and we know that the system is viable for a long lifecycle.”

Bos praises Red Hat’s update policy too. “Updates can be done very easily with Red Hat. With Red Hat we created a more flexible, reliable environment which is easy to maintain and this leaves us free to concentrate on new projects. We’re very happy with the flexibility and reliability we’ve achieved with Red Hat.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Salt River Project

Industry: Utilities, Government

Geography: Arizona

Challenge: Searched for a replacement for proprietary software for its IBM mainframe servers that could provide greater flexibility, manageability, and utilization opportunities

Migration Path: HPUX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite

Hardware: IBM System z mainframe servers

Benefits: Experienced cost savings, boosted performance, stable and reliable management, consolidation, and valuable technical support after migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z

“Since we were already leaning toward Red Hat in our distributed environment, choosing Red Hat on the mainframe coincided perfectly with our desire to have one corporate standard for Linux.”
– Kevin Masaryk, senior Linux/Unix administrator at SRP

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As one of Arizona’s largest utilities providers, Salt River Project (SRP) has delivered low-cost, reliable power and water to Arizona customers for over 100 years. SRP includes two entities: the Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, a political subdivision of the state of Arizona, and the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, a private corporation.

The District provides electricity to more than 935,000 retail customers in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. It operates or participates in 11 major power plants and numerous other generating stations, including thermal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydroelectric sources.

The mission of SRP is to deliver ever-improving contributions to the people it serves through the provision of low-cost, reliable water and power, and community programs, to ensure the vitality of the Salt River Valley.

CHALLENGE
SRP’s Power division had been testing Linux in-house for approximately three years, but didn’t have any Linux solutions in production environments at the time. There was little experience with Linux within SRP’s IT team, though the utility company was interested in moving to a Linux-based environment in the future. In 2006, SRP upgraded its System z mainframe and IBM offered incentives for use with a Linux operating system. This prompted SRP to accelerate its investigation of Linux solutions.

“We had a long-standing desire to look for solutions outside of our current environment,” said Kevin Masaryk, senior Linux/Unix administrator at SRP. “We were very interested in Linux on the mainframe for the enhanced utilization, flexibility, workload consolidation, and management capabilities offered there. Above all, it could help us mitigate the risk of the server sprawl which had plagued us. In fact, whether on the mainframe or a distributed architecture, Linux would allow us to run more workloads per server than our traditional environment.”

SOLUTION
After deciding to evaluate various Linux solutions for the mainframe, SRP selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which the SRP IT team had been evaluating during its in-house Linux testing. SRP decided it would prefer to use one reliable Linux distribution in both its mainframe and distributed environments.

“When evaluating Linux mainframe solutions, we experimented with SUSE because it had an early relationship with IBM for that architecture, but Red Hat had become very mature in the mainframe environment, too. Since we were already leaning toward Red Hat in our distributed environment, choosing Red Hat on the mainframe coincided perfectly with our desire to have one corporate standard for Linux,” said Masaryk.

“The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our IBM System z mainframe was straightforward and didn’t take long at all,” said Masaryk. Today, SRP has nearly 50 Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers and the implementation is on-going. To manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, SRP utilizes Red Hat Network Satellite.

“We use RHN Satellite, which is a key component to the management of all of our Red Hat servers, whether on the mainframe or in our distributed environments. Our use of Satellite has grown with us and we’re pleased with how much time it has saved us and how efficient it has made our administrators. I’d recommend setting up RHN Satellite as soon as possible for others who want to go down that road; it pays off very quickly,” said Masaryk.

In addition, SRP has leveraged Red Hat Training offerings to expand internal knowledge of Red Hat’s products and solutions in production environments. “Red Hat Training has proven to be very valuable to us. Some of our system administrators who came from a more traditional mainframe background or proprietary Unix background, had little experience with Linux. The courses that Red Hat provided got them up-to-speed very quickly and easily,” said Masaryk.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframe servers has provided SRP with a very stable and predictable solution that can be easily managed via Red Hat Network Satellite. It has enabled cost savings through the elimination of licensing costs, and has also provided boosted performance for its servers.

“A key success for us is the ability to consolidate multiple workloads into one instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as opposed to running in our traditional environment, where each workload would have to run on a separate server; That’s a huge benefit for us,” said Masaryk.

With reliable Red Hat support offerings, SRP has also benefited from the ability to access support straight from Red Hat engineers and developers who have written the code behind its solutions. “The support that we’ve received from Red Hat has been very valuable, and we’ve been happy with it all along. As we continue to deploy more Red Hat solutions at SRP, we feel confident in the related support from knowledgeable professionals who know the products so well,” said Masaryk.

