Brazilian Paint Manufacturer, Tintas Iquine, Migrates from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Increase Performance and Improve Security

FAST FACTS

Customer: Tintas Iquine

Industry: Manufacturing: Paint and Tints

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Increase the stability and performance of business critical ERP applications

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Datasul, Progress Database, Trend Micro Security Solution

Hardware: Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

Migration Path: UNIX/RISC based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge servers

Benefits: Red Hat virtualization enabled increased stability, performances, and increased security on redundancy and backup, and Red Hat Satellite simplified systems management

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Tintas Iquine, a Brazilian paints, coatings, and special resins company, produces more than 1,500 products including; industrial paints, varnish, sealing, resins, pastes, and is known for its rigorous quality control, and its use of new technologies to improve its processes, products and deliver more value to its customers, paint and building material resellers and retailers.

In operation since 1974, Tintas Iquine’s two factories have the capacity to produce 8 million liters of products per month, guaranteeing to the company 6% to 7% of the Brazilian market, operate 24/7 and are fully computerized in order to achieve enhanced production capabilit, security, and in addition, less impactful to the environment. Tintas Iquine achieved the certificate of approval in NBR ISO 9001:2000, which signifies the company´s compliance with the requirements of the standard of Quality Management System in coatings. Iquine also won the certificate of quality of the Brazilian Association fo Manufacturers of Paints.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tintas Iquine grew significantly in a short amount of time, with sales volume increases of 20-30 percent, the company increased in size from 200 to 500 employees, and needed a operating platform to improve its critical Enterprise Resource Planning applications and increase the IT team’s ability to scale for the company’s growth.

The existing UNIX based server environment at Tintas Iquine supported the ERP system, database, BI, CRM and security tools, consisted of a disparate, aging infrastructure that resulted in a lower application performance level and required resources devoted to systems management and monitoring, making it increasingly difficult and costly.

The new operating platform needed to increase the ERP application’s performance, security, and provide a simplified systems management tool.

SOLUTION
The Tintas Iquine’ IT team was well versed with open source operating platforms, and especially favored Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to the enterprise support, stability, and performance the platform provides, in addition to Red Hat Satellite systems management, that would solve the company’s systems management issues.

With the expertise in-house and the enterprise-ready reputation, Tintas Iquine confidently decided not to conduct a lengthy technical evaluation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Due to the breadth of third-party applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Tintas Iquine decided to migrate all of its applications from UNIX, as all of the applications would be running under only one operating system, thus increasing the performance and reducing systems management resources.

The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux involved the virtualization of 12 machines to supports the company’s Progress database, Business Intelligence (BI) applications, CRM and Trend Micro Security Solutions.

BENEFITS
Tintas Iquine’s implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has allowed the company to scale for growth, increase application performance, reduce costs, and simplify systems management. The satisfaction and gain of performance were immediately realized by the IT staff and throughout the company, as application users began to work more efficiently and more productively.

The virtualization and the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from UNIX, provided Tintas Iquine increased server utilization, and the management process on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux based servers have shown greater agility and ease of use, when compared to the Windows based servers, due to less interruptions in the maintenance process.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the performance in the application processing has increased 30 percent, and the costs have fallen about 50 percent, thus confirming the company’s decision to migrate to Red Hat.

Although Tintas Iquine’s Oracle database is running in a Windows platform, due to the results of the UNIX to Red Hat migration, the company plans to gradually migrate all systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: India

Challenge: To reduce dependence on UNIX systems, improve cost-efficiency ratio, simplify systems management, and improve scalability for business growth

Migration Path: HP UX/UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle DB

Hardware: Dell 2950 PowerEdge server, Intel Quad Core Xeon-based E5410 x 2 (Dual CPU) Processors

Benefits: Eliminated vendor lock-in, doubled system performance, slashed costs by one-tenth translating into cost savings of over Rs. 40 lakh (USD $83,333), and gained the ability to independently manage systems

“Today, I have complete peace of mind because Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server has delivered stability, performance gains, and cost savings while providing the ability to scale to the rapidly growing demands of our organization.”
–Pertish Mankotia, head of IT, Sheela Foam

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
A US 200 million group and an ISO 9001:2000 company, Sheela Foam is the largest manufacturer of flexible Polyurethane Foam (PU) in India. The company ranks among the top five PU foam manufacturing companies in the Asia-Pacific region. In India, the firm has ten manufacturing units, supported through a distribution network of over 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers. The firm also has a presence in Australia, with five manufacturing units located in five major cities. A combination of manufacturing excellence and distribution network has enabled the company to capture over 40 percent of the Indian PU foam market share.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Sheela Foam had previously developed its own custom Enterprise Resource Planning application (ERP), Greatplus, based on Oracle and HP-UX to automate its entire production process, from procurement to production. The custom-built ERP is integrated into Sheela Foam’s distribution network of 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers and the firm also used an innovative SMS-based tracking system that helps the company to accurately track and maintain inventory at the location of its distributors and dealers. With every dispatch made by the company to the dealer, an SMS message is sent to the distributor about the stock dispatched to him.

In this process, every transaction made by the more than 1,500 users worldwide each day was recorded by the ERP system. While the self-constructed ERP system helped Sheela Foam to boost customer confidence, it also meant that the costly system had to be available 24×7.In an effort to improve its cost-value ratio, lower costs, and reduce vendor lock-in, Sheela Foam decided to evaluate a number of platforms, including those based on open source technology.

“As a company, we wanted to maximize the value gained from the support provided, as the support costs were too high and prevented us from scaling effectively,” said Pertish Mankotia, head of IT, Sheela Foam.

Sheela Foam’s HP-UX system, forced it to depend on a proprietary vendor to test and implement improvements, which made the process less effective and expensive to maintain.

Sheela Foam decided to adopt an open source solution after the company’s HP-UX system went down and took more than 16 hours to recover. As a mission-critical system, any system downtime directly impacted the reputation of the company and in turn, sales and profits. The incident provided Sheela Foam the impetus to migrate to an open source solution that could be independently maintained by its own IT team.

SOLUTION
After evaluating a host of options, Sheela Foam consulted Red Hat Enterprise Linux partner Keen & Able Computers. Convinced about the value offered, the firm trusted the market leader, Red Hat, and chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on an Intel Xeon processor-based Dell PowerEdge server. The preloaded Dell 2950 PowerEdge server made the migration and installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux quick and easy. This meant that the system was ready to be tested and could be deployed immediately.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on an Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server has enabled the firm to deploy its ERP on a single server, compared to the two previously required servers, doubling system performance with no downtime. The Red Hat solution has also reduced the amount of time required for processing heavy reports by 25 percent. The reduction in servers and associated maintenance costs has translated to cost savings of over Rs. 40 lakh (USD83,333). The firm now spends only Rs. 4 lakh (USD 8333) per year compared to the more than Rs. 44 lakh (USD 91,667) on its previous UNIX system.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon-based processors has doubled Sheela Foam’s performance levels, significantly lowered costs, and has given it the ability to independently manage its systems. Today, Sheela Foam’s IT team is able to make improvements rapidly with ease.

“Today, I have complete peace of mind because the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell PowerEdge server system is known for its stability and is well-designed to scale to the rapidly growing demands of our organization. My only regret is that I did not start this earlier,” said Mankotia.

The trusted Red Hat solution has given the Sheela Foam IT team the ability to focus on more strategic issues that can boost the competitiveness of the company.

Reduced Costs By Migrating Its Web Application Platform and Building a Customer Information Portal on JBoss Enterprise Middleware

FAST FACTS

Customer: Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg)

Industry: Printing & Publishing, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering

Geography: U.S., EMEA

Business Challenge: Establish a new customer specific portal to enhance its customer relationship and provide internal business units with valuable customer insight; Evaluate and deploy an application server platform for its Java-based environment

Solution: With the help of Red Hat Consulting, Heidelberg built an interactive customer portal using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle 10g database, SAP R/3, Autonomy search engine, Interwoven TeamSite 6.5 (CMS), Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-Bit

Hardware: Virtualized servers and F5 Load balancer

Migration path: Proprietary portal platform and application server to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Benefits: Improved customer web presence with a central portal that increased services and information available, provided ability to use applications based on open standards in order to interact better with customers, suppliers and partners, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

Download the PDF

BACKGROUND
Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg), the world’s leading solution provider for the print media industry, built an interactive customer portal, www.MyHeidelberg.com, using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to create an interactive site to enhance its customer relationships and provide a unified global brand presence. With the successful portal project, Heidelberg has since migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, in order to reduce costs, and increase the performance of its web applications.

Based in Heidelberg, Germany, with development and production sites in seven countries and around 250 sales offices across the globe, the company supports around 200,000 customers worldwide. Heidelberg’s printing products and software enable its customers to print high volumes, quickly, at high quality and in color at an affordable price and convert the printed material into the desired format.

