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

COMPANY:Allianz Australia Insurance Limited (Allianz)

CATEGORY: Carved Out Costs

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: Australia

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

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

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

HARDWARE: IBM System z10 mainframe, HP ProLiant servers

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

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

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

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

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation (OL&T)

Industry: Transportation: Managed logistics services for the chemicals and process industries

Geography: Headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut with international offices in North America and Europe

Business Challenge: Needed to cost-effectively scale its infrastructure to meet exponential growth in the business

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle Database, Oracle ProC

Hardware: 33 multi-core Intel® Xeon® based IBM xSeries servers

Migration Path: HP-UX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and multicore Intel Xeon processor based servers

Benefits: Ability to add transaction processing and storage capacity quickly and cost-effectively as business continues to expand. Ensures uptime and reliability to customers relying on Odyssey Logistics & Technology to run mission-critical supply chain operations

“Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat. Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”
– Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services, Odyssey Logistics & Technology

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Odyssey Logistics & Technology provides global logistics management services to the chemical industry and other process manufacturers. OL&T delivers a comprehensive portfolio of logistics services to the chemicals and process industries so that clients’ products are delivered safely, reliably and economically, with the advantage of shipment visibility and actionable data across all modes.  

OL&T presents a unique scope of industry knowledge, experience and technology, applied to client supply chain operations in two distinct outsourced logistics contexts: Managed Logistics Services and Third Party Services. The OL&T team of chemical engineers and logisticians brings unparalleled expertise—they are chemical and process industry insiders, intimately familiar with the supply chain complexities and hazardous materials requirements. Its technology backbone, the Odyssey Global Logistics PlatformSM features a net-native transportation management infrastructure that supports highly integrated, flexible and data-rich service offerings.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2005, OL&T ran its business primarily on HP-UX and Windows systems. But that infrastructure simply couldn’t support a business growing as fast as OL&T’s. First, there were cost issues. Adding proprietary RISC/UNIX hardware to handle its rapidly rising transaction volumes was prohibitively expensive. “So we began looking at ways we could handle growth by using standard based servers rather than simply buying more UNIX boxes,” said Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services for OL&T.

Then there was reliability. As OL&T’s customer list grew to include some of the largest and most recognizable names in the chemical industry, it simply couldn’t afford any downtime. “UNIX and Windows are not the friendliest environments to operate,” said Massey. “With the growth we were experiencing, we had a lot of concerns about the stability and scalability of our systems. We needed to make sure we could handle all of the new customers we were implementing.” According to Massey, the impact of downtime would be serious to OL&T’s customers. “We’re integrated right into our customers’ supply chain operations, and have to respond in real time to their needs 24/7,” he said. “We’re mission-critical to them, which means that having a stable infrastructure is mission-critical to us,” he said.

Over the past three years, OL&T has seen an 83% compounded growth rate in transactions through the system. Given the firm’s rapid rate of growth, the ability to scale was critical. OL&T decided it needed to implement a virtualized environment so that it would be able to scale on-demand.

SOLUTION
To address all these challenges, OL&T decided to do a complete infrastructure “refresh” that involved migrating all of its HP-UX and most of its Windows systems over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers. Today, OL&T deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM xSeries servers and virtualized on IBM 3850 M2 servers. It also implemented Red Hat Satellite to manage provisioning and administration of its Red Hat systems. “Through our use of Red Hat Satellite, Odyssey has realized: centralized configuration management and compliance, faster patch deployment and more streamlined server deployment,” said Massey.

On the decision to move to Red Hat over other Linux distributions, Massey said there was hardly any discussion at all. “Red Hat is the market leader, period,” he said. “Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat.”

Though the majority of the company’s mission-critical systems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the deployment is “ongoing,” Massey said. “We started with our Oracle database, and our HP-UX batch processing, and were so pleased with the results that we have continued to progress toward making as much of our infrastructure as possible run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

BENEFITS
The migration went extraordinary smoothly, and was accomplished “virtually painlessly,” said Massey. And, the cost savings were immediate. There were direct savings, as OL&T was able to keep up with its exponential growth by replacing its proprietary RISC/UNIX boxes with virtualized x86 based systems. And because it had deployed Red Hat Satellite, these virtual machines could be provisioned in a matter of just minutes rather than the hours it previously took to get a new server up and running.