For the future, SRP has plans to continue to expand its use of Red Hat solutions. “We’re planning to move forward with implementing additional Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based machines as fast as we can. We’re also investigating the use of JBoss solutions,” said Masaryk.

FAST FACTS

Company: Booz Allen Hamilton

Industry: Government, Management Consulting

Geography: McLean, Virginia

Challenge: Build a service oriented architecture (SOA) solution for a government client that could be leveraged and reused for other client engagements

Migration Path: Transitioned a custom coded, proprietary-based solution to a a hybrid COTS/GOTS/Open-Source application that leveraged a significant portion of the Red Hat product portfolio.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform including JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules, JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Xen virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat GFS.

Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Hardware: Eight Dell 2950 servers with 32 gigabytes of memory

Benefits: Booz Allen built a modular SOA environment that efficiently supported the development and integration of new applications into the system, reducing the dependence on custom coding when doing proof-of-concept or production deployments of client systems across a broad range of government and commercial applications

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs. The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”
– Christopher Dale, associate, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Download the Red Hat case study [PDF]

Download the JBoss case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of strategy and technology consulting for more than 90 years. Every day, government agencies, institutions, and infrastructure organizations rely on the firm’s expertise and objectivity, and on the combined capabilities and dedication of our exceptional people to find solutions and seize opportunities. Providing a broad range of services in strategy, operations, organization and change, information technology, systems engineering, and program management, Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure. With 20,000 people, Booz Allen generates approximately $4.0 billion in annual revenue.

CHALLENGE
In 2004, Booz Allen was approached by a government agency to perform a proof of concept for a proprietary-based document-processing system. Although the proof of concept was successful, attempts to scale the solution up to a production-grade system encountered serious roadblocks. “We went into it carrying a lot of ‘baggage’ due to short-cuts we’d made in the prototype system because of the lack of time and the resources we’d had during the proof of concept,” said Christopher Dale, an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton. Over the next year and a half as more users were added, the team “spent a great deal of effort trying to deal with that baggage,” Christopher said. “But the system simply couldn’t scale the way we needed it to.”

When the agency secured funding to take the system to a new level of capability, the Booz Allen team knew it had to completely rethink its options. From the start, Christopher believed that open source was the answer, and virtualization clearly needed to be part of the solution. Additionally, “we knew we needed a clustered file system, as the old way of moving data back and forth was a real bottleneck,” said Isaac Christoffersen, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. There also had to be a lot more flexibility for dealing with changing customer requests for additional functionality as well as scalability.

SOLUTION
After thinking through its options, Booz Allen decided to design a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based cloud platform using an enterprise service bus (ESB) for a variety of reasons. First, a highly clustered and highly virtualized architecture was needed to build the kind of agile grid of computing and storage resources necessary to scale to the extent the client agency needed. Additionally, Booz Hamilton wanted to build a platform it could leverage in the future for other client engagements.

The physical layer of the architecture was made up of the computers, storage-area networks (SANs), Ethernet networks and Fibre Channel switches. Booz Allen used commodity hardware to build this layer out. The foundation layer of the architecture created a physical “resource pool” for the system to utilize at the virtualization layer, where server, network, and storage resources could be more efficiently leveraged. Booz Allen also used Xen virtualization and the Red Hat Global File System (GFS) on top of Red Hat Cluster Suite to create an environment for transaction processing. Red Hat’s Conga Cluster Management capability, a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, was used to control cluster and storage management.

At the application layer, JBoss Enterprise Application Server provided the ability to create a clustered application server environment. Its built-in redundancy allowed Booz Allen to implement a message-driven Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) infrastructure using the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform that included JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules. JBoss Operations Network was used to perform application and service management.

BENEFITS
The Red Hat-based implementation provided the agency with a multitude of benefits. For starters, it was able to consolidate 55 underutilized servers into just eight servers. This reduced number of systems not only handled the existing processing load, but left capacity available for even more growth in the future.

The system also helped Booz Allen design a system with tremendous flexibility and scalability. Using Red Hat solutions, Booz Allen was able to help the government agency adapt to changes in its mission and system demand in a more agile manner. Over a one-year period, data processing has increased from 1,000 documents per hour and 18,000 documents per day to more than 10,000 documents per hour and 100,000 documents per day. The number of users increased 600 percent in the first year that the system was implemented.

Believing that Booz Allen could leverage what the team had designed for other client engagements, the team briefed a group of Booz Allen partners on the idea… and they agreed. These partners agreed to fund a new initiative that is taking the SOA groundwork that the team created for the federal government, and using it to build a more general platform for application prototyping, development, and production for other government clients.