Heidelberg, with a global market share for sheetfed offset printing machines of more than 40 percent, develops and produces precision printing presses, units for imaging printing-plates, postpress equipment, and software for integrating all the print shop processes that produce everyday items such as brochures, magazines, folding carton boxes and product labels. It also provides general and consulting services ranging from spare parts and consumables to the sale of re-marketed equipment, in addition to education and training at the Heidelberg Print Media Academy.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Heidelberg launched a corporate-wide web initiative to develop a strategic architecture and customer-centric web portal, to strengthen customer relationships, consolidate information and services, provide easier access to information, and increase revenues through improved communications with customers.

“Previously, we had a solid web presence for our customers, but it was more of an online brochure and lacked interactivity,” said Mathias Berg, Director, Global Web Systems at Heidelberg.”

Heidelberg also anticipates the ability to lower its costs by offering more self-service options, reducing the effort and cycle time for developing and deploying new services and applications, and simplifying support and operation of its applications and infrastructure. It also wanted the new portal to provide its customers with a central and secure repository for sharing data and communication.

“With MyHeidelberg.com, we have created a unified, central customer portal that can be rolled out and adapted to local markets, thus increasing our interaction and providing us with valuable customer insight,” said Michael Neff, chief information officer.

SOLUTION
In order to further its edge in the market, provide customers with more features, and enhance its web-presence, Heidelberg decided to evaluate a number of proprietary and open source solutions for the customer portal project, MyHeidelberg.com, in addition to an application platform solution to set up and restructure its global web presence

“In addition to JBoss, we evaluated proprietary and open source solutions, but we selected JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform due to its ability to deliver an agile, reusable framework, coupled with the benefits of open source to reduce costs, and freed us from vendor lock-in,” said Berg, “Although we had limited open source experience, we made our decision confidently due to JBoss’ established technology platform, flexible architecture, highly regarded enterprise support, and the expertise of Red Hat Consulting.”

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, based on open standards, was selected for its ability to meet the key requirements of the project, including: the ability to integrate seamlessly into the existing infrastructure based on VMWare ESX 3.0 and Oracle 10g, and the content management systems: Windows Server 2003 and Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

The MyHeidelberg.com customer portal needed to be flexible and reliable in order to adapt to Heidelberg’s local websites requirements, while at the same time, it had to scale for a steadily increasing number of users, which initially tallied more than 5,500 registered users and has been growing monthly by approximately 5-10 percent.

At an early stage of the customer portal project, Heidelberg made the decision to work with Red Hat Consulting in order to facilitate knowledge transfer, have a closer relationship with JBoss, and to have access to the engineers and developers behind the open source technology. Heidelberg’s IT teams in the U.S. and Germany worked with Red Hat consultants to enable a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure.

“We had a great experience with Red Hat Consulting,” said Berg, “The Red Hat Consultants worked closely with our IT teams in the U.S. and Germany to ensure a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure, by mentoring our team, demonstrating product features, providing documentation, and ensuring our team was prepared for success after the engagement. We view Red Hat Consulting as a trusted advisor to our team.”

“The MyHeidelberg.com portal, based on JBoss, creates a true value-add for our customers, and has enabled us to grow our business and serve our customers in a better way. MyHeidelberg.com provides a centralized web portal with tailored information for each customer with one gateway, one URL, one password, and one login.”

After successful testing and fine-tuning, the production environment and infrastructure for the MyHeidelberg.com customer portal went live.

“We now offer our customers an interactive portal, that can be adapted to every local market and is integrated with more than 45 websites worldwide.” said Berg.

Through back-end integration with ERP and CRM systems, Heidelberg enables portal users to securely interact with their data, such as service information, view and retrieve brochures, product specs, and account data, easily through one gateway. Additionally, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform runs on Windows Server 2003 and collaborates with a content management system based on Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

Heidelberg decided to expand its collaboration with JBoss when it decided to migrate its complete internet presence, www.heidelberg.com, from a proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to set-up restructure its entire global web presence.

“Based on our successful deployment of JBoss Enterprise Portal for the MyHeidelberg.com project, and knowing that we had a stable, reliable, and fully supported solution, we quickly and confidently made the decision to migrate our global enterprise web applications from our previous proprietary solution to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform,” said Berg.

BENEFITS
Heidelberg’s use of JBoss for its customer portal and web application server has resulted in; improved customer web presence with a central portal, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

“All over the world, the name Heidelberg is synonymous with state-of-the art technology, top quality, and closeness to the customer, so we set the benchmark high for ourselves and we expect the same level of quality from all of our vendors,” said Neff. “JBoss absolutely delivered all we needed, by providing high availability, performance and scalability. Due to the Red Hat subscription model, we realized signification cost savings, faster ROI, and freedom from vendor lock-in.”

The introduction of JBoss has helped simplify IT administration: with only one portal infrastructure to manage, one platform and one brand for the company’s Web presence, helping to strengthen the brand of Heidelberg. The new self-service capabilities provided by the MyHeidelberg.com portal give customers fast, convenient access to critical information whenever they need it, increasing customer satisfaction and the credibility of Heidelberg as a valuable business partner.

“In addition to the enhancements for our customers, the MyHeidelberg.com portal based on JBoss Enterprise Portal, offers valuable customer insight and behavioral information that is being leveraged internally by our marketing, sales, and product development teams, which will allow us to make informed and targeted business decisions and increase company sales,” said Berg.

The cost of developing and deploying new services and applications has been reduced now that Heidelberg has a simple way to integrate content and information into the portal; the IT team can index content and expose it through the search capabilities; and can manage single sign-on. Also, JBoss has drastically reduced costs, as the subscription model has freed Heidelberg from the cost-constraints associated with proprietary software licensing and support.

“We were especially impressed with the performance, product features of JBoss and the quality of support, advice, and knowledge contributed by our Red Hat consultants,” said Neff, “The JBoss Enterprise Portal and JBoss Enterprise Application Platforms went into production and performed extremely well, and this is a great benefit for our customers and internal users, who can now access their data securely and without restrictions.”

“JBoss was always willing to work with us, as partners, to ensure the success of the project,” said Berg, “A prime example is when we identified the need for a unique feature for our customer portal, with any other vendor, we would have had to develop a custom feature ,with no vendor support. But with JBoss, we discussed our need, and they worked with us develop a new feature into the product, that will be fully supported by JBoss. This kind of commitment and performance is something that I have never seen before, from any technology vendor.”

FAST FACTS:

Company: ANSYS Japn K.K.

Industry: Software: CAE

Business Challenge:Provide support for complex analytical simulations: address customer requirements for more advanced CAE technologies, investigate emerging processor technologies, increase productivity

Solution: Deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and selected AMD Opteron™ processors, which are scalable up to 8-processors/32-cores and widely employed in the CAE

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL785 G5, 8-processor, 32-core, Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, 256GB DRR2 memory

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ANSYS, Fluent and other CAE software solutions from ANSYS, Inc.

Benefits: The server runs continuously and stably under high loads. Found a highly manageable way of leveraging the power of the new server, like a cluster in a single box. Achieved a significant reduction in power consumption, making it possible to add additional servers. Provides customers with simulation results more rapidly, addresses customer challenges more flexibly, contributes to higher IT ROI

Overview: US-based ANSYS Inc. has taken a global leadership role in the field of CAE software, an integral and indispensable part of many manufacturing processes. ANSYS Japan K.K., the Japanese arm of ANSYS Inc., has deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux to keep pace with customer demand for complex engineering simulations. The company appreciates the benefits of the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including its stability under high loads and significantly reduced power consumption.

Download the Full Case Study at HP.com

FAST FACTS

Industry: Construction & Engineering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: Republic of Korea

Challenge: Migrate to a flexible platform to achieve cost savings for server consolidation in the data center project

Migration: UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database

Hardware: IBM xSeries, HP BladeSystem

Benefits: Reduce server operating costs; achieve reliable and flexible system operation

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Headquartered in South Korea, POSCO (formerly known as the Pohang Iron and Steel Co.) is one of the world’s largest suppliers of iron and steel products. The company produces more than 30 million tons of steel a year, employs more than 20,000 workers and includes subsidiaries: POSCO Engineering & Construction (which builds steel plants, steel-related infrastructure, and energy facilities) and POSDATA (systems integration).

POSCO operates iron and steel making operations in South Korea and India that are renowned for their high efficiencies throughout a physically huge and complex operational structure., so choosing a fool-proof backup and recovery system is critical to the company’s business health.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
POSCO relies heavily on an extensive array of servers to deploy numerous applications for day-to-day operations handling a massive volume of data transactions daily, making the operating platform for the servers critical to the company’s business health.

POSCO, through its systems integrator subsidiary, POSDATA, embarked on a project to replace its aging, disparate systems with an integrated platform as the company was experiencing problems with system performance, and cost control. The company needed to identify an operating system for the system wide server refresh project that would take place over three stages from 2004 to 2009.

