HP Customer Success Story:

Company: FarmaLink

Industry: Healthcare: Prescription Drug Administrator

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

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

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

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

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

Download the Case Study PDF at HP.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: Needed a solution to enable them to proactively monitor, track and respond in terms of bed usage and associated resources

Migration Path: Paper-based system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Red Hat Alliance Partner: Y3 Technologies Pte Ltd

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: IBM PowerSeries 2 P6-570 virutalized server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Bed management solution improved bed turnaround, and thus staff productivity; real-time information enables staff to provide improved patient care

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, together with Y3, offered a unique solution that met our needs and exceeded our expectations.”
– Fong Yong Choi, MIS manager at MAH

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Mount Alvernia Hospital (MAH) began as a 60-bed private hospital in Singapore in 1961, and has since grown to a 303-bed general hospital. The hospital provides services to local medical, surgical, pediatric, and maternity patients, and offers a comprehensive range of specialities. In addition, MAH has two medical centres, which are occupied by consultants who provide a wide range of medical and surgical specialist services.

MAH ensures that its facilities are constantly upgraded to keep abreast of advancements in medical technology and techniques.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As MAH operates round the clock, patients can be admitted at any point in time. The hospital relied heavily on telephone, email or fax coordination with different departments to ensure that patients are assigned the correct beds.

Bed information gathered was consolidated on paper, which was used by the night manager to verify bed status when performing the hospital round from room to room.

Recognizing that MAH was faced with these challenges, Y3 Technologies, a Red Hat Alliance Partner, proposed an open source Bed Efficiency and Management (BEAM) system which would allow the hospital to better manage admissions, and track bed usage with the use of wireless and mobile technologies. BEAM should provide visibility on the hospital’s bed capacity, bed demand forecast and status of pending discharges for resource planning.

While other vendors also proposed solutions for MAH, the hospital chose Y3 Technologies’ BEAM solution for its rich interface architecture and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabled framework based on Red Hat and Oracle technologies.

BEAM was evaluated on the following criteria: ease of integration with existing IT infrastructure and resources, reliability, performance and availability of technology, cost-effectiveness, and vendor independence. In addition, MAH wanted a provider that had experience in implementing the proposed solution in a hospital.

“Open source is known to be cost effective and we are finding value as the technology is now stable, mature and of low risk to us. Furthermore, open source is well supported by major vendors such as IBM and Oracle, thus the time is right for Mount Alvernia to embark on this journey to use the technology to improve and enhance the current operations,” explained Fong Yong Choi, MIS Manager at MAH, on why he chose to adopt open source and Red Hat.

SOLUTION
The solution comprised Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle databases, and Java Platform Enterprise Edition 2, running on a virtualized IBM PowerSeries 2 P6-570 server. Red Hat Enterprise Linux sits on top of the enterprise backup software, with the systems management server as gateway. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform supports the hospital’s mission-critical applications, one of which is BEAM. JBoss Hibernate forms part of the object relational mapping (ORM) for the application framework.

BEAM was implemented in all wards that run 24 hours a day, and other departments such as front office, admission, housekeeping, nurse, and nurse wards.

With the successful deployment of BEAM, MAH plans to explore the feasibility and benefits of extending the open source platform to other systems within the hospital.

“We are more than satisfied with the overall performance of the system and the underlying system software running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. From the solution point of view, we are happy that it has achieved the objectives that were set up. Our expectations have been met with outcome of the project” said Yong Choi.

The collaborative project among MAH, Y3 and Red Hat has broken new grounds in terms of information technology strategy and business operation.

BENEFITS
Following its successful deployment, BEAM has brought about many unforeseen benefits.

Employee productivity has increased as a result of an online, electronic whiteboard that minimizes bed location confusion.

As the system proactively notifies the housekeeping department on pending discharges and discharges for the day through the use of mobile devices, dependence on the nursing department is reduced. The housekeeping department no longer has to perform room-to-room checks for vacated beds prior to cleaning.

MAH’s booking department has also benefitted as bed status is available in real-time. Booking staff can now make more informed decisions and quickly locate and assign available beds for urgent admissions. These assignments can be made any time and at any location using wireless mobile devices.

The MAH management team is also positioned to make better decisions, as key performance indicators are readily available from the management dashboard. These indicators include cutting bed turnaround time to less than 30 minutes, and quality monitoring of housekeeping now achieves excellent or good rating. It used to take around 40 minutes to turn a bed around.

By creating a paperless environment, BEAM has enabled the hospital to support the green environment campaign.

“The key to the success of the project is knowledge sharing and strong management support. Given that MAH has the healthcare domain, Y3 and Red Hat provided the needed technology and solution to be able to meet the business objective,” said Jocelyn Austria, bed management system project manager, Y3 Technologies.

“MAH has shown its pioneering spirit by embarking on this project. It is truly a leader in the field of healthcare and has shown technology proficiency as it has used a unique solution to improve its operations and services,” said James Loo Wai Kheong, COO, Y3 Technologies.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Monash University: Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

Industry: Education

Geography: Australia

Business Challenge: Monash University needed to construct a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to support its biomedical research efforts. The cluster needed to be easily expandable, and CPU power per dollar spent was a major consideration.

Solution:cluster built on Dell PoweEdge blade servers and Dell PowerVault storage running Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge M600 blade servers with Intel Xeon processors, Dell PowerEdge M1000e enclosures, Dell PowerVault MD3000 modular disk storage arrays, Dell PowerVault MD1000 disk expansion enclosures

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Platfrom OCS (Open Cluster Stack)

Benefits: Able to add a new server node in minutes with no downtime, able to support 400% more research projects, research completed in weeks vs. months, favorable price, lower power requirements, easily expandability of both cluster and storage

Read the full case study at Dell.com

BACKGROUND
Melbourne-based Monash University, Australia’s largest university, is known as a worldwide leader in biomedical research. Until recently, however, the university’s researchers were limited in their ability to achieve results quickly due to fragmented and often insufficient computing resources. They sometimes had to spend precious research dollars hiring outside computing facilities to meet their needs—until a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster built on Dell hardware changed everything.

Although the university’s IT leaders knew that a local HPC cluster would greatly improve the situation, they had held off on the purchase due to cost and scalability concerns. “Building a cluster using specialized HPC hardware would have been too expensive, yet we knew we needed to start providing better computing facilities in order to remain
competitive,” says Adrian Ling, manager, infrastructure and major I.T. projects.

“Also, we knew that once we built it, it was going to grow quickly, so we wanted to make sure we could add new servers and storage capacity easily.”

The solution to both problems turned out to be the cost-effective combination of Dell PowerEdge blade servers and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. After considering servers from five vendors, Monash decided that Dell servers offered the most compute power per dollar spent.

“Using standardized, off- the-shelf Dell servers for our cluster nodes instead of custom-built HPC hardware has allowed us to purchase much more CPU power per dollar,” says Ling. “Dell’s pricing was much better
than the competition on a price-per-flops basis.”

FAST FACTS

Customer: Healthplan Services (HPS)

Geography: North America

Industry: Healthcare

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

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

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: MedQuist Inc.

Industry: Clinical Documentation Workflow Solutions

Geography: Mount Laurel, New Jersey

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

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: x86 servers

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Sentry Data Systems

Industry: Healthcare

Deployment Country: United States

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

Business Partner: IBM

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

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

Benefits:

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

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

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

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

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

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

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

BENEFITS

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Sensei, Inc.

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: US

Software: JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms and frameworks including; JBoss Enterprise Application Platforms, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, and JBoss ESB, jBPM, Hibernate, Cache and RichFaces; all components of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Pentaho Business Intelligence, MySQL, and Alfresco.

Migration Path: Open source middleware projects from JBoss.org to JBoss Enterprise Middleware Solutions and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Benefits: Lowered infrastructure and development costs; more flexibility when deploying applications; greater scalability; enhanced standards and support.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software. But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”
-Tim Dion, Chief Information Officer, Sensei Inc.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
A wireless lifestyle is no excuse for leading an unhealthy life – that’s what Sensei Inc. aims to address with mobile and Web-based solutions that engage and empower consumers to live healthier, happier lives. Formed in 2005 by Humana, Inc, the company’s programs promote learning and lifestyle change through automated, personalized, interactive dialog that fits seamlessly into a consumer’s daily routine.

Sensei’s initial product, Sensei for Weight Loss, is a virtual weight and nutrition coach for users, helps them to plan grocery lists, meals and exercise routines. It also keeps consumers accountable for their actions with daily reminders about meals, weight loss and fitness goals. Providing unique real time integration between the mobile world and the online world, Sensei helps each individual, with their personalized plan, achieve success their long term lifestyle goals. The company has plans to rapidly expand its offerings to more closely align with the daily lives of consumers and to encompass more lifestyle and health issues.

Currently, Sensei’s user base numbers in the thousands, but this will increase quickly as the company introduces more consumers to their products and launches additional solutions.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tim Dion, Sensei’s CIO and a 20-year veteran of the technology industry, was presented with a common problem among companies seeking to rapidly innovate product offerings – their current Windows-based technology platform simply was not meeting their needs.

“The design of our existing platform was very constrictive and made our initial trials and pilots extremely difficult,” said Dion. “Making changes was hard and application deployment was fragile. These difficulties opened our eyes to the fact that our underlying infrastructure itself needed a serious overhaul. A complete redesign was necessary to provide a solid foundation for current and future endeavors.”

After determining that a new platform and infrastructure were required, Sensei went through an extensive design period to break out necessary capabilities, explained Igor Royzis, Sensei’s director of technology.

“Our solutions are based on a service infrastructure with a lot of moving parts and complexity,” said Royzis. “We needed components that were flexible, scalable, cost-effective and that would enable us to design and deploy products in a timely manner.”

After examining commercial solutions, including proprietary middleware products WebLogic and WebSphere, Sensei selected an open source stack because of the high-performance and value advantages over proprietary software. Sensei chose Red Hat’s JBoss portfolio as their primary technology platform because of the wide-range of open source solutions that Sensei could deploy from a single provider, enabling cost savings and an easy migration path.