The current configuration of this platform offers database as a service, storage as a service, network as a service, and hardware as a service. The concepts in this SOA are those that industry leaders such as IBM and Amazon have been promising to deliver at some point in the future, Christopher said. “But we’re able to deliver it now.” Among other things, SOA has greatly improved our ability to integrate commercial and government off the shelf (COTS/GOTS) products. Historically, around 50% of Booz Allen’s development efforts were related to writing custom software to enable the integration of COTS and GOTS. By selecting solutions that leverage commercial and open standards, Booz Allen’s SOA approach reduces the need for this custom software and helps their clients achieve better reuse within their enterprise. Going forward, this new platform promises to be absolutely mission-critical to the way Booz Allen will provide its technology consulting services.

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs,” said Christopher. “The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”

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5/08

FAST FACTS

Industry: Government

Geography: Italy

Challenge: One of the top fifteen software and services companies in Italy, CSI-Piemonte has been promoting the modernization of the local public administration for thirty years. Its specific objective was to develop an open source platform for the supply of business applications which offered a real competitive advantage for companies in Piedmont.

Solution:

• Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Application Server 4.0.5 with jdk 1.5 and mod_jk, configured in clusters. DB Server MySQL 5.0 and Web server Apache 2.0.
• Hardware: two Intel-based servers, dual core processors, 8 GB RAM

Benefits:

• CSI-Piemonte has experienced improved performance from superior service levels and high reliability since migrating to Red Hat solutions. Its new solution offers an efficient infrastructure with extremely competitive cost.
• The solution’s standardised and open platform is robust, reliable, and offers excellent performance with reduced development time.

This story is available in the following languages: [  |  ]

BACKGROUND
CSI-Piemonte is a consortium which has been developing IT systems for public sector organisations in Piedmont, Italy for 30 years. It’s now one of the top fifteen software companies in Italy and is a national and European benchmark in the Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) sector. The consortium creates products with a high technological content, designs IT applications and systems, and contributes to the creation of innovative services for citizens and businesses. It provides its clients with versatile work tools and processes highly advanced technological solutions for all public areas. CSI-Piemonte has annual profits of 178 million Euros, maintains more than 1,200 employees, operates in 8 regional centres, and holds over 50 consortium members.

CHALLENGE
CSI-Piemonte’s main activities include supporting the research sector and encouraging innovation within ICT and other businesses in Piedmont. The company is a benchmark in the region for promoting the adoption of technologies that guarantee real competitive advantages. CSI’s objective was to develop an open source platform to support business applications that offered a real competitive advantage for companies in Piedmont.

CSI wanted to create an industrial-level platform which was completely open source for the supply of application services.

SOLUTION
CSI-Piemonte has over 10 years of experience with open source solutions. It introduced PERL for web developments first, but truly became focused on open source in 2006 when it began research on the development of open source business services for local public administration.

After much research, CSI chose JBoss Enterprise Platform for its well-established reputation, for its professional support, and because of the rate of innovation that has always been typical of its community. The project began in 2006 and was carried out in-house with Red Hat and JBoss support. Called OASI (Open Available Secure Integrated), this infrastructure makes use of the best open source components on the market, is configured to be highly available in order to guarantee high service levels, and is integrated, tested, maintained, and documented.

“We developed OASI to offer ourselves and companies in our region a real competitive advantage and to have a concrete meeting point for the community,” says Luca Gioppo, Manager of the Open Source Area at CSI-Piemonte. “We had open solutions for some time already, but this time we saw the opportunity to make its use systematic within a more complete and structured platform.”

Available on the website http://oasi.csi.it, the solution will be issued with a General Public Licence (GPL). The site is also a community meeting point and users have access to collaborative development tools and documentation with a creative commons licence.

“Our objective is to create an OASI community with two important meeting opportunities: on one hand the companies involved in platform support and development and on the other hand, businesses who use the infrastructure for training purposes or to provide other businesses with services,” said Gioppo.

The OASI platform is a perimeter which outlines the limits and provides the references for operating. To be more specific, those involved in development will have the objective of making improvements and offering increasing levels of integration and completeness in order to comply with the various requirements of public administration. The results of these efforts will be made available to the community from a perspective that matches the philosophy which has always distinguished Red Hat and JBoss.

In accordance with the need for reliability and high availability, CSI-Piemonte has developed an administration console for the handling of the JBoss application servers which have been clustered on the same domain or on various different host domains.

BENEFITS
Created with the best open source components on the market, the OASI platform guarantees superior service levels and high reliability. CSI-Piemonte can now make use of an efficient infrastructure with extremely competitive cost savings. The platform comes in the form of a General Public Licence (GPL) and with the guarantee that it’s a standardised and shared platform. Now, client companies can concentrate on their core business.