SOLUTION
POSCO needed to replace its dated and costly UNIX servers with IBM and HP x86 commodity servers in order to consolidate its systems into one large-sized data center. POSCO began benchmark testing and the evaluation of operating system vendors. Paramount to POSCO’s decision was the solution’s ability to provide a flexible environment while matching, if not improving, the reliability and performance of its existing UNIX platform. POSCO also aimed to reduce operating costs. Already familiar with Linux, POSCO selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its server consolidation project because of Red Hat’s reliability, increased performance, security, and the resulting reduction in operating costs.

POSCO began gradually migrating its operating environment for select business systems from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux dating back to 2004 and today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux currently runs on more than 50 percent of POSCO’s servers. Due to the increased performance and cost savings, POSCO plans to continue its UNIX-to-Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration as the solution enabled the company to cut reporting time, improve data quality, strengthen accounting and financial planning, enhance asset management, and achieve integration within systems.

The organization has adopted six Sigma, in-house bulletin and data warehousing for new business systems and has performed migration of several systems, including ERP, EP/mail, KM, EDMS, and EAI from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided POSCO’s systems the reliability and performance expected from the operating platform systems, while providing unmatched reductions in operating costs when compared to UNIX and proprietary solutions.

“By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in an industry where IT trends are changing rapidly and user demands are becoming more diverse, we can save development costs and time. In particular, we can drastically reduce maintenance costs because we are purchasing subscriptions rather than proprietary licenses. In addition, the high interoperability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and industry-standard hardware and certified applications enables reliable systems operation,” said Oh Jong Wan, Manager of Information Planning Department Information Service Group for POSCO

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is equipped with a wide range of certifications through a broad ecosystem of hardware and software partners that allow POSCO to be flexible with their systems and selected vendors.

Because the entire deployment is open source it reduced development costs, eliminated license fees and significantly increased work productivity leading to shorter development time.

Migration from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes

ARMONK, N.Y., May 21 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Gruppo Amadori, a wholesale distributor of quality food products in Italy, is rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based desktops running IBM email, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software to select employees.

About 1,000 of the company’s 6,000 employees access PCs to help manage the production, processing, and delivery logistics of its poultry products for customers within Italy and internationally. In 2009, some of these employees will move to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop client operating system and IBM Lotus Symphony, open standards-based word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

For its collaboration services, the company is moving from Microsoft Exchange to an IBM Lotus Notes and Domino environment hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The first users have moved to Lotus Domino and will continue rolling out to the entire company through the course of the year.

The benefits that drive Gruppo Amadori’s migration to Linux and IBM collaboration software are the lower acquisition and operational costs.

“Our strategy is to focus on Linux first and foremost, taking a practical and pragmatic approach,” said Gianluca Giovannetti, CIO and Director of Organization, Gruppo Amadori. “For us, the Linux environment is the right choice for very focused applications and is more cost effective than Microsoft.”

In the first migrations, the Linux desktops will run Lotus Symphony; IBM collaboration software including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM Lotus Quickr; and a Web browser to access an ERP application.

“Linux on the Desktop is providing great value and cost reductions to companies at a time when they need it the most,” said Bob Sutor, vp of Linux and open source, IBM Software Group.

IBM Lotus Symphony is software comprised of three core applications: documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The software is designed to handle the majority of office productivity tasks that workers typically perform. Lotus Symphony supports Linux, Macintosh and Windows desktops and multiple file formats, including Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office; and also can output content in PDF format. For more information or to download Symphony at no charge, please visit, http://symphony.lotus.com

About Gruppo Amadori
Gruppo Amadori is a leader in the Italian food sector. Founded in San Vittore di Cesena 40 years ago, the company — with revenue of over one billion euros in 2008 — has 16 production plants and 32 branches and agencies. Underlying Gruppo Amadori’s success is its ability to manage all phases of production from the selection of raw materials, farms, hatcheries, feed mills, processing plants and distribution. Tradition and innovation are two elements that distinguish Gruppo Amadori. For more information, please visit, http://www.amadori.it/

For more information on IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/think

Experiences heightened flexibility, stability, cost savings and ease of management with Red Hat solutions

RALEIGH, NC – 3 December 2008 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Scania, the leading Swedish manufacturer of heavy trucks and buses, has expanded its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated server and storage virtualisation capabilities. The company utilises the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its critical systems, including specific infrastructure services, databases, applications and high-performance computing (HPC) servers to leverage the solution’s compelling benefits, including cost savings, stability, flexibility and ease of management.

With its virtualised Linux environments, Scania is achieving shortened time-to-services and increased flexibility. Scania can now perform system maintenance by shutting down servers in a structured process, enabling preserved stability and reliability. Throughout the rest of its virtualised Linux infrastructure, Scania also has the option of leveraging the solution’s included Live Migration functionality, allowing for the transfer of virtual systems between physical machines in the network to reduce the hardware requirements necessary to maintain the same workload.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform replaces some proprietary Unix dialects in Scania’s infrastructure with an open platform without lock-in to a specific vendor. We are now building a cost-efficient, flexible and stable infrastructure on top of the Red Hat platform, and have maintained high security and stability throughout the process,” said Mikael Åhlqvist, service team responsible for Unix at Scania. “The virtualisation capabilities provided by Red Hat play a key role in our platform. The solution has provided cost and time savings by reducing the necessary number of physical servers and decreasing the need for related maintenance, administration and energy consumption.”

In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in virtualisation, Scania is utilising Red Hat Network Satellite to retain in-house control over management and administration of its Red Hat-based systems. With Red Hat Satellite Server, Scania has access to Red Hat Network updates and has the ability to maintain local control over the management, administration and monitoring of its systems.

“We see benefits provided by Red Hat’s open source solutions, particularly in regard to its virtualisation capabilities and its subscription business model. Red Hat centers its business focus on delivering valuable ROI to its customers, and we are experiencing this valuable return today. We are continuously exploring the option of migrating additional systems to open source, and specifically Red Hat,” said Åhlqvist.

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 65 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 survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including 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 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 Web site at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

###

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

FAST FACTS

Company: KSH Holdings

Industry: Construction

Geography: Singapore

Challenge: Needed a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution to monitor project budgets and ensure timely data reports for use by the KSH Holdings management team

Migration Path: Paper-based reporting system to a Progress Claims System (PCS) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, PHP, and Apache

Hardware: Dell 2850 with 2 GB RAM and 1 x Processor

Benefits: Developed a scalable Progress Claims System (PCS) that offered access to real-time financial data, reduced manual input errors, and enabled expedited reimbursement processes for subcontractors

“We handle a lot of data input on a daily basis and require something stable and capable of handling the load. That’s why we chose Red Hat.”
-Tony Tang, Chief Financial Officer of KSH Holdings.

Download the Case Study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
With more than 28 years of experience, Kim Seng Heng Holdings (KSH Holdings) is a well established construction, property development and property management group with operations in Singapore, Malaysia and China. The group’s activities are construction in Singapore and Malaysia, and property development and management in China.

Among its notable private sector construction projects in Singapore are The Coast, The Berth By The Cove, The Spectrum, Montview, the Mustafa Shopping Centre extension, and the restoration of Far East Square. Its public sector portfolio includes The Frontier Community Place, Choa Chu Kang Sports Complex, Nanyang Polytechnic, and Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal. KSH Holdings has also secured a S$32 million contract to build an assembly plant in Selangor and a S$7.2 million contract from Tan Chong & Sons Motor for the construction of a warehouse and office in Selangor.

CHALLENGE
With several simultaneous projects underway in Singapore, KSH Holdings’ finance department needed to a better system to keep track of all claims for payment for work completed by subcontractors. This manual process involved the subcontractor submitting a claim, the quantity surveyor verifying the work done, and the manager and director approving the submission. The previous claims system involved a paper form that had to be passed by hand across sites in Singapore to reach project managers and directors located in different offices.

As a result of the outdated manual process, there were inconsistencies in the progress claims, and the KSH Holding management team could not reliably track their budgets.

“We needed something to monitor the project cost at almost real time to ensure that we were not exceeding our budget. When insufficient or incorrect information is provided to the finance department, payment to the subcontractor may be delayed. The manual process was inconsistent and we could not generate management reports,” said Tony Tang, Chief Financial Officer of KSH Holdings.

The company wanted a solution that could streamline the entire claims process and deliver accurate, real-time data that could be used to produce meaningful management reports.

“Users must be able to log in to the system from any location to input the data. This data will be stored centrally and the system must be able to compute the information and push back to the financial system. The system must allow project managers and directors to check on the current progress in development and payment. It must also be reliable and secure,” said Tang.

With these criteria in mind, KSH Holdings decided to turn to Cxrus Solutions, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, to develop a Process Claims Systems (PCS).