SOLUTION
Initially, Sensei tested their wellness and healthy lifestyle applications on a variety of JBoss.org products – JBoss Application Server, JBoss ESB, JBoss Portal, jBPM, Drools, Hibernate, JBoss Cache and RichFaces. Following the successful deployment of the community projects, Sensei transitioned to JBoss’ hardened and supported enterprise class open source solutions for production: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Enterprise SOA Platform and Enterprise Portal Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Sensei has chosen to standardize their I.T. environment on open source solutions, allowing for increased flexibility, scalability and the ability to rapidly develop and deploy products to market. In addition to JBoss and Red Hat, the company has also deployed the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite, an open source solution for enterprise reporting, analysis and workflow capabilities, which has integrated perfectly with Sensei’s operations, thanks to the interoperability presented by the underlying JBoss middleware solutions. Other open source solutions deployed include MySQL and Alfresco.

In addition to deploying open source solutions, Sensei is also planning to contribute some of the integration code they have written in house back into the open source community.

BENEFITS
Flexibility and scalability are the most significant benefits Sensei has realized by deploying Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software,” said Dion. “But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”

By migrating from costly proprietary technology to open source solutions, Sensei has been able to carve out significant cost savings . According to Dion, the savings are “almost exponential over BEA or IBM.”

Sensei has also received a competitive edge through JBoss, thanks to Red Hat’s early adoption of various technology and privacy standards.

“Red Hat moves very quickly when it comes to supporting new standards,” continued Dion. “For our business, HIPAA and other privacy standards are becoming more and more important in not only winning new customers, but keeping those we already have. Red Hat’s agility around standards adoption helps us keep our competitive edge, and it’s one of the main reasons we put our trust in JBoss.”

For the future, Sensei is continuing to transition its JBoss community projects to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as well as examining new JBoss solutions for deployment.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software,” said Dion. “But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”

FAST FACTS

Customer: Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach

Industry: Healthcare

Country: Germany

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Optimizing IT, Supply Chain Management

Business Partner: IBM, SAP, EGT InformationsSysteme

Business Need:
Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, a hospital with 1,400 staff and an annual budget of around €100 million, wanted to improve both business and clinical efficiency. Users found that SAP applications were slow to respond to their requests, as the underlying database had reached its performance limit. The system could not be extended or developed, and the database had to be taken offline for maintenance.

Solution:
The hospital implemented the latest SAP applications and selected IBM DB2 running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the IBM BladeCenter platform. It also chose IBM System Storage and IBM System x hardware to support a new storage area network for clinical imaging.

Benefits:
SAP application and database response times have been cut by more than 30 per cent, and users gain rapid, reliable access to critical business data. Database maintenance can be completed online, avoiding interruptions, and a clustering solution ensures system reliability. The new SAN offers scalable storage up to 112TB, a tenfold increase in current capacity.

“Our 32-bit operating system was limited to 4GB of main memory, which was limiting our ability to improve performance. Running 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM blade servers immediately allowed us to increase system RAM to 16GB, and this alone produced significant improvements in performance.”
-Dieter Reichl, Head of Business Technology

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview

The Lörrach region is tucked into the south-western tip of Germany, bordering France and Switzerland. Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, based in the city of Lörrach itself, serves the local population with both in- and outpatient general healthcare. The hospital employs some 1,400 staff, with an annual budget of around €100 million, very largely generated by medical insurance payments.

The Lörrach region is tucked into the south-western tip of Germany, bordering France and Switzerland. Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, based in the city of Lörrach itself, serves the local population with both in- and outpatient general healthcare. The hospital employs some 1,400 staff, with an annual budget of around €100 million, very largely generated by medical insurance payments.

Approximately 600 people require regular access to business and patient management systems. The hospital had been using SAP applications, supported by a Microsoft SQL Server database running on the Microsoft Windows platform. System response was slow and becoming slower, and the opportunities for database tuning – which required downtime – were limited. Additionally, healthcare legislation requires that medical records and images are retained for 30 years, contributing to a significant rise in storage needs.

Dieter Reichl, Head of Business Technology, comments, “The aim was to introduce the latest SAP applications, which would enhance our business processes and give us new reporting and control capabilities. The existing system landscape would not be capable of supporting the new applications.

“Ultimately this was a technical issue. Based on the 32-bit Microsoft Windows Server operating system, the MS SQL database had reached its performance limit. To meet our business needs, we wanted to shift to a 64-bit operating system and database, and looked for the best combination of software and hardware to give us high performance, high reliability and low operational cost.”

Choosing a SAP application landscape

Starting with the target SAP applications, the clinic selected the SAP for Healthcare solution portfolio, with the addition of specific financial accounting, asset management, materials management, project systems and project management applications.

“The SAP applications provide a powerful environment for all our hospital operations,” says Dieter Reichl. “We track every patient, procedure and process within the SAP ERP landscape. With a shared information resource for all our activities, the SAP applications help us to run a highly efficient healthcare service for the citizens of the Lörrach district.”

Knowing that database performance, scalability and reliability would be key to providing effective service to clinicians and managers, Dieter Reichl selected IBM DB2.

“DB2 offers key advantages for the hospital, particularly its close integration with SAP applications, its ability to complete administration tasks online, and its very high performance,” says Dieter Reichl. “The exceptional price-performance combination offered by DB2 met our desire to reduce operational costs, and simple administration means there is no need to employ a specialist database administrator.

“The migration process ran smoothly and efficiently, and we found that we needed very little training to transfer to the new DB2 environment.”

“The price-performance ratio lead us to the decision to select DB2. In addition, we have no time for reorganization runs of the database, which is not possible in our environment, and DB2 is able to handle these runs even during production.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on BladeCenter

Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach looked at possible 64-bit operating systems, including Windows Server, UNIX and Linux, and selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The next stage was to select suitable infrastructure, capable of delivering the promised improvements and offering a stable long-term solution.

The hospital chose to deploy an IBM BladeCenter with HS21 blade servers, featuring quad-core Intel Xeon processors, to support the SAP applications and DB2 database. IBM BladeCenter offers integrated servers, storage and networking systems in a single chassis. The BladeCenter’s future-proof design, with the emphasis on high availability, is the right solution for meeting the challenging demands of the hospital’s IT infrastructure.

“Our 32-bit operating system was limited to 4GB of main memory, which was limiting our ability to improve performance. Running 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM blade servers immediately allowed us to increase system RAM to 16GB, and this alone produced significant improvements in performance,” says Dieter Reichl. “We run the servers in a cluster, and the BladeCenter approach allows us to increase total compute capacity quickly and easily by adding another blade server to the cluster with minimum physical deployment effort.”

Implementation was completed in partnership with EGT, a division of DataGroup. Server clustering, using Veritas Cluster Server, ensures that should an application or physical server fail, the environment can be restarted on an available server and reconnected to storage and services – so users can continue working.

“The collaboration with EGT and Veritas was very good, and IBM completed the database migration effectively. The transfer to the new systems was completed on time and without a hitch,” says Dieter Reichl.

Medical imaging database

Medical images generated by x-ray, CT and similar scanning techniques, are retained in a separate database. Image storage and retrieval requests are generated by clinicians using the SAP patient management applications, and slow response time was becoming a significant source of frustration. Healthcare legislation requires 30-year retention of patients’ medical records and associated images, which means that image data could not be deleted to reduce storage needs or increase performance.

With some 12TB of live and archived images, existing storage systems were struggling to deliver image requests rapidly and reliably. The hospital replaced its direct-attached storage servers with a new storage area network (SAN), based on an IBM System Storage DS4700 Express, controlled by two IBM System x servers.

“The DS4700 offers very high performance, and total capacity of up to 112TB – almost ten times more than our current needs. It offers very cost-effective expansion opportunities, and is helping us meet our legal requirements with reliable, secure data retention.”

Improved performance and reliability

The new, fully integrated SAP and IBM solutions are already proving their worth at Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach. Clinicians and business users report that system response times have halved or are even faster. The Red Hat Linux cluster ensures that the SAP applications and DB2 database is always available, essential to hospital efficiency.

“Using SAP applications we have a fully integrated performance monitoring and communications system, and some 90 per cent of departments and services rely on this solution. Operating theatres, endoscopy and x-ray – and of course patients – all depend on IT reliability and performance, and without it the hospital stops working.”

Dieter Reichl concludes, “The SAP and IBM solution brings us low costs and high reliability, perfect for critical healthcare at Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach.”

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

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.”

Company: Midland Memorial Hospital

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Midland, Texas

Business Challenge: Replace an existing proprietary health information system (HIS) with an open-source-based suite of integrated applications to improve quality of patient care while cutting costs.

Migration Path: Moved from proprietary HIS legacy system to an open-source solution based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on HP hardware.

Software: Medsphere’s OpenVista Electronic Health Record (EHR) solution.

Hardware: Two HP Proliant DL580 G2 servers and one HP ProLiant DL380 server; HP Compaq desktops for client machines.

Implemented an open-source EHR that put patient information at the fingertips of healthcare providers for less than half the price of an equivalent proprietary system.

“Red Hat continues to make an incredibly valuable contribution to the technology industry by putting its tremendous resources behind Linux and commercializing it for enterprise use. I’ve been a Linux enthusiast for years, and I absolutely trust my organization’s well-being to Red Hat.” –David Whiles, Director of Information Systems for Midland Memorial Hospital

BACKGROUND

Founded in 1950 in Midland, Texas, to “make quality healthcare available to all residents of Midland County” regardless of their ability to pay, Midland Memorial Hospital has grown from a 75- to 320-bed facility on three campuses over its nearly 60 years of operation. Funded by private donations, Midland remains the area’s only not-for-profit hospital, and today provides a comprehensive portfolio of health care services for an ever-expanding geographic area that includes communities throughout west Texas as well as southeast New Mexico.

OPPORTUNITY

In 2003, Midland Memorial Hospital was given notice by its health information systems (HIS) vendor that the application it had been using for years was being “sunsetted,” or phased out. David Whiles, Director of Information Systems for Midland Memorial Hospital, decided to investigate open source alternatives to proprietary solutions available on the market.

Three things in particular drove Whiles’ decision to investigate open source. First, there was cost: Legacy HIS applications are expensive to purchase and implement, and require a great deal of costly customization before they are truly useful to a healthcare provider like Midland. Second was security: Midland needed a fully integrated system based upon open standards that would seamlessly and safely share information across different functions. Finally, there was the stability issue. Because the HIS was so mission-critical, Whiles required a solution that could give him absolute peace of mind 24×7, 365 days per year.

“Our patient care records are stored in the system, and if the system goes down, it creates a tremendous additional workload on all the physicians and staff members,” said Whiles.