With an open source solution, CSI-Piemonte will benefit from the continuous contributions of involved community members. The improvement of this infrastructure will therefore be constant and continuous, allowing companies in Piedmont to make use of a platform which is increasingly efficient, integrated, and modern.

The acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat has been received very positively by CSI. “We are very happy that the two companies are now one,” said Gioppo. “Red Hat’s decision to acquire JBoss is a further confirmation of the correctness of our choice and consolidates our long-standing relationship with Red Hat, a success which is also confirmed by the more than 80 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers we currently operate.”

CSI-Piemonte’s experience with Red Hat solutions has been very fulfilling. “I can happily say that JBoss fully meets our expectations in terms of reliability, robustness, and performance,” said Gioppo. “And the economic benefit is extremely plain to see, especially if we consider the support costs.”

FAST FACTS

Company: The Clinical Research Information Exchange (CRIX)

Industry: Pharmaceuticals

Geography: Reston, Virginia

Opportunity: Create an electronic information exchange for all stakeholders involved in getting new drugs to market – from research and development, to clinical trials, to government approval

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss jBPM Framework, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and TriCipher

Benefits: Will enable previously unmatched levels of collaboration among pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, academic institutions, and health care providers to make the drug development, testing, and approval process more secure and efficient while reducing costs and safeguarding the safety of the end consumer

Download [PDF]

Background

Clinical Research Information Exchange (CRIX) International is a not-for-profit collaborative consortium that includes government agencies, members of the bio-pharmaceutical industry, academic researchers, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders in development of new drug therapies. CRIX has created a secure and standards-based electronic information exchange for everyone involved in clinical drug research that facilitates faster, less-expensive, and secure alternatives to exchanging clinical research information. Open to everyone involved in clinical drug research and development, the CRIX community currently includes more than 20 companies ranging from smaller clinical research organizations to pharmaceutical giants like Merck & Co. Inc. and Pfizer Inc.

Opportunity

Getting new drugs to market has always been a complex, costly, and labor-intensive process. One of the most painful aspects of this procedure has been the vast amount of paperwork involved in collecting, processing, and distributing documentation of clinical trials to submit to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As it currently works, all the various parties involved in clinical research – the bio-pharma companies themselves, the doctors and hospitals performing the trials, and the FDA, as well as numerous other organizations – communicate with one another on a one-on-one basis: The bio-pharma organizations exchange data with the healthcare providers and academic institutions performing the trials; the bio-pharma groups interact with the FDA and other government entities, and the organizations involved in the marketing and distribution of the approved drugs have to establish independent connections with all parties.

Although most of the large bio-pharma businesses have implemented proprietary IT systems that attempt to automate most or all of the process, frequently, this information is still collected, processed, and exchanged manually. In either case, the result has been “siloed” data as well as investments in technology by different organizations that overlap and even outright conflict with each other.

“What we absolutely needed was a platform that could be used across this very broad arena of clinical research that was independent of business processes, legal documentation, intellectual property protections, and marketing strategies,” said Mark Vermette, product manager for CRIX International. “And the ultimate goal of such a platform would be to enable delivery faster, more secure, and more effective drugs to patients.”

Solution

Initially created under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute in 2005, CRIX’s first pilot deliverable, called Firebird (for the Federal Investigator Registry of Biomedical Information Research Data), automated the FDA’s Form 1572 submission process. Form 1572 is the FDA-required document in which clinical investigators agree to conduct investigational new drug clinical trials according to federal regulations. The much-needed Firebird applications enabled the electronic completion, signing, and submission of the copious amount of paperwork that the doctors and other health-care providers have to complete during a clinical trial.

But although useful, Firebird was limited in scope, as it automated just a fraction of the clinical trials process. So in 2007 CRIX International was formed, and the CRIX project was placed under its jurisdiction.

The first decision that Vermette and his team made was to use open source to build what would be called the CRIX Collaborative Platform. To that end, CRIX International worked with Rivet Logic, the Reston, Virginia-based, open source systems integrator.

“This would ensure the end result would be based upon established standards, and also that it would be easier for participants to contribute their efforts to the general innovation and contribution we were making to the industry,” said Vermette. Once he started looking at actual products, “it was clear we wanted Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management and JBoss Enterprise Middleware to support our efforts,” he said.

The CRIX Collaborative Platform was developed using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, including JBoss Hibernate for database access. It also utilized TriCipher as a unified authentication infrastructure.

Benefits

Launched in June 2008, the CRIX Collaborative Platform will create a shared knowledge base, enable increased opportunities for collaboration, and facilitate economies of scale unprecedented in the pharmaceuticals industry. Lower transactional costs will free up more funds for research; human errors will be reduced because manual data entry will be minimized or outright eliminated; and patients will reap the benefits of new therapies much faster. Perhaps more importantly, the fact that the entire clinical trial process will be easier will motivate project participants, which in turn will improve quality of health and life for people around the globe.