SOLUTION
Cxrus Solutions studied the construction company’s needs and spoke to its quantity surveyors, project managers, directors, and the finance department to understand the requirements for the desired PCS.

“We handle a lot of data input on a daily basis and require something stable and capable of handling the load. That’s why we chose Red Hat,” said Tang.

According to Alvin Teo, Business Solutions Director of Cxrus Solutions, the cost of using Red Hat is lower than other platforms.

“The solution also runs faster and performs better when deployed on Red Hat. Of course, Red Hat is renowned for its security, reliability, and scalability,” said Teo.

Cxrus Solutions conducted end-user training for about 40 quantity surveyors, project managers and directors, and finance department staff at KSH Holdings. The PCS, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, PHP, and Apache, went live in October 2007.

Teo believes that taking part in the Infocomm Development Authority’s (IDA) Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP) has given his company a technology edge.

iLIUP is aimed at promoting mutually beneficial partnerships between local enterprises in Singapore and infocomm multinational corporations, leveraging the strengths of each party to bring about greater synergy and results.

“Cxrus Solutions has gained much from Red Hat’s technological insights of the Linux operating system versus other operating systems. This has helped us to craft the best possible solutions for our customers. KSH is a good example of a customer that has benefitted from our participation in iLIUP,” he added.

BENEFITS
It took some time for the KSH Holdings staff to become accustomed to the switch from a manual system to an automated system, but the employees quickly realized the benefits of the solution.

“PCS is a means to record work done. The Red Hat-based solution has met our objectives of improving data accuracy, better visibility of project cost, and prompt payment to our sub-contractors. Our quantity surveyors can now check the status of their claims online from any location,” said Tang.

Since the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based system was implemented in 2007, business has increased by about 70 percent. Due to the scalability of the platform, the KSH Holdings financial department was additionally able to handle the associated workload increase without needing to recruit more staff, saving more money.

In addition to providing increased accuracy and scalability, PCS has also made data more easily retrievable so that management reports can be produced quickly when necessary.

Claims processing time has been cut by 50 to 60 percent, enabling sub-contractors to be paid more promptly. This, in turn, leads to maintaining good relationships and enhanced corporate reputation.

Going forward, KSH Holdings plans to link PCS with the financial system to enable customised management reports on the fly.

“We are also planning to add a document management system to PCS so that we can reduce the amount of paper utilised. By doing this, we will also have better document security, and we’ll save on storage space,” said Tang.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Semiconducting

Geography: Worldwide

Opportunity: Replace aging, deficient UNIX-based system with a Linux solution that could deliver reduced costs, expanded flexibility, and heightened stability

Migration Path: RISC-based UNIX servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell x86 servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network

Hardware: Dell x86 servers

Benefits: Reduced costs by 60 percent, enabled the sharing of data through flexible support of Network File System (NFS) protocols, gained flexibility in vendor selection, and increased work efficiency by more than four times

“We were also very satisfied with the choices that we were presented with once we deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Before, if we wanted to use an alternative operating system, we were locked in with a specific vendor. Now, we’re able to select vendors based on quality and stability and not brand.” – Seok-Ho Choi, Researcher at Fairchild Semiconductor.

Download [PDF]

Background
Fairchild Semiconductor is a leading global provider of semiconductor technology that powers products and makes them more energy efficient. Fairchild continues to build on its rich history of innovation to address one of the greatest challenges of today – reducing wasted energy and improving efficiency in an increasingly power-hungry world. Its headquarters are located in South Portland, Maine, and its main design and manufacturing facilities are located in Buchon, Korea.

Challenge
Concerned with deploying systems that can support fast-developing semiconductor processing technology and semiconductor manufacturing designs, Fairchild became concerned when its former UNIX-based EDA system was not providing adequate performance, cost, and stability requirements for its systems.
Semiconductor manufacturing designs require complex and detailed operations, and Fairchild’s systems were experiencing instability with its systems. Closely related to the verification of design, an important step in semiconductor manufacturing, the instability issues that the company was experiencing needed to addressed immediately. With a five-year internal lifecycle for its systems, Fairchild decided to quickly migrate its verification system to a new, more reliable solution.

Solution
When considering alternative solutions, Fairchild became interested in Linux for its cost savings, stability, and interoperability with x86 servers. For compatibility with x86 servers, its choices were limited to Windows or Linux-based operating systems. “Windows did not support the functions and stability that we desired, so we decided to test various Linux solutions,” said Seok-Ho Choi, Researcher at Fairchild Semiconductors. “Linux was not only able to provide a similar environment to our original UNIX solution, but it was more cost-effective.”

Fairchild evaluated Red Hat solutions and after obtaining solid results, decided to migrate its UNIX-based EDA system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A large portion of the company’s 150 RISC UNIX servers were migrated to Dell x86 servers equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Each is managed using Red Hat Network.

Benefits
After migrating from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fairchild benefited from elimination of system downtime and was able to load libraries that correspond with each EDA tool from the operating system without the disconnection issues that it had experienced with its previous solution. It also reduced costs by 60 percent in terms of server maintenance, was able to freely share data with the support of NFS protocols, and was able to manage a heterogeneous architecture more easily due to the solution’s interoperability.
“We were also very satisfied with the choices that we were presented with once we deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Seok-Ho Choi “Before, if we wanted to use an alternative operating system, we were locked in with a specific vendor. Now, we’re able to select vendors based on quality and stability and not brand.”

Red Hat Network also provided Fairchild with ease of management of its Red Hat-based servers. “What satisfied us most after implementing Red Hat solutions was patch management,” said Seok-Ho Choi “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network, we were able to ensure that our system was optimized with just one click. If solution patches were necessary, or just normal updates, it was a lot easier for us.”
Fairchild is currently working on a project that converts all of its graphics-related tasks to Linux systems in order to further reduce costs and improve the efficiency of its IT architecture. “We also plan to convert our UNIX workstations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop,” said Seok-Ho Choi.

Industry: Food Manufacturing
Geography: Italy
Opportunity: Ensure the fast processing of customer orders by reducing system response times and maintaining consistent performance levels, even during peak periods
Solution:

• Software: 6 virtualized instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running on IBM z/VSE and z/VM, DB2/Udb database, Ware Place and Tomcat
• Hardware: IBM zSeries 9 Business Class mainframe

Benefits: Maintain response times calculating to under one second, efficiently manage various databases with over 24 gigabytes of data and simplify communication among operating systems through use of XML within the mainframe

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

BACKGROUND

Fratelli Carli was established in 1911 when Giovanni Carli, the youngest son of the oldest family in Oneglia, Italy, began selling the oil produced in his olive grove to the public. Soon, the family’s printing business started to incorporate olive oil sales and experienced an increase in customers and olive oil orders. Though unchanged in its traditional values and the quality of its products, Fratelli Carli is today a modern company that delivers its products to hundreds of thousands of customers.

Fratelli Carli’s business is unique in its direct sales process. Its products are sold directly to end customers, without any intermediaries, and speed in processing orders is crucial. Orders are mainly received by telephone, but are also available through mail and via its new e-commerce website. Fratelli Carli receives approximately one million orders and sends over two million packages to over 600,000 Italian families per year.

OPPORTUNITY

With speed of ordering and delivery as a key component in the business, the main challenge for Fratelli Carli’s IT infrastructure is the ability to maintain reduced response times. Currently, response times average below one second, but it is increasingly difficult for the company’s 40 Customer Relation-team operators to maintain the same efficiency levels even during peak periods, such as Christmastime.

Fratelli Carli started its operations with a 360/20 mainframe with a DOS operating system in 1970 and has since migrated to the latest generation IBM z9 Business Class mainframe that runs the z/VSE and z/VM operating systems, which was selected for its reliability and performance. Approximately two years ago, a decision was made to change the IT systems in order to standardize the way customer postal addresses are handled on the z/VSE to ensure consistency and reliability in the data.

“The existing standardization was obsolete and hard to update and integrate,” said Marco Gardini, Mainframe System Architect at Fratelli Carli. “Unfortunately, our market research did not produce many alternatives which are compatible with the z/VSE system. There were very few products available for the mainframe environment, since most are based on new-generation technologies such as C++, Java, and Web standards.”

SOLUTION
Gardini decided to utilize a mainframe and began searching for a solution that would fit well with this hardware. He suggested that the research and development team look for a Java-based solution for a Linux platform that would also work in a zSeries environment. After assessing multiple solutions, the group opted for DB2/Udb database and Egon by Ware Place, a Java-based application that ensures that customer addresses for the Gardini business would be entered correctly.

Once the address standardization software was selected, Gardini assessed various Linux programs and opted for Red Hat solutions. “I like Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is a standard Linux product much closer to the logic of a mainframe than other products,” said Gardini. “I am totally satisfied with this choice. Red Hat support is very competent and always available, and it has supported me very well in the completion of this complex project, involving Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ware Place software developed with Java, on a Tomcat server, which communicates with the z/VSE Cics in XML through a hypersocket network.”