Whiles therefore viewed the vendor’s news as an opportunity rather than a problem. “We saw the chance to dramatically improve the way we worked at the hospital in a way that would make us more efficient as well as contain costs, and – most importantly – improve the quality of the care we can provide to patients,” he said.

SOLUTION

After reviewing a number of systems from various vendors, including a mix of proprietary and open-source solution providers, Midland decided upon OpenVista by Medsphere, a commercial open-source suite of applications built on top of a single database using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Whiles made this choice for a number of reasons. In terms of broad functionality, OpenVista provided Midland with most of the functionality it needed in an EHR. OpenVista was also approximately one-third the cost of implementing equivalent functionality using other, proprietary systems. And, OpenVista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux together provided Whiles with peace of mind that patient records would remain private and protected.

The fact that OpenVista ran on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a major selling point in its favor. “We’d felt for a number of years that Linux was as robust if not more so than commercial operating systems,” said Whiles. Indeed, he said, he specifically made the decision to go with a Linux rather than Windows-based solution largely for stability. Even more specifically, he wanted a system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Red Hat has done such a fantastic job of commercializing and maturing the operating system that we felt very confident about any solution built on top of it,” he said.

With the help of HP and Medsphere, Whiles completed a clustered Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Medsphere implementation that ran on two HP Proliant DL580 G2 servers and one HP ProLiant DL380 server. He also purchased HP Compaq Desktop PCs to allow users to access the Medsphere system.

BENEFITS

Whiles has been “extremely satisfied” with the new EHR and its relatred reliability. “Our Windows servers go down two or three times a year,” said Whiles. “In the years we’ve had Red Hat Enterprise Linux in place, we have never had an unanticipated failure.”

Midland’s ability to scale as the organization grows has also been well supported. “We’ve continuously enhanced and expanded and added onto our system, and no matter what additional loads we’ve put on it, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can handle it,” said Whiles. And the ease of use has been particularly welcome after the maintenance-intensive legacy system that Whiles replaced. “The thing about Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that you install it, and it just goes,” he said. “It’s the easiest operating system in the world.”

“Red Hat continues to make an incredibly valuable contribution to the technology industry by putting its tremendous resources behind Linux and commercializing it for enterprise use,” said Whiles. “I’ve been a Linux enthusiast for years, and I absolutely trust my organization’s well-being to Red Hat.”

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center hosts its mission-critical applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Raleigh NC – February 11, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital in Boston, Mass., has migrated to Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network. Red Hat solutions have provided BIDMC with significant cost savings, higher system availability and streamlined disaster recovery, creating an opportunity to enhance patient care.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is renowned for excellence in patient care, biomedical research, teaching and community service. It is the fourth-largest recipient of biomedical research funding from the National Institute of Health and staffs 3,000 doctors and 12,000 employees. The Information Systems Division of BIDMC, which maintains a datacenter with 146 mission-critical applications that are vital to the functioning of the hospital, decided to replace its proprietary operating system in 2005 with a more secure, reliable solution that could provide reduced operating and capital costs for the hospital. The IT department also looked to create a new disaster-recovery system that could improve performance and availability.

The internal security team at BIDMC had been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its servers for three years, and the hospital’s Sr. Cache Administrator had extensive experience with Red Hat solutions with a previous hospital. After providing benchmark data that exhibited the benefits of Red Hat solutions to hospital decision-makers, BIDMC purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Red Hat value-added provider, DLT Solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux now runs on 40 BIDMC servers, 11 of which are installed in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Cluster that hosts Intersystems Cache and the hospital’s proprietary Triple A applications, those that are most mission-critical for patients. BIDMC implemented Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite to develop a more robust disaster-recovery strategy. With the solutions, BIDMC’s IT team is creating a multi-tiered architecture that separates the network, applications and database layers with one stack.

With Red Hat solutions, BIDMC has realized significant cost savings and increased system availability. IT budgets are small, so we don’t have much money to spend, but we have to be obsessed with security, privacy and reliability because in this industry when services go down, patient care can be disrupted, said Dr. John Halamka, MD, MS, Chief Information Officer of Harvard Medical School and of Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center. Red Hat solutions provide us with high reliability and security, reduced TCO with lower costs from the use of commodity hardware and a strategy that allows us to support our mission-critical Triple A application levels. I haven’t found another operating system that incorporates all of those benefits. We expect true zero downtime with our Triple A applications because our clusters will be geographically isolated across two physical locations.

BIDMC’s future IT plans include migrating additional hospital systems from HP-UX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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

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

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

CSI-Piemonte, Iride Energia and City of Marsala implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and additional Red Hat solutions

Raleigh, NC — October 23, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that three leading Italian organizations, including CSI-Piemonte, one of the top fifteen software and services companies in Italy, Iride Energia, a leading thermal and electric energy provider in Italy and the City of Marsala have found success with Red Hat solutions. Each has experienced heightened performance, cost-savings and increased reliability with solutions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Support.

CSI-Piemonte, responsible for delivering IT solutions to public bodies in the Piemonte region of Italy, conducted extensive research as it searched for a platform for the development of business services for local public administration. Ultimately, it selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for the solutions’ well-established reputation, professional support and for their rapid rate of innovation. The implementation project began in 2006 and was carried out in-house with Red Hat Support. The new platform is a hosted solution that is used by CSI-Piemonte customers to run and develop their own applications, which can be used by all public bodies in Piemonte. With Red Hat solutions, the platform guarantees superior service levels, cost-savings and high reliability, enabling CSI-Piemonte’s clients to concentrate on their core business.

“We selected Red Hat solutions to offer ourselves and companies in our region a real competitive advantage, and to have a concrete meeting point for the community,” said Luca Gioppo, manager of the Open Source Area at CSI-Piemonte. “I can happily say that Red Hat solutions fully meet our expectations in terms of reliability, robustness and performance. The economic benefit of this solution is extremely plain to see, especially when you consider the support costs.”

Similarly, Iride Energia, part of Gruppo Iride, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the standard operating system in its IT infrastructure with each of the company’s 35 enterprise servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Oracle and SAP software certifications, used widely throughout the company, played a significant role in Iride Energia’s selection of Red Hat solutions. The entire migration project was completed in two months and the elimination of software licenses has provided cost savings that have been reallocated to update all of Iride Energia’s IT hardware, delivering additional system improvements. The hardware, consisting of Bull NovaScale servers based on Itanium2 and HP ProLiant servers, in all production environments has been recently renewed and equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a strategic choice for Iride Energia and the solution is providing great support for our business,” said Roberto Ganio Mego, system administrator at Iride Energia. “With our migration to the new Red Hat platform, performance has been greatly enhanced, systems have become more reliable and we’re experiencing significant improvements in our global productivity.”

A pioneer in local government innovation, the City of Marsala Town Council has been offering its citizens free internet-based services for years. Recently, it looked for a new solution that could provide lowered costs relating to IT updates and assistance, while maintaining the large number of services available to its citizens. After several months of testing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was chosen for its cost-effective platform and reliable services. The implementation was completed internally and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was deployed on the majority of the Town Council servers during the summer of 2007. The Marsala Town Council has also experienced an increase in the reliability and security of its infrastructure — an important consideration for the Town Council, whose web servers are located within the internal infrastructure and not hosted with external providers.

“The economic benefits of our solution have been immediate. In the first year alone, we were able to save more than €100,000,” said Sergio Cacioppo, IT Area manager at the Marsala Town Council. “In terms of performance, things changed immediately for the better. The solution we adopted has made it possible to speed up all the calculation processes, reducing the times involved by more than 70 percent. Also, labor-intensive procedures, such as the reconstruction of the indexes that previously required up to eight hours in the past, are now completed in just a few minutes.”

All three Italian organizations are considering further implementation of Red Hat solutions.

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

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

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Apoteket migrates its existing server platform, in-house developed ERP-system ATS, from SPARC-based Solaris servers to new Intel hardware running Red Hat Enterprise Linux to reduce cost of ownership/TCO

Raleigh, NC — September 18, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Apoteket (The Swedish State Pharmacy), Sweden’s largest state-owned pharmacy chain, has chosen to replace all of its servers at approximately 900 pharmacies with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel hardware.

Apoteket’s server infrastructure was slowly reaching end of life and experiencing performance issues as a consequence of age. After careful evaluation, Apoteket made the decision to replace both the hardware platform and the server operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel-based servers. Following the purchase, all servers at approximately 900 pharmacies will be replaced with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“When you are dealing with people’s health, you really do need an IT system that both the pharmacy and patients can rely on,” said Anders Persson, IT manager at Apoteket. “We put high demands on the quality of applications, availability and cost efficiency. The switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is part of a strategy to offer our customers the best possible access and service, while cutting costs and modernizing our IT infrastructure.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in combination with the new hardware, brings several advantages to Apoteket including low cost of ownership, solid performance and a large selection of software and open source alternatives that enhance development opportunities. The change also allows the Pharmacy to decrease its dependency on a single hardware or software provider and gain the flexibility to select and reselect the technology that offers the best price and performance in the future.

“Sweden’s nationwide network of state-owned pharmacies investing in open source clearly demonstrates the value and flexibility that is acknowledged around the world in all types of businesses,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager for EMEA at Red Hat. “We see significant interest among government agencies and other large organizations and corporations in the region in a number of industry segments such as telecommunications and construction.”

Apoteket, in collaboration with the Red Hat Support team, has performed extensive tests of the new platform with positive results. The deployment of the new Linux platform was completed at the end of June 2007 and is now in full motion.

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

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

Forward-Looking Statements:Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Swedish pharmaceutical association experiences cost savings and increased performance for medicines portal

Raleigh, NC — September 5, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that FASS.se, the main medicines portal run by the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry, LIF, has migrated its servers from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Red Hat solutions, FASS.se is experiencing approximately 40 percent cost savings and has seen its new operational environment double functions on all levels.

FASS.se has approximately four million visitors per month, 60 percent of which are healthcare organizations and pharmacies. The company’s medicines portal provides the opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry to contribute high-quality, current information about all medicines. In addition, FASS.se is available on several different servers within healthcare organizations to which information from FASS.se is exported.

Our main reason for migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was our recognition of a need for making FASS.se’s operations more efficient, said Per Manell, Chief Technology Officer at LIF. During our evaluations, Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the obvious alternative because of the cost savings and increased performance delivered by the solution. It was ultimately an easy decision to select Red Hat solutions and migrate all of our servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We are excited that FASS.se has selected Red Hat solutions for its distinguished medicines portal, said Magnus Svensson, Nordic manager at Red Hat. With pharmaceuticals and healthcare, it is especially important to ensure that the operation is faultless and safe.