Because Red Hat technologies promote a modular approach to development, one of the biggest benefits of the CRIX Collaborative Platform will be that independent software developers will be able to create and own modules that reside on top of it. Bio-pharmaceuticals stakeholders will thus have an entire menu of open source functionality from which they can choose. “They will have a choice of implementing content management functionality, clinical analysis tools, or the document publication capabilities – there will be an entire laundry list of options they will have based upon their needs,” said Vermette.

Red Hat products were an integral part of the CRIX effort, said Vermette. “Although this would have been possible without Red Hat products, it would have been substantially more difficult,” said Vermette. “The biggest reason we went the Red Hat route, in addition to the technical excellence of its products, was its legendary support. And its reputation for it is well deserved.”

Alfresco ECM was also a critical part of the solution. “Alfresco provides us with an enterprise-scale content management solution, based entirely on open standards, enabling consortium members to accelerate collaboration and information flows for clinical research,” said Vermette.

Looking ahead, Vermette is anticipating implementing JBoss jBPM and Alfresco ECM to bring process automation capabilities to the CRIX Collaborative Platform. “The pharmaceutical industry has some very complex regulatory requirements, and – historically – binders and binders of paper documents with complicated rules on who gets to author them, how they are edited, and how the content is controlled,” said Vermette. “The JBoss jBPM Framework and Alfresco ECM are very sophisticated technologies that will provide these capabilities, and should be the ‘tipping point’ for getting organizations to adopt the CRIX Collaborative Platform.”

Italian organization utilizes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to maintain mission-critical systems for regional Chambers of Commerce

This story is available in the following language: [  ]

RALEIGH, NC – July 16, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that InfoCamere, an organization responsible for managing the IT systems that connect and secure over 100 Italian Chambers of Commerce, relies on Red Hat and JBoss solutions for flexibility, reliability and ease of use for its mission-critical systems.

InfoCamere’s IT infrastructure, covering all 300 local offices, must ensure that its users, including administrations, companies and individuals, have immediate access to documents, information and legal data stored in the Chambers’ archives. When InfoCamere began developing its first Internet platform in 2000, it utilized Red Hat Linux 7.2 in both testing and production environments. After demonstrating high levels of reliability, the ability to succeed in critical production environments and flexibility with an extensive application ecosystem, InfoCamere decided to expand its use of Red Hat solutions to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

“As evidence of the maturity of the solution and the trust that we place in Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems are used throughout our internal heterogeneous IT architecture,” said Corrado Claut, system and architecture management at InfoCamere. “We use Red Hat extensively throughout our architecture for not only flexibility and compatibility, but also for the performance levels and advanced support services that provide great reliability and real business advantage for us.”

Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used on all of InfoCamere’s mail systems and is the main production platform for many of the websites that the organization runs for the Italian Chambers of Commerce. Many of the company’s Java applications also run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a combination of JBoss and Tomcat application servers.

“In addition to our systems that run our internal mail and communications for the Chambers of Commerce, we use Red Hat and JBoss solutions to support our PEC (Posta Elettronic Certificata) solution that digitally delivers legal documents that must comply with rigid requirements and extremely high service levels,” said Claut. “Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, offer compliance, 24×7 reliable support service, availability of 99.8 percent and even more benefits, making them an excellent fit for our needs.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also provides the reliable platform for InfoCamere’s Legaldoc, a document-archiving service used for the reception, signature, time stamping and conservation of electronic documents that offers significant cost, space and time savings. The organization’s service for collecting HASH signature documents relies on Red Hat solutions for reliability, scalability and security. InfoCamere’s Oracle-based database servers are also installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems to achieve installation and maintenance cost savings.

“JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is used widely throughout the company,” said Claut. “As the technology expands, we have increased its presence on our systems. We use JBoss solutions for the significant cost savings, expanded performance and ease of installation and management. We’re also beginning migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.”

InfoCamere has also leveraged Red Hat Training offerings and boasts two employees who have achieved Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification to expand InfoCamere’s in-house knowledge of Red Hat solutions.

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

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

Industry: Utilities, Government

Geography: Western Australia

Business Challenge: Decrease technology costs by avoiding expensive hardware replacement fees and improving performance and manageability

Migration Path: Tru64 Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, Oracle 9i
Hardware: 30 x HP DL385 (AMD Opteron)

Benefits: Increased performance by nearly 500 percent, achieved significant cost savings of approximately $140,000 per machine and gained reliable support from a trusted vendor

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Western Power is an electricity networks corporation owned by the Western Australian Government. It transports electricity from power stations to towns and cities and then distributes it to homes and businesses. This is done via a large network of power lines known as the South West Interconnected System (SWIS), designed to meet the needs of customers and developers and to bring electricity to new areas.
While companies that produce electricity as generators, and companies that sell electricity as retailers, have access to the network, Western Power is responsible for maintaining this network and restoring power after interruptions.