“I believe that over the next few years, we will see the revival of many mainframes thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM zSeries. This revival is due to the interaction among classic mainframe operating systems such as the z/VSE with the CICS TP monitor and the z/VM, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is capable of offering the efficiency of an open source system and the graphics of a web server developed with Java,” said Gardini.

In August 2006, Fratelli Carli purchased the IBM z9-BC mainframe with DS8100 disks, which allows the installation of Linux applications on the same equipment that manages z/VSE applications in production. The z/VM, IBM’s sophisticated virtualization system, is essential to the integration of the two environments. In fact, the mainframe has a dedicated IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux) engine, in addition to the traditional Constraint Programming (CP) engine.

As a result, the z/VSE system that contains almost forty years’ worth of data now interacts with the Ware Place Java application and the DB2/Udb database via XML, all managed by Red Hat. This is a complex operation, as the VSE mainframe environment’s data memorization feature differs from that of Linux and Windows; therefore, when a request comes from one of the Customer Relations team operators, an elaborate conversion process begins with a complex search within the database for address standardization and the inverse conversion to return the data to the z/VSE.

The project analysis began in 2006 with the search for the application for address standardization and ended in the first quarter of 2007 with the deployment of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in production. Five out of a team of eleven IT professionals worked on the project in two separate phases: an initial analysis phase aimed at selecting the product and communicating with the system users and a second programming phase which involved the Cobol development of the code that calls the Java product from the VSE.

Genoa’s Delphis Informatica – an IBM business partner and a Red Hat Advanced Partner – provided integration for the project and ongoing global IT infrastructure support to Fratelli Carli.

There are now six instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the z/VM hypervisor on the IBM zSeries mainframe: two with Ware Place, two for testing and development activities, and an additional two with an ERP system from the Italian company RDS for accounting and inventory.

BENEFITS
“I am definitely satisfied with the results associated with Red Hat solutions, although there is still much to do,” said Gardini. “We are now able to manage different DB2/Udb databases with over 24 gigabytes of data in an open source environment, thereby offering our customers better service than in the past. We have achieved our aim of keeping response times under one second, communicating among different operating systems through XML within the mainframe.”

This was the first IT environment of its kind in the industry, and the IT department at Fratelli Carli had no previous experience to draw upon.

“Red Hat’s strong points? Definitely support, which was provided at any time necessary. The attitude of the company in gladly accepting our challenge was excellent as well,” said Gardini. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers versatility and standardization to a variety of users, as it sets no restrictions.”

“I am firmly convinced that Linux is the turning point for the evolution of mainframes, which, now as in the past, continue to be excellent systems in terms of reliability and performance,” said Gardini. “As far as we are concerned, this is only the beginning: there will be many improvements in the years to come.”

Based on the success of this project, Fratelli Carli has begun to work on a number of new internal projects. The projects involve the transfer of project-management software packages for mainframe-linked hardware infrastructure, such as terminal emulation and printer-management software, currently installed on other platforms, within the IFL engine.

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography:Latin America

Challenge: Minimize operating costs and overhead without sacrificing data security or system reliability

Software:Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sybase

Hardware: Intel-based servers from HP and IBM

Benefits: Cost savings in excess of 70% per server and a 4x performance increase after migrating from legacy UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

The world’s largest producer of refined silver and other metals, Industrias Peñoles, S.A. is comprised of 50 companies with nearly 7,000 employees throughout Mexico. Traded on the Mexican Stock Exchange since 1968, Peñoles places great emphasis on increasing their value to shareholders, and one way they do so is to strictly control costs company-wide. This meticulous fiscal responsibility is increasingly important given the strong effect that the international market for silver and other non-ferrous metals has on prices Peñoles can charge for its products. Because they have little control over market fluctuations, Peñoles must keep its own operating costs to a minimum in order to maintain profitability.

Challenges

One of the biggest concerns of the Information Technology division is containing overhead and operating costs. The high cost of hardware for their UNIX-based infrastructure combined with increasing maintenance costs made aligning with Peñoles’ corporate-wide goal of minimizing expenses difficult, if not impossible.

Data security is also a top priority. 85% of Peñoles’ business comes from a small number of customers, meaning that those transactions involve large sums of money. As the IT team investigated cost-saving alternatives, the security of each transaction and the systems themselves could not be compromised.

Because mining operations are often located in remote areas of the country, traditional data transfer can be unreliable, so Peñoles views maintaining the most current technology as extremely important. As part of this, they maintain 24-month lease arrangements for hardware with both HP and IBM. Any solution Peñoles considers must operate with the latest hardware, emphasize new features, and allow an easy upgrade path.

Solution

Peñoles looked to Intel-based hardware solutions as a way to significantly and quickly cut costs. Because their IT employees had a UNIX background, Linux quickly emerged as the most viable solution. Peñoles ran several performance tests with multiple Linux distributions, but, according to Pedro Luis Sanchez Armas, IT Research Manager for the mining division, none matched the results they achieved with Red Hat. “It simply tested better,” says Sanchez Armas. “We knew after our testing that it would meet our needs of cutting costs while maintaining high levels of security and reliability.”

After six months of testing, Peñoles migrated a DNS server from UNIX to Linux, followed by their security firewall and external email application. Pleased with the results, the IT staff looked at more mission-critical applications as candidates for migration. Portions of Sybase, the database used by Peñoles for a number of different applications, were also migrated to Linux. In fact, Sanchez Armas says, “The UNIX-to-Linux migration was the easiest large-scale migration we have ever done. It was almost transparent.”

We look forward to the cost and performance benefits that further use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will bring to Peñoles and our shareholders.

“The company was originally interested in the cost savings we could achieve,” acknowledges Sanchez Armas. On average, Peñoles recognized a cost savings in excess of 70% per server when they migrated from proprietary UNIX to commodity Intel-based servers with Linux. “But when we started testing, ” Sanchez Armas says, “we found additional impressive performance benefits as well.”

On average, server performance increased by a factor of 4, though certain tasks improved even more. For example, processing time for one of Peñoles’ most processor-intensive reports was reduced from 27 minutes to 7 minutes, a 74% time savings. And with the performance improvements they were getting, Peñoles could anticipate better overall system reliability and more uptime.

Additionally, the Linux environment proved to be more secure because Peñoles could control more of the functionality of their network in-house rather than depend on third party providers. Early on, Sanchez Armas realized that the flexibility of Linux, combined with the fact that the source code was freely available for modifications, would let him run the DNS server outside of the DNL network.

Future

Currently Peñoles’ mining division utilizes Linux for the majority of its infrastructure, which is distributed throughout Mexico. They are now evaluating the further use of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family in multiple instances across the corporation, including Red Hat Desktop. Recent tests have shown that migrating some core applications could result in a cost savings of up to $2.5 million. Additionally they’re evaluating Intel’s Itanium processor and are seeing strong indications that Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Itanium will offer higher performance at a lower cost than UNIX on the same platform.

“Soon, our equipment leases will be up for renewal,” explains Sanchez Armas, “and if current tests are successful, we will begin migrating more of our operations. We look forward to the cost and performance benefits that further use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will bring to Peñoles and our shareholders.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Automotive Manufacturing

Challenge: To reconfigure and consolidate Renault’s UK micro-site hosting requirements

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Consolidated all UK micro-sites on a single platform. Reduced on-going costs. Guaranteed improved customer experience. Enhanced scalability, and increased control.

The challenge: Increased server security

“We realized that we were in fact running a serious risk of losing control of our web-based operations if we failed to reconfigure outdated server technology that did not offer us the security, stability, or future-proofing we required to back-up this mission-critical online interface.” – Ian Collins, Operations Manager, Renault UK

While the Internet is becoming increasingly integral to corporate promotional strategies, a similar increase in technology investment to support those strategies is often lacking. This lack of investment and attention to web infrastructure has meant that many companies have found it hard to maintain the desired levels of control over their web-based activities or to ensure the continuous availability of online information to customers.

As the Internet became part of the car and van manufacturer’s front-line marketing strategy, Renault recognized the need to consolidate its individual UK micro sites to cut costs, use server space more economically, and manage the online presence more efficiently.

“Failure to evaluate the processes surrounding our operating systems and web hosting solutions could ultimately jeopardize the sustainability of our business,” said Ian Collins, Operations Manager, Renault UK. “Our traditional policy of allowing creative agencies to host individual micro sites became increasingly impractical and costly as our reliance on the Internet grew. We realized that we were in fact running a serious risk of losing control of our web-based operations if we failed to reconfigure outdated server technology that did not offer us the security, stability, or future-proofing we required to back-up this mission-critical online interface.”