LIF, the pharmaceutical industry association responsible for FASS.se’s medicines portal, is a branch organization for pharmaceutical research companies that operate in Sweden. About 60 pharmaceutical companies, representing close to 90 percent of the total pharmaceutical sales in Sweden, are members of the association today. With all versions of FASS now gathered under a web address and based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, members of LIF are able to update their critical pharmaceutical texts daily.

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

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

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Migrating business-critical store applications to Red Hat solutions means simplified maintenance and freedom from vendor lock-in

Raleigh, NC – June 18, 2007 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Specsavers, the UK’s most trusted optician, is migrating all of its servers, desktops and tills from Microsoft Windows 2000 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in its 830 stores in the UK, Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain. Specsavers selected Red Hat solutions for its Linux open standard strategy because they enabled the company to standardize applications on a Java platform without vendor lock-in. Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Specsavers has experienced a stable and future-proof platform, in addition to enjoying a reduced need for maintenance and increased reliability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was selected to run Specsavers’ store application, SOCRATES 7, which previously ran on Microsoft Windows 2000. Specsavers chose Red Hat solutions for superior performance, reliability and security at a significantly reduced cost in comparison to proprietary solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running on an Intel platform on Fujitsu Siemens hardware for both servers and store desktops.

We selected Red Hat solutions because of our confidence in its business, its people and its technology, commented Nigel Spain, Specsavers’ Global Architecture Manager. With our new store system, every single business-critical application is running on Red Hat, from the till to the test room hardware. We were convinced that Linux would have a major positive impact on our business and Red Hat has delivered exactly what it promised. Red Hat staff had a refreshingly new approach to customer management. Instead of the usual approach of direct hard selling, the company was genuinely creative in assisting us with how to redesign our whole IT infrastructure.

Specsavers is also using Red Hat Satellite Server to centrally monitor and update all Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations. The ability to manage updates remotely has greatly reduced the time spent installing software patches by the IT department. The Red Hat Global Support network was also a major factor that contributed to Specsavers’ choice of implementing Red Hat solutions. Now, Specsavers has instant access to local support, 24 hours per day, in every country where the company requires it.

The Red Hat Satellite Server is strategically essential for our operations; we can now automate our whole deployment and manage maintenance and updates centrally. This was previously completed manually going to every single store one-by-one and delaying the process extensively, said Spain.

As part of the migration, the SOCRATES 7 application was developed in-house by Specsavers as a Java application to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The open standards of Linux, combined with the platform independence of Java, have enabled Specsavers to achieve its aim of freedom from software lock-in and flexibility in software development. In addition to replacing all desktops and servers in its stores, Specsavers has also replaced several head-office Solaris servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Specsavers also has a number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers running an open source ERP system for its wholesale business in Australia and Hong Kong. Additionally, the company is using other open source solutions such as Apache webserver and JBoss jBPM (Business Process Management) software to manage its workflow.

Business users are getting fed up with the restrictions of vendor lock-in that dictate forced upgrade cycles and proprietary standards, said Werner Knoblich, Vice President of EMEA, Red Hat. Red Hat and open source provide the building blocks for a flexible and truly future-proof IT infrastructure no matter in which sector they operate.

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

About Specsavers: Specsavers was founded in 1984 by Doug and Mary Perkins. In the early 1980s the UK Government deregulated professionals, including opticians, allowing them to advertise their products and services for the first time. The Perkins’ seized the opportunity and opened their first Specsavers, value-for-money, quality eyecare opticians in Guernsey and Bristol, followed shortly by stores in Plymouth, Swansea and Bath.

The company has grown rapidly since, thriving with its joint venture partnership approach to eyecare. It hit the milestone of 100 stores in July 1988, 200 in 1993, 300 in 1995, 400 in 2000, 500 in 2003, 600 in 2004 and 700 in 2005. The first Netherlands store opened in 1997, the first Swedish in 2004, while 2005 saw the first in Denmark and Norway.

For the past three years it has been voted Britain’s most-trusted brand of opticians by Reader’s Digest. The current straplines – Number One Choice For Eye Tests and Number One Choice For Contact Lenses – reflect its position as market leader in the UK. Its own lens manufacturing laboratories – three of the largest in Europe, mean that it can supply the latest high-tech lenses at high volume and low cost.

Specsavers is also market leader in contact lenses, with its own brand of easyvision monthly and daily disposable lenses. It has also pioneered the use of continuous-wear lenses, and is estimated to have at least 40% of the UK market. Furthermore, Specsavers is the largest provider of home-delivery contact lenses in Europe through its Lensmail service.

The company continues to expand. There are now more than 500 staff based at Specsavers’ headquarters in Guernsey. The company has 830 stores across the Channel Islands, UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain.

http://www.specsavers.co.uk

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

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

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.

Funded by the Singapore Red Cross and an IT initiative under the National Blood Programme, the non-profit website chooses Red Hat Enterprise Linux to connect with blood donors and volunteers in Singapore and beyond

Singapore — May 29, 2007- Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Donorweb, the non-profit website and online central depository of the Singapore Red Cross Blood Donor Recruitment Programme (BDRP), has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run its mission-critical applications and SMS messaging gateway critical to recruiting and retaining regular blood donors in Singapore and also important in meeting the national blood requirements.

Donorweb (www.donorweb.org) began as an IT project founded by a group of tertiary students from a local university in 1998. The project aimed to facilitate a real-time communication channel between blood donors and those in need of blood for regular transfusions, surgical procedures and transplants. Donorweb was subsequently re-launched by the Singapore Red Cross BDRP in 2001 as a public information system and central depository to provide useful information on topics related to blood and to encourage donor response and build a ready pool of blood donors in times of emergency or crisis. As an IT partner in the National Blood Programme, Donorweb is currently sponsored by the Singapore Red Cross and is maintained by a group of volunteers spearheaded by researchers from a local research institute.

As a not-for-profit unit, cost is a constant challenge for Donorweb. Knowing the cost-effective advantages that open source solutions deliver, Donorweb began rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its operating system of choice in 2002, the same year in which an SMS (short messaging service) system developed using Kannel open source gateway. Today, Donorweb servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to handle an average of 800 SMS per day, hundreds of discussion threads and more than 2,000 data and image files posted online, as well as a hosted Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform to support its vast e-mail and information management systems on the backend.

Red Hat is proud to be involved in the Singapore National Blood Programme and is pleased to provide Donorweb with the infrastructure it needs to help ensure that there will always be an adequate blood supply to those in need, said Gery Messer, President, Asia Pacific/Japan at Red Hat Asia Pacific. An average of 350 units of blood is needed per day in Singapore to save lives, and the Red Hat infrastructure put in place is instrumental to providing timely, real-time information to the public and in recalling regular donors. We are extremely honored to be able to contribute to such a remarkable cause.

The content management system and more than 90 percent of the online applications on Donorweb are developed using open source software by a team of volunteers. The system and applications are hosted on two Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers located across Singapore and the US. S.P.T. Krishnan, a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), leads the voluntary team of developers and content editors and oversees the design of Donorweb’s user interfaces and system architecture.

Donorweb was looking for a platform that is synonymous with robustness, security, scalability, flexibility and ease of implementation and maintenance that can afford us with the lowest TCO. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was singled out because it was capable of delivering all of these benefits without compromising performance and availability, unlike any other Linux option, said Krishnan. One hundred percent uptime is crucial for Donorweb to save lives as real-time data is disseminated online and broadcasted from the SMS gateway. A good example is the Blood Stock Indicator on Donorweb that displays the current stock level of different blood types in Singapore.

Currently, about 1.5 percent of the Singapore population is regular blood donors. The Singapore Red Cross aims to raise the targeted number of blood donors significantly over the next three years. The organization is also looking to assimilate a regional information sharing system on Donorweb to share knowledge and cross-pollinate ideas on blood donor recruitment and other humanitarian practices with other Red Cross centres in the neighboring ASEAN countries. Daily traffic to Donorweb is expected to soar over time as a result.

Donorweb hopes to leverage the virtualization capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to expand capacity as well as host the regional information sharing system that it has planned to build on the same hardware servers.

The Singapore Red Cross and the other 11 Red Cross centres in the region will benefit tremendously from the sharing of donor recruitment experiences, especially in the event of emergencies relating to blood donors, said Cecilia Tan, Director of Blood Donor Recruitment Programme at the Singapore Red Cross. We are pleased to be working in partnership with Donorweb and Red Hat to make this vision a reality.

For more information on Red Hat, please 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 three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and potential for infringement or breach of license claims regarding third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

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

RALEIGH, NC – January 23, 2007 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Sage Software, a leading vendor of software and services to physician practices in the United States, will make The Medical Manager by Sage available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The integrated solution combining The Medical Manager on Red Hat’s platform will be made available by Sage Software to their customers.Sage Software provides integrated electronic health records, electronic data interchange (EDI) applications and practice management systems to more than 20,000 ambulatory care practices throughout North America. These systems enable physicians and practice managers to better manage their practices and improve profitability.

“Our choice to offer The Medical Manager on Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on x86-based servers was driven by many factors,” said Michael Gold, Product Manager – Platforms for Sage Software Healthcare Division. “We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its performance and stability, as well as for the breadth of servers and peripherals it supports.”

“As Red Hat continues to expand its reach in the healthcare industry, we are thrilled to partner with companies like Sage Software that recognize potential value in the performance and stability that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can provide to its customers,” said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Red Hat Enterprise Solutions at Red Hat.

For more information on Red Hat and JBoss solutions, please visit www.redhat.com. For more information on Sage Software, please www.sagehealth.com. About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs rank Red Hat the most valuable software vendor 3 years running in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high-quality, low-cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides an operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, along with applications, management, and middleware solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat is accelerating the shift to service-oriented architectures and enabling the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, secure open source platform. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat’s open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with a focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the US and other countries. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

FAST FACTS

Company: Florida Hospital

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Orlando, Fla.