“Western Power supplies energy to more than 840,000 households and businesses throughout the state,” said Julian Rouse, systems administration manager, Western Power.
“Our mission is to conduct a safe, efficient, and importantly reliable operation. As the backbone of the business, our technology infrastructure is paramount to that.”

CHALLENGE
Western Power had been a long time Compaq Tru64 Unix user, but with HP’s acquisition of Compaq, the organisation was prompted to re-evaluate its existing server environment. It was faced with aging hardware, but needed to keep server replacement costs to a minimum.
In designing a new strategic platform for the long term, improving current software performance and improving manageability were key priorities for Western Power.
“Reassessing our strategic platform initially involved a comparison between HP-UX and Compaq TRU64 offerings, but when we looked at what our major energy application provider was doing, our attention quickly turned to Linux,” said Rouse.

Western Power’s ENMAC energy management solution, developed by GE, is responsible for providing centralized, controlled, secure, safe access to the distribution network, in real-time, for maintenance and fault restoration purposes. With GE testing and then porting the software application onto Linux, it made perfect sense for Western Power to consider Linux for its new platform. This would ensure that it could achieve the best possible performance from the solution.

SOLUTION
Western Power investigated Novell SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its infrastructure upgrade. With the knowledge that GE was already testing ENMAC on Red Hat, the organisation soon realised that only Red Hat could guarantee optimum performance, ease of management and first-class support.
“While we evaluated the leading Linux offerings on the market, Red Hat had already established itself as the enterprise Linux market leader, and that gave us a great deal of confidence,” commented Rouse.
As Rouse recalled, another factor in choosing to work with Red Hat was Red Hat Network, an easy-to-use systems management platform that brings greater efficiency to package updates and other ongoing maintenance tasks.

“With Red Hat, we also knew that we had instant access to the right support if and when we needed it, rather than being referred to downloads from a public website. Plus, the power of the developer community meant that the Linux kernel was constantly evolving and being further improved – and that was an attractive proposition.”

By August 2007, Western Power commenced its migration to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform as part of an overall ENMAC update. The migration started with 18 HP DL385 (AMD Opteron) test and development servers and extended to a further 12 production servers, running a mix of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1. A total of more that 30 servers in development, test and production.
Through its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Western Power became one of the first GE customers to run the ENMAC energy management solution for distribution on Linux.

BENEFITS
For Western Power, the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux resulted in a migration to higher performance and lower running costs. Unix loads typically run on Linux using commodity-class hardware that costs up to 75 percent less than what is required by Unix systems. Through experience, Western Power has been able to realise these cost savings.

According to Rouse, “Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more cost-effective commoditised hardware has seen the kernel outperform any previous build. This is great because the difference in cost between the HP servers we’re now able to use, compared to TRU64 Unix servers, is in the order of several magnitudes.”
“Furthermore, we’ve been able to halve our hardware cost per node, because the 64-bit kernel has enabled us to tune our hardware for both excellent memory and disc performance, allowing us to be able to run both Oracle and EMAC on the same box, whereas previously this required separate tiered machines” Rouse added.

Rouse estimates that, to date, Western Power has experienced CAPEX cost savings of approximately $140,000 per machine, along with a 50 percent increase in total system headroom due to an average CPU usage drop and an impressive performance gain of 500 percent.
Western Power also looks forward to further savings on an ongoing basis. With the move to commodity hardware and virtualisation, it will be able to decrease annual hardware maintenance costs by up to 80 percent.

“There’s no doubt that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is our operating system of choice, and as we embark on overhauling our middleware application, our next focus will be on extending our investment in open source with the introduction of JBoss into our environment,” said Rouse.
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Fast Facts:

Sector: Public Administration

Geographic location: Spain

Opportunity: Replace mixed proprietary IT environment to simplify management and improve system performance and availability

Migration Path: Sun Solaris and IBM z/OS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Tomcat

Hardware: HP, Dell, and Fujitsu Siemens servers

Benefits: Achieved simplified system management and improved system availability, performance, reliability, stability, and platform flexibility

This story is available in the following languages: [ |  ]

BACKGROUND
The Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) is responsible for education – including mandatory basic, secondary, and university education – and also controls science and innovation in Spain. The organization’s main responsibilities include managing the Spanish-grant, student-aid, competitive-examination, teacher-transfer, and research project-grant systems. It is required to provide the back-office systems with the capability to deliver a fast response to a large volume of users, including university students, lecturers, and researchers to companies participating in scientific projects.
“It took one-and-a-half days to resolve a lecture-transfer process with the proprietary system. It now takes five hours with Linux. After moving MEC’s IT systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, performance has increased five-fold in comparison with our previous solution,” said Africa Cabañas, Head of IT for the Ministry of Education and Science.