The solution: Managed web hosting backed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rackspace has given us a true enterprise-class platform offering. Safe in the knowledge that our operating system and IT infrastructure have been optimised, we can now focus all our attention on our core business.

Based on a recommendation from one of its creative agencies, Renault chose a solution from Rackspace Managed Hosting based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Entrusting thousands of its customers’ web servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network, Rackspace Managed Hosting has been able to pass on the benefits of open source technology directly to Renault. Live in just weeks, the solution consolidated Renault’s complex web server configurations and simultaneously allowed full scalability and easy management of the IT infrastructure. Because of the 12-18 month testing and release cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Renault is confident that they have now created the most reliable, future-proofed environment possible for its web presence.

“Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rackspace has given us a true enterprise-class platform offering. Safe in the knowledge that our operating system and IT infrastructure have been optimised, we can now focus all our attention on our core business,” Collins said

In a complete transformation of the operating network, Red Hat’s open source technology provides Renault with a fail-safe mechanism to run its web operations, guaranteeing continual network availability of online information to customers.

Growth and support

“Besides the technical improvement to our operations, we also benefit from a bundled support system that gives us increased peace of mind above and beyond the enhancements within the IT infrastructure. Although the likelihood of problems with our web-based activity has been much reduced as a result of this solution, we know that professional, around-the-clock support is at hand should we require it.”

Renault’s fully integrated enterprise software solution is backed by world-class support. Being the first managed hosting provider to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux and having one of the largest installed bases of Red Hat technology in the world, Rackspace is uniquely positioned to provide top-tier assistance, drawing expertise from its sizeable pool of talented Red Hat Certified Engineers.

“Besides the technical improvement to our operations, we also benefit from a bundled support system that gives us increased peace of mind above and beyond the enhancements within the IT infrastructure,” Collins sai. “Although the likelihood of problems with our web-based activity has been much reduced as a result of this solution, we know that professional, around-the-clock support is at hand should we require it.”

Rackspace relies on Red Hat Network to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, ensuring that Renault can be kept up-to-date with the latest security patches and management tools and that the systems it depends on to stay current. The close relationship between Red Hat and Rackspace allows their joint offering to scale further than solutions offered by competitors, giving them the ability to meet Renault’s future business requirements.

Measure of success

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to perform well in any mission-critical deployment, offering value through enhanced manageability of IT infrastructure, open source scalability, improved security, and a high level of dependability. Avoiding the on-going need to fix IT problems, Renault has:

• Reduced the ‘behind-the-scenes cost’ of their web presence
• Lowered long-term IT spend considerably
• Continued to improve the customer experience

The efficiency of Red Hat Enterprise Linux safeguards operations. It allows Renault to keep the cost of running its servers extremely low while keeping service availability extremely high. In turn, this frees up more IT budget for new services and products, helping the company build its customer base for the future.

Industry: Food manufacturing

Geography: Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France

Challenge: To replace an outdated custom-built system with a standard Intel-based IT environment using proprietary software. Providing all functionality required for the highly specialized animal feeds market.

Solution: First European implementation of Oracle® EnterpriseOne on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.
Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
Hardware: HP® DL380 and DL580 multi-way Intel® Xeon-based servers

Benefits: Simplified management of a standards-based solution. Migration to a single integrated ERP system for all European branches. Ended dependency on IT staff.

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

In the European market, the Denkavit Groep is among the largest producers of feeds for animals during the first phase of the rearing period. It has offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France, and exports products to more than forty countries worldwide. Denkavit’s laboratories develop and test innovations that impact the entire animal feed industry. They are also involved in the creation of organizations like the Dutch government-funded Veal Sector Quality Guarantee Foundation.

In 2002, Denkavit took stock of its aging IT systems and processes and determined what functionality was needed. Any new system had to be built around Intel hardware, use standardized, proprietary software, and support web applications. These critical requirements would-in the long term-benefit all European branches and partners.

Increasing support challenges

Denkavit’s 2002 study showed that 90 percent of the company’s IT systems and processes were custom-built solutions, programmed in Rally and Cobol and running on HP Alpha servers. Although the system’s performance was considered adequate in 2002, providing quality support was becoming increasingly difficult.

Frank van den Hout, systems and network administrator at Denkavit Nederland, explains, “Although the application environment as a whole worked fine, it was all held together with some pretty complex links and scripting. As a result, we were becoming overly dependent on the small number of people we could find who actually had the skills and the training to keep things running-skills that were simply not available in the Dutch job market.” The difficulty finding skilled staff was one of the main drivers behind Denkavit’s decision to use a standardized, proprietary ERP system. But the company also needed a system with more flexibility to deal with regulatory and legislative changes. Van den Hout explains, “If there were changes to the tax regime, for example, the old system simply didn’t enable us to react quickly enough for the business. With no standard modules available, we had to program everything ourselves.”

Choosing the right platform

The first step of the selection process for the new system was to outline the functional specifications. The team knew it wanted a standard, proprietary ERP application, but also wanted to customize the solution. “We had to be able to ‘turn the dials’ ourselves,” says Van den Hout. “It was really important that we could make changes to the system that would allow to us build a competitive edge-as a company, we work very hard to maintain our leadership position in this sector.” After a number of corporate presentations and an intensive evaluation session, Denkavit opted for Oracle’s new EnterpriseOne ERP suite. The decision was made largely because the suite could be heavily customized. Having chosen the product suite, the Denkavit team then had to choose a standard platform on which to run all of its systems-a question which proved far more difficult than expected. Initially the options were limited to IBM® AS/400, UNIX®, and Microsoft® solutions.

Choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel provided our organization with the flexibility to make significant modifications at the OS level. It gives us full control over aspects like processor priority and performance.

At first, Linux was out of the question. Van den Hout admits, “Our calculations were based on an IBM AS/400 environment in combination with DB2, an HP solution based on HP-UX and a UDB-database, and a complete Microsoft Windows Enterprise Server-based environment.” None of these solutions provided the right combination of manageability and cost. Denkavit decided to include a fourth alternative based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“The proposals we received for UNIX and Windows environments were just not right for us in terms of functionality and cost,” says Van den Hout. “The UNIX solution would have given us a lot of flexibility, but was too costly. The Windows solution did not give us the performance or flexibility we were looking for, but was less expensive. But to be honest, cost was not the be-all and end-all for us-we had to have the right price/performance ratio.”

The right solution was a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, a UDB database, and Oracle EnterpriseOne, running on four multiway Intel Xeon-powered HP Servers-three HP DL380 servers and one DL580 server. “Choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel provided our organization with the flexibility to make significant modifications at the OS level. It gives us full control over aspects like processor priority and performance. Red Hat’s OS conveniently splits out processes, while also optimising compute time for some of our more ‘exotic’ processes, greatly enhancing performance.”

Smooth migration

Migrating all of the company’s systems from an ASCII-based environment to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution with a full web interface constituted a major transition for Denkavit. The company opted for a phased roll-out. The fifteen-user Denkavit Ingredients division had the honor of being the first unit migrated to the Red Hat environment. Van den Hout explains, “This was a complete rebuild of our systems, and to make matters more complex, it was the first ever roll-out of Oracle EnterpriseOne on Red Hat Enterprise Linux worldwide. We wanted to take things cautiously and start small.”

The migration to the Red Hat environment went very smoothly-better than we had expected.

The caution turned out to be unnecessary. Initially a one-month trial period was planned, but after a week the results were so positive that Denkavit decided to migrate the entire business to the new system. “The migration to the Red Hat environment went very smoothly-better than we had expected,” says Van den Hout. “We outsourced a number of aspects, but the combination of our in-house UNIX expertise (we use SCO UNIX for the processes at our factory) and Red Hat’s ease-of-use made for a quick and easy migration.”

The next phase of the project will include rolling out the new system to the remainder of the Dutch organization, then moving on to the German, Italian, and French offices in early 2007. The Dutch migration will be completed in October 2006.

“This phase will also include the migration of some of our most important data and custom-built applications-applications which enable us to track and trace the raw materials used in our feeds,” said Van den Hout. “These days, we have to be absolutely meticulous in our record-keeping. We have to be able to demonstrate exactly where our materials originate , how they have been transported, and where they have been stored. Fortunately, our tests to date have shown that our Red Hat environment gives us incredible platform stability. We’re confident there won’t be any major issues.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux reduces support overhead

Denkavit’s primary objective was to build a standardized, easy-to-manage system that maintained all current functionality, safeguarded the continuity of all processes, and ensured a flexible future-proof IT environment. The company’s calculations also show that its Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution will-overall-be less expensive by a factor of four than some of the other solutions that were under consideration. “Thanks to our existing know-how in the UNIX world, we haven’t had to do much training to get ourselves up to speed in the Linux environment,” remarks Van den Hout.

Red Hat provides rock-solid stability, lower costs, and enhanced ease-of-use for our most business-critical systems.