Business Challenge: Design a new disaster-recovery system that would ensure seamless business continuity for the hospital; determine a solution to aid in delivering high-performance, secure, cost-effective systems to ensure optimized patient care; identify a solution to enable internal hosting and support for the growing number of external websites

Migration Path: IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite; Red Hat Network Satellite; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform; JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Consulting; MySQL, Oracle, Caché, FoxPro, and Postgres databases; proprietary applications for reporting and management of patient data and for mail, security, and virus protection

Hardware: HP and IBM servers

Benefits: Streamlined disaster recovery and gained higher system availability and resource efficiencies that translate into better patient care; achieved 35 percent growth in its datacenter without needing to expand its hardware footprint or internal resources through its use of virtualization; gained expertise through the knowledge transfer resulting from virtualization and clustering-focused engagements with Red Hat Consulting

“Our first priority is security and our second is performance. When you can get security and performance needs met, and it costs less than the alternative, you go for it. That’s the quadrant that Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays in.” — Barbara Schleider, director of Technology Services, Management Information Systems (MIS) at Florida Hospital

Download the case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
With eight facilities, 18,000 employees, and over 3,000 beds throughout Central Florida, Florida Hospital is the largest hospital and is the second largest employer in the state. Florida Hospital sees more patients through its Emergency Room than any other hospital in the U.S. Established in 1908, the hospital provides care to more than one million patients each year and is part of the Adventist Healthcare System—the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in the nation. Florida Hospital’s MIS Department, which includes approximately 100 developers, manages one centralized datacenter for all of its facilities, making it one of the busiest centers in Central Florida. Its over 500 servers and 350 applications are responsible for the life-critical healthcare-delivery machines that rely on its systems. The hospital is also known for its excellent quality of healthcare. US News and World Report magazine has ranked Florida Hospital as one of “America’s Best Hospitals” consecutively for the past six years.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
o deliver the best patient care, Florida Hospital is constantly evaluating and improving its IT systems—ensuring the most reliable, high-performance infrastructure is always in place. In the mid 1990s, the hospital decided to undergo a new Web initiative to publish its internal applications to the Internet, but the project soon became cost-prohibitive.

Additionally, Florida Hospital’s IT infrastructure was becoming extremely complex with over 300 different places where patient records could be stored. Data stored on the system must be instantly accessible in locations across the hospital, mandating a high-performance and scalable platform for its IT infrastructure.

“As our environment grew, we couldn’t afford to use an expensive proprietary operating systems anymore,” said Jack Velazquez, Sr. Systems Engineer for the Open Systems Team at Florida Hospital. In addition, the hospital began reevaluating its disaster recovery system. As part of the patient-care continuum, Florida Hospital’s IT must be highly available and highly recoverable. “Because of the way our disaster recovery system was designed, it could have taken up to two days to restore our file systems and data if anything went wrong. We knew we needed to deploy a smarter system that would provide seamless business continuity for the hospital,” said Velazquez.

“With the highly transactional nature of Florida Hospital’s business and our need to access patient data with immediacy, we needed a solution that could provide high performance, reliability, and secure backup and recovery,” said Barbara Schleider, director of Technology Services, Management Information Systems (MIS) at Florida Hospital. “Our first priority is security and our second is performance. When you can get security and performance needs met, and it costs less than the alternative, you go for it. That’s the quadrant that Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays in.”

SOLUTION
Initially, Florida Hospital turned to Red Hat because it provided the combination of high performance, security, and cost efficiencies it needed for its Web initiative, but it quickly found many more advantages for its disaster recovery project. “We realized that using Red Hat in our data warehouse would help us resolve hardware-software compatibility issues that can cause unnecessary system downtime. Red Hat’s large network of certified vendors ensures that most drivers are built into the operating system kernel, resulting in smoother operations,” said Velazquez. Florida Hospital also chose to use the Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Cluster Suite, and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) to restructure the way its disaster recovery system was designed and managed.

Today, 116 HP and IBM servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, which runs a number of databases, including the hospital’s eight-terabyte Oracle data warehouse. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also runs JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the hospital’s proprietary applications, which include patient care, financial, and data management solutions. A group of servers is also dedicated to communication and system protection applications, such as authentication, user ID management, mail, and virus scanning.

To protect all of this critical information, the Open Systems Team created a unique disaster-recovery system by offloading all applications and data to the Red Hat Global File System running on the SAN. Using Red Hat Cluster Suite, the team created a six node cluster. Each of the clusters shares two volumes on the GFS: one for the applications and the other for data. “With Red Hat GFS, we no longer need to replicate data or applications if a server goes down,” said Velazquez. “The servers simply provide CPU and power. Everything else runs from GFS. Though millions of transactions are processed each day at Florida Hospital, today it only takes minutes to back up the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.” To upgrade or restore a machine in the cluster, the team simply installs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and attaches the computer to the SAN. Within minutes, it’s ready to go.

As part of its evolutionary partnership with Red Hat, Florida Hospital also implemented the virtualization technology delivered as an integrated part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform operating system. “With Red Hat virtualization, we’ve been able to manage 35 percent growth in our datacenter without augmenting our hardware infrastructure or staff. We’ve done some exceptional things with virtualization,” said Schleider.

To date, Florida Hospital’s servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux have produced over 1,200 days of solid uptime, thriving despite a number of serious datacenter challenges, including air conditioning malfunctions that caused the server room to overheat. “Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems have been very resilient and have survived the most catastrophic conditions with great stability. We’ve never had a problem with our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers – it’s really a self-sufficient datacenter,” said Velazquez.

The Open Systems Team also implemented Red Hat Network Satellite to facilitate infrastructure management, security compliance, and new system deployment. “Red Hat Network Satellite makes system management easy, enabling us to deploy new applications and security patches to all servers at once,” said Velazquez. Florida Hospital’s data security office continually conducts security audits, and Red Hat Network Satellite tracks all system activities, making it possible for the Open Systems Team to provide detailed reports for HIPAA compliance.

To provide expertise during its virtualization and clustering deployments, Florida Hospital relied upon Red Hat Consulting. “The knowledge transfer that resulted from our work with our Red Hat consultants was extremely valuable,” said Velazquez.

“As a mission-oriented, non-profit organization, we’re conscious of financial stewardship and had not used outside consulting previously,” said Schleider. “We saw the value of investing in Red Hat Consulting and we made the right decision – the expertise we gained from the Red Hat Consulting experience helped us achieve our goals and work toward our mission.”

BENEFITS
As a result of deploying Red Hat, Florida Hospital streamlined its disaster recovery processes and gained higher system availability that translates into better patient care. “Red Hat solutions enabled us to create a highly efficient disaster-recovery system that expedited restoration time from days to seconds. This means we make patient data readily available and provide the highest level of care at all times,” said Velazquez. Average recovery time now takes between 30 seconds and five minutes to sync the data and one hour to recover.

Having faced the challenge of growing numbers of external websites being developed by third parties that translated into mounting expenses, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization technology, the team was able to start migrating these sites to internal hosting. To date, 89 websites have been migrated in-house, providing expanded security and reduced costs for the hospital’s IT infrastructure.

“The strength of Red Hat virtualization for us has really been through paravirtualization,” said Velazquez. “It blows the performance of other virtualization solutions on the market away.”

Florida Hospital also experienced significant efficiency gains from its Red Hat deployment. “Red Hat Network Satellite makes it possible for us to manage 110 servers with only two engineers. Provisioning systems only takes minutes when it used to take us hours or even days,” said Velazquez. With the new Red Hat disaster recovery system, the hospital continues to save on resources. “Red Hat GFS enabled us to create an innovative design that saves on storage costs, network bandwidth, and processing power,” he said. In addition, Red Hat Consulting helped the Open Services Team to implement the Linux disaster-recovery system, helping them build and break clusters during on-site training. “Thanks to Red Hat Consulting we were able to deploy the system within a couple of weeks,” said Velazquez.

Red Hat also helps Florida Hospital maintain a technological and competitive edge. As the largest hospital systems within the Adventist Healthcare System, the hospital strives to stay ahead of the curve. “With 100 developers on our team, we rely on Red Hat to save us time on everyday management issues so we can focus on creating new solutions. Our parent company has been impressed by our efficiency, ROI, and performance gains from using Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it possible to meet cost pressures, but also still meet mission-critical demands,” said Velazquez.

“There’s nothing more critical than lives at risk, so our systems must be highly recoverable. Having highly available systems means that Florida Hospital can deliver the quality care that our patients need,” said Schleider.

Category: New Generation Technology
Winner:Lexicon Genetics
Submitted by: Buckley Kohlhauff, Mark Ma, Jason Williams
Industry: Biotechnology
Geography: The Woodlands, Texas

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss Seam to glue together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBoss jBPM to dramatically simplify their development process and create a robust platform that can deploy mission-critical applications for the Texas Institute of Genomic Medicine.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Download JBoss World Las Vegas Presentation

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Lexicon Genetics is focused on the discovery of breakthrough treatments for human disease. We use our proprietary gene knockout technology to systematically discover the physiological and behavioral functions of genes to identify potential drug targets. We have advanced more than 70 knockout-validated targets into drug discovery programs.
Lexicon Genetics employs over 700 people between our two sites in The Woodlands, TX and Princeton, NJ. Lexicon’s revenue for 2005 was $76M

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The challenge was to re-engineer a legacy production system that has been running for five years. The business logic for the system was spread among various layers and components. Most of the documentation that existed was outdated. We had less than a year to redesign and implement the core architecture and workflows. In addition the new system needed to address the fundamental problems that were present in the existing system and be flexible enough to support the same goals with different business processes.

We needed to reengineer a legacy application from php/apache to an enterprise platform in order to support our major involvement in the recently established Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine (TIGM). We have implemented other projects on the JBoss platform and have been pleased with the results. JBoss is a powerful and stable application server and we feel that the JBoss Seam framework will revolutionize Java Enterprise development.

3. What was the desired solution?
Our guiding philosophy was to select a group of frameworks that prevented us from writing a lot of non-business code, but at the same time allowed us to make modifications quickly if we needed to. In addition we always want to leverage standards in the industry. We have utilized J2EE for 3 years so our solution needed to stay within that context to leverage our internal knowledge and skills.

We selected JBPM in 2005 as our solution for modeling our business processes. We selected JSF as our UI framework since the application needed to be accessed from a browser. The introduction of seam excited us because we felt that too much time was spent on connecting the backend layers in previous JSF applications we had written. We had some internal solutions that were built upon codegeneration, but they weren’t flexible and couldn’t help us with JBPM integration.