OPPORTUNITY
After 2004 government elections a number of changes that affected the MEC IT structure were implemented. As part of these changes, the culture area was separated from the department of Education while that Ministry of Science and Technology was dissolved. As a result, a new Ministry, called Ministry of Education and Science, was created, assuming the responsibilities of the former department.

The Ministry, which already had highly heterogeneous environments, assumed 400 new users and 60 new applications after the new structure took affect. The integration with the rest of the systems was completed within a six-month period. Additionally, by assuming responsibility for innovation and with the increase in importance of electronic administration, the department was required to provide a greater number of IT services, requiring more servers. This presented the Ministry with an opportunity to renew hardware and software solutions for its IT systems.

SOLUTION
The IT department began the project to renew its hardware and software solutions by virtualizing a large number of machines and executing a project to consolidate various operating systems into a single platform. The department made the decision to replace its existing Sun Solaris and IBM z/OS proprietary operating systems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 “. We were already using Red Hat solutions in network-service areas, such as perimeter security. It was this positive experience with Red Hat, combined with the knowledge of the operating system within the department, that made us select it as our operating system of choice across the Ministry,” said Africa Cabañas, Head of IT for the Ministry of Education and Science.
The compatibility between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the EMC Storage Area Network (SAN), assured by Red Hat certification, was an important factor in the Ministry’s decision. “All storage-cabin manufacturers certify against certain operating systems and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is normally one of the first. We could not choose just any Linux distribution; it had to be certified, because the SAN is of core importance to our IT infrastructure,” said Cabañas.

The project involved all three architectural levels of MEC’s IT system: database servers, application servers, and web servers. “All systems were built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization. In cooperation with development areas, we migrated everything that could be moved from proprietary environments to Red Hat solutions,” continued Cabañas.

In addition to implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and virtualization, MEC also migrated its application servers to Tomcat and JBoss solutions to benefit from the solution’s superior technology and to extend the freedom of open source to its middleware layer.

The project was executed in two phases. The application servers were migrated to Tomcat and JBoss solutions during 2006. At this point, the Ministry chose 5 JBoss Application Servers as well as solutions from other providers. In June 2007, the Ministry completed the migration of its corporate Oracle database servers.
In addition to its internal data centre, the Ministry had a number of applications and a large database which were located at an outsourced hosting service. During the migration, the ministry found that the hosted service did not provide the performance required, and decided to also move these services to the new Red Hat servers.

BENEFITS
With server consolidation and 24×7 support provided by Red Hat, the Ministry of Education and Science has resolved its previous performance problems and has successfully reduced system-response times.
“We have objective details. It took one-and-a-half days to resolve a lecture-transfer process with the proprietary system. It now takes five hours with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5,” said Cabañas. “After moving MEC’s IT systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization, performance has increased five-fold in comparison with our previous solution.”

For the Ministry of Education and Science, changing from Solaris and z/OS proprietary platforms z/OS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization has resulted in cost reduction, which has enabled increased investment in hardware renewal. Moreover, the administration’s IT system has been simplified after system consolidation.

In terms of citizen services, the new platform is especially beneficial for grant requesters, who can now connect at any time of the day. The virtualization capabilities have enabled increased platform availability, which is clustered and migrated automatically in the event of system failure.

The Ministry’s migration to an open source environment is ongoing. The organization is looking to remove its existing Windows platforms and has plans to test new functionalities on Red Hat solution, including virtualization, GFS, and desktop Linux.

The Ministry’s IT department is satisfied with the results of its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Application Platform. “As the migration only affects the back-end systems, the only difference that end users see is faster response times. Acceptance has been good. Changing from a proprietary platform to Red Hat solutions enables us to guarantee the future agility of the platform,” concluded Cabañas.