The real benefits of the standardized ERP solution and Intel-based Red Hat platform will finally be seen when the international offices are brought online in 2007. In preparation for the roll-out, the Denkavit team is finalizing architectural details that will provide 100% redundancy and ensure continuous availability of the system.

“This project looks set to deliver the standardization we want, and will also better align the business processes of our sister offices. In addition, we will gain IT-support efficiencies across the business, saving on labor and travel costs,” said Van den Hou.

The future

Denkavit’s goal is to have a completely web-based system that links its business processes to those of its many suppliers, customers, and partners. Once the system is complete, the company expects an extremely high volume of transactions, making Red Hat Enterprise Linux critical to the future of the business.

Red Hat provides rock-solid stability, lower costs, and enhanced ease-of-use for our most business-critical systems,” said Van den Hout. “It also puts us right on the bleeding edge of technology-we’re skipping a whole generation of IT developments and migrating directly from an ASCII environment to an open, web-enabled infrastructure.”

Hikal powers mission critical ERP project with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Manufacturing

Challenges: Use technology to reduce manufacturing costs. Integrate ERP with legacy infrastructure. Eliminate server compromises. Seamlessly migrate key legacy components to the latest platform

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle E business suite & Red Hat Cluster Suite

Benefits: ERP project completed in a record time of under six months. Complete freedom to add multiple applications to infrastructure. Enterprise Linux & Red Hat Cluster Suite deliver continuous uptime with zero maintenance issues.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

Introduction

A technology driven company, Hikal began its operations in 1988 and established itself as a dependable partner for high quality fine chemicals, safety and environmental protection.

Hikal is involved in custom synthesis and manufacturing of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), intermediates and crop protection products. It operates state-of-art manufacturing facilities in Maharashtra and Gujarat and an R&D center and API manufacturing facility in Bangalore. The plants are ISO 9000-2000, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certified.

In 2004, Hikal made its international presence by acquiring a majority stake in Marsing, a Denmark based API marketing and distribution company. Hikal is also building a new Contract Research facility in India, which will be operational by the end of 2006.

Challenges

In the pharmaceuticals industry, solution providers need to maintain extensive control over their production processes, store functions and quality metrics, all of which involve harvesting large pools of data. As a public limited company (Hikal’s shares are publicly traded on Bombay and National Stock Exchanges), the company’s responsibility towards investors made adherence to regulatory standards all the more pertinent.

Hikal needed to manage its data effectively and minimize defects in production. The broad objectives prescribed by Hikal’s management was to use technology to reduce inventory, improve customer delivery performance and reduce process cycles, while simultaneously bringing down manufacturing costs. Hikal also expected to better cost of compliance and resource utilization through standardized processes, and improve customer service with better controls. A company-wide ERP project, which could deliver complete automation to Hikal’s plants and processes was initiated.

The choice of the right Operating System (OS) platform to host the ERP was important to ensure continuous availability of the applications. Moreover, the OS platform was expected to provide a high degree of freedom to allow seamless integration with Hikal’s existing infrastructure.

Explains Falgun Shukla, Senior GM-IT, Hikal Ltd., “Sturdiness was an important factor in selecting the right platform to power our ERP project. We were looking for an OS that could deliver UNIX-like sturdiness coupled with a strong security framework, which would effectively eliminate any server compromises.” Since Hikal was planning to use the ERP to both monitor and control production, the applications had to be integrated with the company’s legacy control room modules. This is an area where few manufacturers had ventured before, making the project more complex from a long term perspective.

Solution

In June 2004, after an extensive evaluation process for the right OS platform, Hikal decided to take the mission critical plunge with Linux by hosting the Oracle E business suite on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server.

Falgun Shukla, explains, “We did an apples to apples comparison between various platforms and found UNIX to be much stronger than other similar systems. However, its proprietary nature would limit freedom and impose an expensive vendor lock-in. Moreover, UNIX being comparatively less user friendly would have made it very tedious to manage. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the perfect balance as it combined the sturdiness of UNIX with a fair degree of user friendliness. It also had a clear performance & security edge over proprietary systems.”

With six remote locations connecting to a central hub hosting the ERP, security and maintenance of servers were also key considerations in the choice of the OS. Since a massive investment was riding on the project, the performance of the OS was critical from a long term sustainability perspective. “Linux has built-in scalability and security features that protect our servers from being broken into and infected with viruses. Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers ensure high availability of ERP applications across all remote locations,” adds Shukla.

Since the ERP project was initiated at a later stage, Hikal had to plan its automation project keeping in mind the legacy-overhaul involved. Four Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers power the Oracle 11i Apps system, running in a clustered mode through the Red Hat Cluster Suite. Two Enterprise Linux servers have been deployed in a production environment whereas the other two run as UAT Clones. With a fall back mechanism, Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures continuous availability of the Oracle ERP. “We have setup a clustered environment with failsafe redundancy, to ensure that our Linux infrastructure remains unbreakable,” says Shukla. To allow its support staff to adopt Linux skills seamlessly, Hikal also availed of Red Hat’s training courses.

Benefits

With its mission critical backend now completely powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Hikal has experienced the strong value delivered by Open Source software. In a record time of six months after the project was initiated, Hikal had a full-fledged live ERP powerhouse well under their control, with all legacy systems integrated seamlessly to Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers running at the backend.

“The choice that an open standards platform like Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides is very beneficial from a long term perspective. For example, with Enterprise Linux, we now have complete freedom to add multiple applications to our infrastructure. We also have the flexibility to integrate our instrumentation OS (UNIX-based) to our ERP servers,” explains Shukla. Approximately 100 concurrent users access the ERP from locations across the country, and as Shukla describes, “The Enterprise Linux servers have delivered continuous uptime with zero maintenance issues. For us, adapting to the Enterprise Linux technology has been as easy as plug and play.”

Future Roadmap

Although Hikal’s critical ERP project has successfully gone into production mode, the organization is now looking at extending technology to other areas of its operations as well. “We are seriously analyzing the potential of integrating and combining our business applications with a number of our subsidiaries. This will help us automate and streamline processes on a national and global level,” says Sameer Hiremath, Executive Director, Hikal Ltd. Keeping growing business strategies in mind, Hikal is confident that Linux will be able to scale proportionately. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux in particular offers excellent scalability for horizontal as well as vertical growth, as it is backed by professional services and consulting that match the needs of growing enterprises like ours,” explains Shukla.

Conclusion

Hikal’s mission critical automation project running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a testimony to the robustness, performance, scalability and security of the Linux operating system. Red Hat’s commitment towards providing a single point of support for enterprise deployments coupled with the high reliability factor of Linux has given Hikal the required confidence to bank its entire business on the Open Source platform.

Industry: Manufacturing

Challenge: Converting a closely interwoven and complex distribution model into a unified solution to automate the sales &
distribution backbone.

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.5.9

Benefits: Simplified management and complete freedom to scale up using low cost commodity hardware. Significant TCO reduction by saving on unnecessary licensing fees. Installing security patches and conducting routine server hardening checks reduced to a bare minimum.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

Initially apprehensive about Linux, Eveready Industries has now achieved seamless integration of its mission critical ERP, Oracle E-Business Suite 11i with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS version 3. The proven stability and maturity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux coupled with its optimum performance on Oracle solutions, gave Eveready the required confidence to take the Linux plunge.

Along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a one of a kind ‘active-active’ two node cluster implementation enabled by the Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures maximum uptime with zero compromise on hardware resource utilization. Eveready is inching closer towards a completely scalar and bankable powerhouse, running exclusively on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Introduction

Eveready Industries India Ltd. (EIIL) is India’s leading manufacturer of dry cell batteries and flashlights, and the world’s third largest carbon-zinc battery manufacturer. The flagship of Williamson Magor Group, Eveready started its operation in the year 1905. The company holds the distinction of setting up the largest torch manufacturing facility of its kind in South East Asia.

The first dry cell batteries sold by Eveready were imported from USA in a consignment valued at less than Rs 500. Today, Eveready has registered a turnover of Rs 800 crore, establishing a diverse product portfolio ranging from carbon zinc batteries, flashlights and rechargeables, to packet tea – which sell under the ‘Greendale’ brand. The company has established a power brand repertoire for itself, with its unforgettable “Give Me Red” media campaign. Eveready is now exploring ambitious plans of setting up a joint venture in China for manufacturing batteries.

Challenges

An important factor that has contributed to Eveready’s dominance in the market has been its investment in developing a formidable distribution network across the length and breadth of the country. Apart from a traditional urban distribution system comprising of distributors, retail stockiest, wholesalers and retailers, it reaches out to the rural sector through a unique van distribution system. Today, Eveready’s products are available in more than 2 million shops, with the company’s internal distribution system itself catering to 6,00,000 retail outlets through more than 3000 retail stockists and 1000 van operators.