The Mouse production software encapsulates a complicated workflow covering many scientific and business processes involved in the production of genetically-modified knockout mice. It has to be flexible enough to meet the needs of a large user-base comprised of many distinctive roles. It also needs to be scalable and configurable enough to be used by other organizations involved in TIGM that may need customized workflows.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
We already had selected JEMS as our stack for enterprise applications in 2004 after reviewing alternatives from BEA, IBM, and Oracle. That decision was based upon a matrix of feature requirements, cost, support options, references, and published data.

We also evaluated other application servers and frameworks such as Oracle JDeveloper/BPEL, JRun, and Spring. JBoss proved to be the most cost-effective and robust provider. JEMs allowed us to quickly adopt SOA-based development, increasing the reusability of our code. It enabled us to break our company’s scientific and business processes down into granular projects that fulfill specific needs and adapt to changing requirements in our fast-paced software development lifecycle.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
JEMS is our platform for application development. The trend we see is tighter integration with the JEMS suite, therefore we lean towards selecting tools from within the suite.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

The Seam framework significantly reduced development and deployment time by gluing together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBPM. It enabled us to focus solely on our complicated scientific and business logic without having to put together the pieces of the enterprise framework ourselves. With the traditional Java Enterprise architecture there are so many tiers that have to be explicitly implemented, configured and glued into place. Seam makes all of that transparent to the developer.

We especially benefited from Seam’s introduction of the conversation context, as well as the integration of JBPM. The conversation context helped us resolve classic technical challenges such as users using our software in multiple windows. The JBPM framework allowed us to clearly define our business and scientific processes, and it provided a simple and efficient way of implementing the workflows, while implicitly maintaining the data integrity.

For user interface development, we have been using JSF for 2 years. Seam’s direct integration of JSF made it the perfect framework to allow us to reuse some of our existing custom JSF components that provide a rich user interface for our users.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
We have a clustered front-end and back-end running on Dell 2850 servers. We have 4 separate clustered instances of JBOSS spread on 3 servers. Our backend comprises of 3 servers running Oracle 9i RAC.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
We used JBoss support and training. The level of support and training is on par with what we receive from our other vendors. Early adopters clearly have an advantage to effect the direction of the product and therefore benefit from support.

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
Get support and training early in the process. The learning curve isn’t steep but it can be completely avoided by doing what you would normally do with other software purchases.

Category: Clustering
Winner: J. Craig Venter Institute
Submitted by: Pete Davies, Indresh Singh, Tom Dolafi, Chris Lemieux, Sean Murphy, Adam Resnick, Angelo Trivelli, Bryan Yu, and Saul Kravitz
Industry: Bio Engineering
Geography: Rockville, MD

Overview
Selected for use of JBoss messaging and clustering to provide the stability and scalability necessary to process in excess of 40 million traces in batch across a 2 node cluster that supports over 100 DNA sequencers (scaling to 8 nodes to process large collections of traces) while also saving the not-for-profit genomic research center over $500,000 per year in licensing and maintenance costs.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission

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

J. Craig Venter Institute is a not-for-profit research institute dedicated to the advancement of the science of genomics; the understanding of its implications for society; and the communication of those results to the scientific community, the public, and policymakers. Founded by J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., the Institute is home to approximately 200 staff and scientists with expertise in human and evolutionary biology, genetics, genomic and environmental policy research.

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

The J. Craig Venter Institute’s Joint Technology Center (JTC) opened in June 2003. The facility was designed to be one of the world’s leading DNA sequencing organizations, providing DNA sequencing and resequencing services for the Venter Institute and collaborators worldwide. The JTC executes 150-200 projects a year, 45-50 concurrently, and has a capacity of 80 million sequence reads (lanes) per year. The facility was designed to scale to 320 million lanes per year. Producing high quality data from a 24×7 high throughput DNA sequencing facility servicing many concurrent projects requires a comprehensive and robust Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS).

The challenge was to build a LIMS supporting the JTC’s evolving lab processes that would provide the performance, scalability, and robustness the JTC’s high capacity operation, with materials tracking, workflow, and process control. In addition, the LIMS was required to support integration with hundreds of laboratory instruments, computational pipelines, and analysis tools; real time quality control reports and data delivery to collaborators and public data repositories. We evaluated COTS LIMS tools, but all fell well short of the JTC’s LIMS requirements. The primary shortcomings were performance at the transaction and data volumes contemplated, and the ability to integrate with analysis pipelines and instrumentation.

3. What was the desired solution?

To track all the lab processes and the data, we designed and implemented a suite of LIMS applications, providing bar-coded tracking of users, reagents, and material transfers throughout the facility. The LIMS is built on an Oracle 10g database, with a rich stored procedure layer. Business logic is implemented in EJBs, and most user interaction is via JSPs. The first version of the LIMS was deployed in April 2004.

Extensive integration of laboratory robotics has been facilitated by the use of J2EE technology provided by JBoss. Our ~110 DNA sequencers each host a JBoss instance, supporting user interactions via JSPs, data transfer and remote monitoring via HTTP, and interaction with the LIMS via JMS and EJBs. We have integrated fluid handling robots used to setup experiments in a similar manner. Symbol wireless PDAs have been integrated to track steps where lab staff mobility was critical.
DNA sequence data flows from the sequencers to a pipeline where it is reduced and analyzed, and loaded into the LIMS database. The pipeline is built using both JMS and EJB technology and integrated with both our in-house Oracle database, as well as a Sybase database from one of our key customers. The robustness of this pipeline in the face of DB connection stability enabled by the J2EE features as embodied in

JBoss has produced dramatic increases in customer satisfaction as well as greatly reduced production IT overhead.

Suites of LIMS applications are deployed on three, 2 node JBoss clusters. For on demand, batch processing, we have an 8 node JBoss cluster, which can easily process 40 million traces within days.

We are leveraging JBossMQ with HAJMS to process traces with a JBoss cluster using a fork and join approach. We used this approach to parallelize trace processing for high performance. When the TraceProcessing MDB receives a trace processing request, it forks the job into many smaller jobs by sending messages into another JMS queue. These messages are received by a second MDB and the smaller jobs are then executed on all clustered servers in parallel. The TraceProcessing MDB waits for completion messages from all of the MDBs which are processing the smaller jobs. After receiving the completion messages from all of the jobs, the TraceProcessing MDB aggregates all results and sends a message into another queue which is processed by a Loading MDB to persist the data. This is a very simple, stable and highly scalable approach to process millions of traces. In case we need to add more computing power to our JTrace server farm, we simply add new JBoss nodes to existing JBoss cluster.

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

Members of our team had experience using JBoss since 2000. Once we made our strategic decision to heavily invest in J2EE, JBoss was our first choice. The main considerations were its feature set, quality, cost, and clear development roadmap.

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

Building on JBoss has dramatically reduced the development time for our LIMS, and increased its stability. The ability to deploy Java application servers to all of our DNA sequencers has greatly improved the cost effectiveness of our LIMS integration with the sequencers. JBoss JMS and Clustering provided the vertical scalability to our application; we setup an 8 node JBoss cluster to process large bundles (40 million) of traces in batch.

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

We currently deploy about 140 JBoss application servers in production, using advanced features like HAJMS, clustering, cache etc. We have probably saved more then $500K per year on application server licensing costs by using JBoss. JBoss free, open source applications provide the unmatched scalability, where we can add new JBoss instances without worrying about any licensing cost.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
Any software dollars saved through the use of JBoss have been reallocated to development software that is core to our scientific mission.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
DNA Sequencers: 100 ABI 3730xl and 6 ABI 3100 DNA Sequencers
Integration with ABI 9700 Thermalcycler
Beckman Biomek® FX Laboratory Automation Workstation
Hudson Controls Laboratory Automation Stackers and Print and Apply Stations
Zebra Barcode Printers and Scanners
Application servers run under Linux on HP BL20p blade servers
DB Server runs on a two node Linux cluster (HP DL580s).
Symbol PPT-8846 Wireless Pocket-PC based PDAs with scanner
3 Oracle 10gRAC cluster with more then 1Terrabyte of data.
JBoss 3.2.6 Java Application Servers
Panscopic Scope Server Reporting Tool ((www.panscopic.com)
Bugzero Issue Tracking System (www.websina.com)
DiskXTender from Legato
Celera Assembler
Custom Bioinformatics Software developed at the Venter Institute

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

Yes, we used JBoss advance training provided JBoss and we found it very good. Training added a lot of value to our employees.

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

JBoss provided excellent enterprise applications which are open, stable, and scalable. We scaled from 1 standalone server to an 8 node clustered sever with some trivial changes. JBoss stability and scalability is exceptional. Why pay for other black box applications server when you can get JBoss open source applications, which can add value while drastically cutting costs.

Submitted by: Michael Simpson, CTO
Industry: Healthcare
Geography: Louisville, CO
Website: http://www.mckesson.com

Overview

Selected for being the first company to employ the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform to integrate its varied healthcare software applications on one unified platform, saving approximately one million dollars in combined software and hardware costs and allowing the company to provide a more robust and enterprise-ready solution for patient care.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

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

McKesson Provider Technologies is a $2.6 billion division of McKesson Corporation, the largest United-States based corporation specializing in the distribution of healthcare systems, medical supplies and pharmaceutical products. It is the 16th largest company in the United States and the single largest health care company in the world. McKesson’s products and services are designed to meet the information needs of all participants in the integrated health system.

McKesson provides software that powers hospitals. This includes software that aids in the emergency room, radiology department, with patient health care records, during surgeries and more.

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

Over time, McKesson has accumulated 23 applications to help address various in-hospital needs. Each application is on a separate architecture. The company’s goal in this project was to have one large enterprise architecture with a common operating system, common set of databases, while continuing their reputation to deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care.

As a patient enters the emergency room, doctors and nurses have no way to know everything about a patient – the medications they take, the operations they have undergone, etc. McKesson saw the importance in truly knowing everything about a patient and thus wanted to fix this disconnect by creating a messaging system that links to different hospitals, pharmacies and other healthcare systems to help organize a patient’s continuum of care. With this messaging system, a doctor or nurse can see a complete medical history of the patient, giving them the ability to deliver a better quality of care. As a result of bringing together these applications, caregivers in the healthcare industry can log in to an operating suite and all the documentation on a particular patient will flow back into messages from the clinical systems. Through this project, all aspects of the continuum of care of patients will be linked and a patient’s complete story will unfold for doctors and nurses.