Superior Alternatives

Winner: Booz Allen Hamilton

Submitted by: Christopher Dale

Vertical: Government

Geography: US

Website: www.boozallen.com

Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm with more than 18,000 employees serving government clients from more than 80 offices and has been recognized by major publications as a best place to work. Integrating the full range of consulting capabilities, Booz Allen is the one firm that helps government clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology. Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton was asked by a federal government agency to develop a Microsoft Windows-based proof of concept for a document management system. The initial prototype consisted of both hardware infrastructure design and software development, but as the system’s user community grew, the newly promoted operational proof of concept quickly proved inadequate for handling the increasing volumes of data. After a budget for a “technology refresh” was approved, the Booz Allen Hamilton team decided to redesign the software architecture using JBoss Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Oracle 10G Real Application Clusters (RAC), and enterprise integration best practices. The system was transformed from a two-tier architecture to an event-driven Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) approach, but although the software redesign greatly improved the system’s ability to handle the increasing volumes of data, the physical infrastructure was still a bottleneck that prevented the system to scale as needed. Simply adding servers was not a viable solution because of space and energy constraints. The solution needed to be exceptionally efficient in terms of floor space, power, cooling and total cost. It also had to be easily leveraged for use in other Booz Hamilton consulting engagements.

“It wouldn’t be enough to just show that we had high server utilization,” said Christopher Dale, an associate at Booz Allen. “We had to get a ton of work out of our investment, with enough spare resources to be able to respond to new mission demands at a moments notice.” To do this, Booz Allen Hamilton needed a solution that would allow it to scale its CPU and memory resources independently of its network resources. In turn, network resources would have to scale independently of system storage capacity and throughput. “Finally, we needed to be able to dynamically allocate all available resources to the task du jour without jeopardizing the ongoing mission,” said Dale.

Vendor Selection Process

For the proof of concept, Booz Allen Hamilton needed to configure both an Oracle 9i meta data database and an Oracle 9i Text Index database. As it turned out, the federal agency client already possessed an Oracle site license. Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to “harvest” several Red Hat Enterprise Linux entitlements from a previous client project. “The icing on the cake was that I had experience installing Oracle on Red Hat Linux as a hobby,” said Dale. Once Red Hat Enterprise Linux passed security tests, it was viewed as the clear first choice for the project.

Solution

The solution consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network Satellite and soon Red Hat Directory Server, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, JBoss Operations Network, and, most recently, Metamatrix. The deployed environment consist of a seven-node Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) grid (five Dell 2950s and two Dell 6850s all with maxed-out memory running Red Hat Enterprise Linux housing multiple Oracle RAC databases that performed data warehousing functions, online transaction processing (OLTP) functions and multi-language text indexing functions. There also is an eight-node (Dell 2950s with varying amounts of memory) services grid that acts as a clustered Xen host. The Xen machines on the services grid include a clustered JBoss application server, a Metamatrix node, and many other Xen machines that perform various mission-specific tasks. Both the database grid and the services grid can leverage the storage on the Fiber Channel fabric backed with multiple storage area networks (SANs).

Benefits

By implementing the new hardware and software architecture, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to transition its client from the initial proof of concept system-which had grown to a five-lab, two-building deployment that housed a single system, to an ultra-compact, highly available, high performance environment that enables three complete systems to reside in 1.5 labs. “We now have the capability to use spare capacity for the evaluation and hosting of new commercial off-the-shelf software, government off-the-shelf software, or custom software that previously would have been too expensive to implement even if the software was free,” said Dale. Additionally, using GFS to pool storage resources, Xen and Cluster Suite to pool processing and memory resources and using a bonded, link aggregated, VLANed, Xen-bridged network configuration to pool network resources, “we had successfully delivered to our client an environment that surpassed our goals in compute resource and software development agility,” he said. “In the Federal space, ROI doesn’t really have meaning, but our client was getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

Additionally, the enterprise-class system was capable of handling data volumes that commercial enterprises rarely see. “We can add new capabilities without the purchase of additional hardware, and, because we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we leverage unlimited virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. Indeed, many capabilities can be made available in hours instead of weeks or months. “This is how we delivered 10 pounds of capability in a two pound bag,” said Dale.

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

One of the best value decisions Booz Allen Hamilton made was to establish a subcontract for its government client with Red Hat Global Professional Services group. “Through that subcontracting arrangement, we were able to use a full-time employee slot to bring in a number of highly skilled Red Hat, JBoss, and Metamatrix professionals who accelerated our work at critical junctures,” said Dale. Additionally, as a result of the successes the team experienced in terms of capability delivery, many team members sought out Red Hat, JBoss and Metamatrix training and certification on their own, which further benefited the client in terms of day-to-day value enhancement.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Be aware of all the possibilities. “Looking back to the beginning of the effort to re-engineer our legacy environment, I still cannot get my head around all that has been accomplished,” said Dale, who said that if he had been told a year ago, “This is the list of things your team needs to get done in the next year,” it would have been “soul crushing.” But now, having been through it, he is now finding it difficult not to look at any opportunity without thinking, “No problem, we have an answer for you and it isn’t going to cost you half of what you think. It’s also going to take less time, fewer people and be more capable and agile than you can imagine.”