At Eveready, the legacy environment consisted of a sales & distribution module designed on Oracle and Java, developed and implemented by PwC in 1999 at the sales branches. At the plants, a Materials Management System (MATMAN) was implemented based on Sybase & APT, by NIIT in 1992. A Financial & Payroll system was coded by the company’s own internal development team, again on Sybase & APT.

Sybase servers ran on Sun Solaris, while Oracle-Java app servers were hosted on Win2K (earlier powered by Windows NT 4.0). Solaris was deployed on 10 application and database servers, while 14 branch offices and the Head Office internal LAN was configured on 25 Windows 2000 servers.

Understandably, the challenges associated with managing such a closely interwoven and complex distribution model were immense. A unified solution to automate the sales & distribution backbone became absolutely essential. Another cause of concern was the company’s diverse geographical presence, which created the need for establishing a zero time-lag service & support model.

Moreover, the disparate nature of business applications and server environments made administration and maintenance an arduous task.

Arup Choudhury, GM- IT, Eveready Industries Ltd., explains, “Using technology to manage 15 sales branches and 9 manufacturing plants, plus an additional mobile distribution operation in rural sectors, is an extremely formidable task. Our legacy environment was disparate, built on a heterogeneous demand-based architecture. This created a need for establishing a single point of contact.”

Eveready began to analyze the possibility of selecting a robust, scalable architecture that could adapt to virtually any deployment scenario, be it running a highly mission critical ERP solution on an Intel 64-bit platform, or powering mail servers and managing proxy’s.

Dynamic growth created the need for immediate scalability of infrastructure, i.e. technology needed to scale both proportionately and rapidly. As the company’s Solaris servers were running on expensive RISC-based hardware, increasing computing power implied an added strain on annual IT budgets. A system that could support maximum users on inexpensive hardware became the need of the hour.

Eveready began looking for a mature stable platform to host its mission-critical ERP that could deliver enterprise class performance without the high capital expenditure and platform lock-in involved with UNIX-RISC machines.

Solution

Having already experienced the benefits of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the mail-proxy end in 2002, Eveready was convinced that the solution was bankable enough to power its entire mission critical ERP infrastructure.

The company decided to invest in an expensive, but necessary ERP project, which could map the existing framework to a next practices model driven by new ideas being generated within the organization and being implemented to meet the business goals. To further this vision, Eveready chose to implement Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.5.9 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3.

Eveready has managed to setup a ERP powerhouse on basic, low-cost Intel-based servers – i.e. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3.0 powers Oracle 11i on two Dell 4-CPU Xeon MP 2.7 GHz machines with 4 GB RAM each, attached to an EMC shared storage box.

Today, Eveready has one testing & development server that runs Oracle 11i on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3 and two production servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3, which are networked to an external Storage Area Network (SAN) configured in a failover mode.

All services, including database, authentication, infrastructure, forms and web services, have been distributed among the two nodes. With the Red Hat Cluster Suite, these services get transparently transferred to the running node from the failed node with minimal delay, which is typically within a few seconds (Depending upon the number of services active at any given point of time).

Red Hat Cluster Suite provides an automatic failover solution from one node to the other. “We implemented the Red Hat Cluster Suite to ensure redundancy and 100% uptime,” says Choudhury.

At the time of implementation, the Red Hat Engineering team wanted to design an ideal failover setup, which could leverage available hardware resources to the maximum. The teams jointly experimented with an active-active cluster setup, i.e. both servers would remain active simultaneously and host different services. All services are configured to run on Virtual IP, so that if one node fails, corresponding services will come up on the live node on the same IP.

Once the services which required to be failed over and the service related files which need to be migrated in the event of a node failure were identified, the Red Hat Engineering team coded failover scripts to implement an automatic solution.

Today Eveready has built a highly mission critical resource system to automate all functionalities of its day-to-day business on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. The approximate budget allocated for the ERP project was Rs 5.5 crore (including hardware and networking costs). With stakes running high, Eveready wanted to ensure that the ERP initiative would achieve the desired ROI, making Red Hat Enterprise Linux & the Red Hat Cluster Suite an ideal solution to bank upon.

Benefits

For Eveready, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered complete assurance and freedom to both modify and retain components of its existing IT infrastructure. Today at Eveready, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is being used across a wide variety of applications, ranging from powering the company’s mission critical ERP system to running mail servers.

Says Choudhury, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux has greatly simplified management and given us complete freedom to scale up using low cost commodity hardware, with absolutely no compromise in performance or reliability. Migration from our legacy environment was seamless, and all applications have been shifted to Oracle E-business Suite on Enterprise Linux successfully.”

Looking back, Choudhury is glad that he tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Eveready’s tryst with Red Hat Enterprise Linux first began in 2002, when the company installed Sendmail on its mail server, and Squid on its proxy server. With the number of mailboxes/users growing rapidly, the performance of the Sendmail server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux has still remained intact at Eveready. The overall benefits leveraged by Red Hat on the mail server end made Choudhury conclude that Red Hat was the perfect choice for powering Eveready’s mission critical ERP infrastructure.

Switching from a 32-bit installation to 64-bit is as easy as a few mouse clicks on the Red Hat Network, at no additional charge. No expensive software upgrades necessary. Just watch your investments grow with Red Hat!

Choudhury explains, “We have managed to achieve a significant TCO reduction by saving on unnecessary licensing fees that are associated with proprietary Operating Systems. Linux provides a very robust kernel, which is extremely difficult to crack. Installing security patches and conducting routine server hardening checks have reduced to a bare minimum with Red Hat.”

“Besides, we have plans for setting up a resource powerhouse with Dell’s latest server lineup that uses Intel’s 64-bit Nocona processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is truly way ahead of the competition in providing a perfectly scalable roadmap for 64-bit computing, in an era where others like Microsoft haven’t managed to deliver a concrete enterprise-ready solution yet. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has already achieved significant benchmarks on Intel’s 64-bit computing platform, giving us total hardware independence and safeguarding our investments for future upgrades,” he added.

In addition to the superiority of Linux over proprietary operating systems, Eveready found Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be an ideal platform for Oracle deployments. The Oracle installation package consists of an exhaustive list of parameters which can be fine tuned for maximum performance on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “The Red Hat Engineering team worked on fine tuning several kernel and environment variables, which further leveraged performance,” adds Choudhury.

Dispelling the notion that Linux resources are hard to find, EIIL is receiving support from all sides with Red Hat.

“Red Hat has delivered true enterprise class compatibility and support both onsite and remotely. Contrary to the belief that Linux support is difficult to source, we have received a bankable three-point support offering from all sides. Red Hat has established a strong presence in the east, and they provided us with timely implementation, training and support. Additionally, Oracle also offered us end-to-end OS level support, like they do for all customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a part of their Unbreakable Linux program. Even our ERP implementation partner TCS is supporting us on various Linux-related issues, making it collectively a three-pronged base for us to build on. That’s the kind of confidence that helped us take the mission-critical plunge with Linux. It’s almost impossible to go wrong with Red Hat, because there are so many entities backing it up today,” reasons Choudhury.

Future Roadmap

After successfully implementing Enterprise Linux on the server end, Eveready is now closely looking at the possibility of a desktop migration initiative. As Eveready’s ERP applications are browser based, there are no issues as far as compatibility on Enterprise Linux desktops is concerned. Once the Linux interfaces get accepted amongst users, Eveready is looking to frame a planned migration strategy to move to Red Hat Desktops from Windows. Besides saving in licensing fees, Eveready plans to inherit the benefits of Red Hat Desktops – i.e. the security, stability and simplified management.

Also on the agenda is a migration of Windows servers running Active Directory Server (ADS). “Our ADS has been configured on Win2K, running on 25 servers in total – one for each of our 15 sales branches, 9 factories and head office. With the success of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the mission critical front, we are closely evaluating the possibility of migrating our Windows 2000 servers as well,” explained Choudhury.

With strong benefits visible already, Eveready has purchased Linux-based storage servers like the latest Dell-Veritas offerings, to maintain a unified architecture. An extensive ROI calculation phase has already been initiated for the same. Eveready anticipates a recurring benefit in using Enterprise Linux, primarily because of the significant cost savings achieved in administrating the low-maintenance Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3. “Thanks to Enterprise Linux, today i am in a better position to justify the expenses incurred in technology,” concludes Choudhury.

Conclusion

By implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux to power its mission-critical ERP project, Eveready Industries has benefited from its flexibility, robustness, scalability, low TCO and security. The manufacturer has joined the ranks of numerous enterprises that have created a failsafe environment by powering their entire business critical infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux & Red Hat Cluster Suite. With Red Hat’s unique 64-bit strategy, which requires no additional purchase for switching from 32-bit to 64-bit architectures (just a simple upgrade), Eveready, like many other enterprises today has showcased the benefits of planning a long term IT strategy with Red Hat.