McKesson faced a number of technical and business challenges in its project to integrate all of its healthcare software on one platform. One technical challenge came with the migration from mainframe Unix to Linux solutions. The migration itself was not difficult, but convincing the industry it was ready for this change proved challenging. With this change in mind, McKesson had to alter the mindset and education of its customers worldwide. Its customers previously were expected to be knowledgeable about Oracle management applications. Now each must be Linux trained and Oracle-on-Linux trained too.

McKesson also faced a great business challenge. Today, customers from hospitals buy hardware with the knowledge in 3-5 years the hardware will need to be updated or replaced. An example of this depreciation rate is a customer who purchased mainframe hardware just two years ago still only has about three good years of usage left on their systems. McKesson faced the challenge of showing an return on investment for why customers like this should move to a new solution faster, even with a balance of three years on their previous system still available.

Also, from the perspective of the industry as a whole, the world of healthcare is very risk-adverse. Daily interactions with patients are critical and can involve life-or-death situations. To change an already functioning system and process takes a lot of convincing. It also takes time to determine that the new system does not have any adverse affects that could alter patient care. The healthcare community has been using Unix for over 20 years. It’s hard for this community to understand that Linux offers the same support as Unix and can be equally as efficient. McKesson was challenged with ensuring community comfort with this change.

What was the desired solution?

McKesson desired a solution that included clinical care applications running on an open OSS stack, using industrial grade systems. They needed a system to enable safe an efficient care. Mandatories include reliability, scalability, manageability, cost effective, highly flexible and built for ‘what’s next’.

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

Prior to this project, McKesson was already employing Red Hat solutions in isolated areas throughout the company. Red Hat was the Linux solution ingrained in the minds of McKesson employees and had always provided very cost-effective ways to get customers moving forward quickly. McKesson had a good, standing relationship with Red Hat and had already enjoyed a superior product in other areas of its business. Red Hat was offering superior education and support opportunities for what McKesson needed for its current project. In addition to Red Hat, McKesson also chose to work with JBoss solutions because they were less expensive and still offered equal, if not better, solutions in comparison to other commercial applications on the market.

In February 2007, McKesson was the first to take advantage of the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform. The platform packages the Red Hat suite of open source products and services, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux updates via the Red Hat Network. It also includes dedicated customer support and services, as well as other open source technologies such as JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This complete solution provides superior levels of stability and performance as well as predictable maintenance cycles. The Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform fits seamlessly with McKesson’s commitment to product quality and customer service.

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

Red Hat and JBoss products are the cornerstone of the chosen McKesson solution. McKesson is the first company to adopt the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform. The company was able to overcome its business and technical challenges because of the flexibility of this Red Hat solution. Because of the ability to run Linux on most environments, McKesson was able to subset to put multiple Red Hat sessions on its boxes. Also with Red Hat’s flexibility, McKesson was able to use its existing hardware.

With Red Hat and JBoss solutions, McKesson had the ability to interoperate with all of the applications that were interfaced and not integrated. Now, McKesson has the ability to integrate its applications without having to change all of the code, rewriting as all one application. All information about a patient’s full medical history is now available to healthcare workers who are treating this patient.

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

McKesson was the first company to adopt the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform. It allows McKesson to offer solutions for hundreds of dollars cheaper than before. In large mainframe environments, McKesson saved a million dollars in combined software and hardware costs for customers. The company offered not only a less expensive, solution, but also a better solution when considering the excellent support provided by Red Hat and JBoss. Overall, the total cost of ownership of the McKesson solution was significantly lowered. As a result, the solutions are able to be used in smaller footprint hospitals, making the integration of applications consistent among all hospitals using McKesson.

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

McKesson gained value across the board as a result of implementing Red Hat solutions. Prior to implementing Red Hat, McKesson was supporting multiple varients of Unix, which caused the company to spend time and resources testing products on each individual version. After migrating to Red Hat, internal efficiency was gained because the company no longer had to continue buying mainframes and did not have to test products on so many systems. There was now one test on one product. Now, McKesson can reuse and reprovision its capital needs more effectively. McKesson engineers all speak the Red Hat – JBoss language and that common language has been incorporated across the company.

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

McKesson customers include hospitals and healthcare providers of all sizes, so hardware is not consistent across customers and varies between each hospital. The company does have 5-6 different Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle racks for database tiers. There are also 5-90 application servers involved, depending on the size of the hospital. McKesson’s architecture takes advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss, and Hibernate.

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

McKesson has enjoyed excellent support and services from Red Hat and JBoss. Whenever training was needed, Red Hat was able to provide personal help within a day’s notice. On one occasion, Red Hat even flew engineers out to a McKesson customer when on-site help was necessary.

Prior to the Red Hat – McKesson engagement, McKesson was a BEA shop. As the company compared BEA to JBoss, it found that JBoss offered better support and better turn around time for defects within the JBoss community. One time in particular, JBoss turned around a McKesson issue in less than two days. Another vendor took almost four months to provide the same solution.

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

Just do it. Understand what your customer needs. In healthcare, cheaper solutions with better supportability and better training are needed. A company should always look at what its customers need. In this case, Red Hat and JBoss solutions met McKesson’s terms and gave a more robust, enterprise-ready solution to customers than was previously available.

Category: Joint Red Hat / JBoss Deployment

Winner: DST Health Solutions

Submitted by: Gary Krasovic

Industry: Health Information Systems

Geography: Birmingham, Alabama

Overview

Selected for their use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JEMS to build a consumer-directed healthcare solution that was first-to-market, yielding immediate customer traction, increased market visibility, thus reflective of corporate leadership and success.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

DST Health Solutions is a wholly owned subsidiary of DST Systems, Inc., a publicly traded mutual fund processing company with approximately 10,000 employees worldwide. The DST Health Solutions subsidiary has 1,000 employees dedicated to delivering applications and outsourcing services that improve efficiency, reduce operational costs, increase speed to market, and improve customer service for health plans, consumer-directed health plans, Medicare plans, and physician practices. DST Health Solutions’ enterprise applications and ASP and BPO services support 390 healthcare clients, representing 38 million covered lives, 360 million health plan claims, 30 million physician business transactions, and 450,000 consumer-directed members annually.

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

Three years ago, DST Health Solutions began developing a consumer-directed platform for self-administration of flexible spending accounts (FSAs), health spending accounts (HSAs), and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs). Previously, consumers could only access or make changes to their accounts by calling a claims support representative. Due to the growing demand for consumer driven health products, DST Health Solutions wanted to be first to market with a software solution that allowed members to log in and administer their own accounts. However, the company mainly focused on developing larger, more lenient business-to-business solutions that didn’t require the constant uptime of a consumer web application.

Since developing a member accessed application was new territory, DST Health Solutions wanted to start with a conservative approach, while still providing the reliability demanded by consumers. DST Health Solutions needed a technology it could implement at a low cost and scale over time as membership numbers grew. Also important was technology agility, since DST Health Solutions wanted to put the systems together quickly without first building an extensive infrastructure.

3. What was the desired solution?

DST Health Solutions needed a low cost, small volume stack that would scale with demand. Flexibility was a key factor, since the company wanted to get the system up and running quickly and then develop an appropriate infrastructure to support ongoing growth. The goal was to build the system on inexpensive Intel-class hardware, with one application server and one database server, monitor the load, and quickly scale as needed. DST Health Solutions also knew it needed to guarantee uptime to ensure customer satisfaction.

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

The decision to use JBoss Application Server was initially one of necessity for DST Health Solutions. After considering several solutions, the company determined that the Sun application server didn’t have the functionality needed, and Weblogic and Websphere were too cost prohibitive. A developer within DST Health Solutions started coding using JBoss and brought it into the organization. The organization immediately liked JBoss Application Server’s flexibility, resulting in its quick acceptance. On the operating system side, DST Health Solutions used Novell’s SUSE with JBoss for a short time before moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SUSE was too unstable, and SUSE running on Oracle servers didn’t provide the expected reliability. RHEL offered DST Health Solutions a cost-effective, rigorously tested technology that met the company’s reliability and scalability needs. Additionally, the Red Hat Network (RHN) systems management platform would allow for easy maintenance and monitoring of the system.

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

Red Hat and JBoss significantly contributed to the affordability and scalability of the project. Red Hat made administration of the whole infrastructure easier through use of the RHN management tools that enable the company to easily provision new systems as demand warrants, download important patches and configuration changes, and monitor the status of its 50-60 servers. Because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is so agile, it can easily scale to handle large numbers of subscribers as well as heavy loads during peak times, such as open enrollment, when demand is high. RHEL also makes it simple to deploy new servers to grow the network without creating administration headaches.

The modularity of JEMS made it possible for DST Health Solutions to pick only the software development solutions it needed. The company uses JBoss Application Server to develop and grow its web application, Hibernate to eliminate the need for extra coding, and JBoss jBPM to facilitate business processes and workflow. As part of its subscription, DST Health Solutions utilizes JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) and has implemented the Monitoring Module that provides the company with advanced monitoring capabilities, pre-selected statistics, and the ability to create custom statistics.

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

The health insurance industry is historically slow to adapt new technology. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss to develop, deploy, and scale its FSA, HSA, and HRA consumer-directed healthcare product allowed DST Health Solutions to be first to market and quickly attract large enterprise customers.

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

When DST Health Solutions first developed its consumer-directed healthcare product, a separate holding company owned the technology and CDH solution. DST Health Solutions credits the market visibility gained because of its new offering and resulting customer success with making the company an attractive acquisition target for DST Systems. DST Health Solutions’ success using Red Hat and JBoss solutions in a production environment is leading its parent company, also a Red Hat and JBoss user, to explore using the technology beyond its current development and testing environments.

DST Health Solutions currently supports more than 450,000 lives on our CDH solution. DST Health Solutions was awarded a prestigious opportunity to serve one of the nations leading financial/ banking institutions. Scalability was the key business need for this financial institution, as their consumerism offering expands and CDH members increase dramatically. The Red Hat framework afforded DST Health Solutions the flexibility and scalability to quickly adapt and deploy new lines of business, which further supported strategic decisions and penetration into evolving markets.

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

DST Health Solutions uses 10 production application servers and three database servers, all of which are HP DL or BL class running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. All systems use AMD Operton processors and some feature SAN booting for easy system provisioning. The company also uses version 3.0.28 of the JBoss Application Server, with plans to move to version 4 soon. Other JEMS products used include Hibernate for object/relational mapping and JBoss jBPM for workflow applications.

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

DST is a JBoss Platinum and a Red Hat Basic support customer. Skilled Red Hat engineers provide a high level of RHEL support when needed. Since DST Health Solutions began receiving support directly from JBoss, the company has enjoyed high-quality, prompt answers to its inquiries. While the company has not used consulting services because of the rapidity with which it put the system together, it foresees using these services in the future to help improve system performance.

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

Because it offers the maturity of older technologies and the innovation of newer solutions, Red Hat provides a nice medium for developers coming from an HP-Unix background. The more mature and conservative RHEL packages, testing, releases, and patches provide a stable solution for any project. While JBoss is more cutting-edge than Red Hat, it is easy to deploy and provides the stability needed in a production environment.

Industry: Healthcare Geography: Boston, MA

Opportunity: Migrate core clinical applications to stable, secure operating environment and create new disaster-recovery system with higher availability

Migration Path: HP Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite; Intersystems Caché; proprietary Triple A, utility, and security applications

Hardware: HP DL385 with AMD dual-core processors

Benefits: Realized $200,000 in annual cost savings, decreased annual downtime from 20 hours to near zero—furthering leading-edge patient care

Challenge

In 2005, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and BIDMC, wanted to migrate the hospital’s IT infrastructure to a more secure, reliable operating system that would reduce operating and capital expenditures. “Our Triple A applications, which are responsible for all of the clinical, financial, administrative, and academic activities in the hospital, ran on HP Unix. But the operating system had memory leaks and required frequent virus patches,” said Halamka. “We experienced approximately 20 hours of planned and unplanned downtime last year,” added Rob Hurst, Sr. Caché Administrator for BIDMC. The hospital not only wanted to move its applications to a more stable and secure operating system, but also wanted to create a new disaster-recovery system that would increase availability from 99.7 percent to 99.99 percent—improving the hospital’s level of patient care even further.

Solution

Three years prior, BIDMC had begun using Red Hat for the hospital’s utility services, including mail exchange, spam filtering, and DNS. “Our internal security team was running Red Hat Enterprise Linux exclusively on its servers, so we knew Red Hat provided rock-solid security,” said Hurst. However, executive management questioned whether an open source solution could scale sufficiently while providing the level of reliability needed to support enterprise applications. As the former IT director for another Northeastern hospital, Hurst had gained extensive experience deploying Red Hat for core clinical systems. “Based on my previous experience, I was able to provide BIDMC with benchmark data, demonstrating that Red Hat performance, scalability, and reliability was proven in hospital environments,” he said.

After gaining management approval, Hurst spearheaded the migration project, purchasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux from DLT Solutions, one of Red Hat’s value-added providers dedicated to healthcare and government environments. Hurst’s team deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 11 servers that run Intersystems Caché, as well as the hospital’s proprietary Triple A applications. “Red Hat Professional Services helped us review the architecture design, ensuring a smooth transition to our production environment,” said Hurst. Within six months, the migration from HP-UX to Red Hat was complete, and Hurst is now leveraging Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Cluster Suite, to implement a more robust disaster-recovery strategy. BIDMC currently operates four environments—development, testing, production, and shadow production—and runs 11 servers in a cluster.

Using Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite, Hurst and his team are creating a multi-tiered architecture that separates the network, applications, and database layers within one stack. “Red Hat GFS creates one file system as if all of the layers are running on one server and redirects files seamlessly as needed. If we have an unplanned outage on one application server, then GFS automatically distributes to another application server or environment, eliminating lengthy wait times,” said Hurst. To perform a planned update, such as a security patch or memory upgrade, GFS enables the team to redirect to a different environment easily without having to shut down the system.

Benefits

Red Hat’s open source technology, combined with high-level support, provide BIDMC with the reliability and agility it requires to run a leading-edge hospital. “Red Hat solutions, such as GFS and Cluster Suite, are built into the kernel, providing all of the open source technology we need—affordably and without vendor lock-in,” said Hurst. Before moving its Red Hat servers into production, Hurst was impressed when his team was able to communicate directly with the Vice President of Support, 24×7. “Red Hat is an engineering-focused company with executive management and a Global Support Services team that is highly involved and technically capable. This means we can resolve issues quickly and keep our most critical hospital information systems available to ensure leading-edge patient care,” he said.

BIDMC’s roadmap includes moving other hospital systems from HP-UX to Red Hat. “The hospital is currently considering migrating its Oracle and PeopleSoft database applications to Red Hat. “Moving our core clinical applications to Red Hat was the first step. The reliability and performance gains we’ve experienced are proof that we’re ready to migrate our other applications,” said Hurst.

For more about Red Hat’s open source solutions for healthcare, visit the Red Hat healthcare web site http://www.redhat.com/solutions/healthcare

Red Hat Provides Cost-Effective Solution for Record Management

Customer: Highmark Healthcare

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: US: Pennsylvania

Business Challenge: To maintain secure health records for over 4.1 million insured customers through a manageable and cost-effective system.

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Directory Server, Red Hat Network, Red Hat Network Satellite

Hardware: JuTzu, Race servers, HPDL rat mouse server

Benefits: Approximately 30% savings in hardware/software licensing costs. An almost 50% reduction in hardware (78 CPUs to 42). More than $470,000 long-term savings through the directory server ($500,000 + future costs estimate from Sun versus one-time $30,000 cost from Red Hat). Higher performance and security. Readily available support.

Download the Case Study: PDF

BACKGROUND

Highmark Inc. is Pennsylvania’s largest health insurance company by membership. It was created in 1996 by the consolidation of two Pennsylvania licensees of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association – Pennsylvania Blue Shield (now Highmark Blue Shield) and Blue Cross of Western Pennsylvania (now Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield). They are now one of the largest health insurers in the United States.

Highmark’s mission is to provide access to affordable, quality health care, enabling individuals to live longer, healthier lives. They have a long history of nearly 70 years serving health insurance needs, and currently provide fully insured and self-funded health products to about 4.6 million members in Pennsylvania.

Highmark completed the grand opening of its new data center in November 2005. The facility is located on 11.3 acres in an 87,000 square foot building with 49 employees. Its ISG division has approximately 700 people. Highmark has 107 Linux servers and four Linux systems administrators.

CHALLENGE

Highmark is a large Medicare intermediary and carrier that deals regularly with strict government regulations. The company is involved in seven to 10 government audits per year surrounding the security of the highly sensitive health care information it holds. Information like dental business coverage details for military personal, both retired and in service, and Medicare information. Five of these annual audits are large-scale and require an enormous focus on security. Therefore, the company must ensure that their health care records remain secure and manageable.

In addition to security and management issues, Highmark needed to find a cost-effective, high-performing, and consistent operating system in order to cover their IT budget and goals.

SOLUTION

In the face of these challenges, Highmark decided to consolidate to one operating system. While the company already had forms of Linux present in its environment, Highmark needed the consistency of one unified operating system – a solution that Red Hat provided.

Highmark migrated from Sun and AIX to Red Hat for two reasons. “First, we wanted to try to get a consistent operating system for management purposes,” said Dave Dipiazza, manager of Internet services at Highmark. “The second big thing was the cost in trying to cover our IT budgets.”

The migration to Red Hat is focused on four major areas: WebSphere, Oracle, Lotus Notes, and web presence. “Considering the four big applications that we have in our IT environment, we started out looking at both SUSE and Red Hat,” Dipiazza said. “We came to the decision that Red Hat would be better for our environment because the support we received from Red Hat was outstanding and Red Hat has better market share here in the United States. We simply had better experiences with Red Hat solutions.”

Dipiazza continued, “Security was one of our top priorities, and Red Hat provided an amazing solution for us. As a Medicare intermediary and carrier, we have to deal with many strict government regulations. The security and protection of our health care records is extremely important within our corporation, and Red Hat helped us to achieve this level of security.”

Don Matush, manager of operating systems at Highmark, expects to finish consolidating to one operating system by the end of 2006. They have already completed the migration of close to 90% of the WebSphere environment and have started on its Oracle and web server environments.

Highmark also implemented the Red Hat Directory Server into its environment to realize further cost reduction. They migrated from the iPlanet directory server, which operated on a per-entry pricing model, to the Red Hat Directory Server. With 1.3 million entries in the directory currently, per-entry costs were much higher than with Red Hat’s one-time fee.

Highmark’s environment is now operating from the Red Hat Network. “Our environment has grown in its position. It is more prudent to bring that functionality in-house and manage it ourselves instead of having over 107 servers connecting to the network to get something,” Dipiazza said.

BENEFITS

Highmark has seen numerous benefits since migrating to Red Hat – including cost savings, heightened performance and security, and excellent support resources. The company has experienced a 30% reduction in its hardware and software licensing costs. The ISB software that Highmark was previously running was priced per CPU. Because Highmark was able to make an almost 50% reduction of the amount of CPUs necessary for operation (78 CPUs to 42 CPUs), licensing costs were drastically reduced.

Highmark also saw a huge cost reduction in its directory server. With Sun, Highmark would have spent $500,000 up front with additional maintenance costs in the future. By implementing Red Hat instead, Highmark is spending a one-time fee of $30,000. “Red Hat is going to save us money every time we need to add users,” Dipiazza said. “I don’t need to purchase anything else for Red Hat Directory Server in the future. Red Hat saved us more than the difference between $500,000 and $30,000.”*

The Red Hat Satellite Server has helped Highmark with functionality and management. “The Satellite Server offers some additional administrative functionality to help us optimize our employees’ time managing the environment,” Matush said.

With the optimum service provided by Red Hat, the management of Highmark’s environment has become much easier. “Red Hat support was much more available than SUSE support,” Dipiazza said. “It was much easier for Highmark to find the right resources with Red Hat.”

Highmark has also benefited from Red Hat certification and on-site training. More than five members of their IT staff are currently Red Hat Certified Engineers® or are preparing for the certification test.

The company’s future plans and integration of Red Hat solutions include taking a look at virtualization. “We are definitely interested in seeing and evaluating virtualization when it becomes part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5,” Matush said.

Thus far Highmark has enjoyed a successful migration to Red Hat. “It’s definitely been a positive experience with Red Hat,” Matush said. “You can tell that Red Hat values their relationship with Highmark, and we certainly value it as well. We are working together to make sure this Linux initiative is a success at Highmark.”