Then there were indirect savings due to increased IT worker productivity. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just so much easier to manage than either UNIX or Windows,” said Eric Brown, database administrator. As a result, OL&T can do more with fewer people. “Even with our tremendous growth, we’ve been able to continue to manage our IT operations with a reasonable staffing level,” said Massey. “And given the kickstart and configuration management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite, our workers can add a lot more value to our organization

About the quality of the support OL&T receives from Red Hat, Massey said it’s a moot point. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux just works,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it.” He said he can count on one hand the number of support calls he’s had to make – but stressed that those support calls were promptly and professionally dealt with. “The attention and care that Red Hat provides to its customers is truly enterprise-class,” he said.

As far as the workloads that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is capable of supporting, Massey said that it’s been able to handle everything OL&T has thrown at it. “We’ve migrated our Oracle databases over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Windows and our mission critical batch services for planning and rating from HP-UX over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he said. “In fact, we’ve completely eliminated UNIX from our environment.” OL&T is currently also in process of moving its Java workloads from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Gap Inc. Direct

Industry: Clothing Online Retail

Geography: San Francisco

Business Challenge: Ensuring security and payment card industry compliance while managing system level access across the enterprise

Migration Path: UNIX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Likewise Enterprise

Hardware: 1,500 Intel-based IBM blade servers

Benefits: Savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on reduced administrative and hardware costs associated with compliance and security requirements. Compliance with PCI and SOX requirements through automatic authentication of users across a mixed systems environment.

“The ROI [return on investment] of the Red Hat-Likewise solution is up to several hundred thousand dollars annually once you add all of the hardware and software savings to the reduced costs associated with manually auditing the systems. Likewise Enterprise’s compliance enhancements allowed us to control user access and permissions, thus enabling us to grow our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.”
– Jeff Arcuri, senior manager, IT for GAP Inc. Direct

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Gap, Inc. is a specialty retailing firm that operates more than 3,100 retail and outlet stores within the United States and internationally. Founded in 1969, the Gap sells casual apparel, accessories and personal care products for men, women, and children under the Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Piperlime, and Athleta brands. Through its Gap Inc. Direct line of business, it also offers its products through gap.com, bananarepublic.com, oldnavy.com, piperlime.com, and recently launched athleta.com Web properties. Headquartered in San Francisco, the Gap currently employs more than 150,000 workers around the world, and generated $14.5 billion in revenues in 2008; online sales through Gap Inc. Direct Web sites accounted for approximately seven percent, or $1 billion.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In late 2003 the Gap Inc. Direct needed to revamp its entire end-to-end business technology platform – from the customer-facing front-end system, to the back-end order management application, to the business tools that supported the company’s long-term growth strategy. Previously, the Gap Direct’s e-commerce platform was largely built on Microsoft Windows. The need for new features – as well as concerns about the platform’s ability to scale given the retailer’s ambitious growth plans drove Gap Inc. Direct to evaluate alternative solutions to the Microsoft platform.

“Our growth was very strong and projected to continue for the foreseeable future, and we needed to scale to meet that growth,” said Jeff Arcuri, senior manager, IT for Gap Inc. Direct. “We knew we wouldn’t be able to do that cost-effectively with our existing systems and tools.”

GID’s team performed in-depth testing of three different platforms for the revamped infrastructure: UNIX, Linux, and Windows. The decision turned out to be an easy one. Linux outperformed the other platforms.“We were seeing a lot of momentum in the retail industry toward leveraging open source in general, and Linux in particular,” said Arcuri.

Once Linux was chosen as the operating system, his team put all the different flavors of Linux through testing using five key criteria. “It had to meet our performance objectives; it had to be secure; and it had to be scalable and manageable within a large enterprise-class implementation, and fit within our budget,” he said. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the clear winner.”

Although Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the new standard operating system across the enterprise, Gap Inc. Direct still had systems running UNIX platforms IBM AIX and Sun Solaris, as well as Microsoft Windows. As with all retailers, Gap Inc. Direct needed to perform audits to meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance requirements.

Gap Inc. Direct uses Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) for administrative tools to grant and control end-user permission, but AD by itself doesn’t support Linux or Unix, this resulted in the need for several systems administrators and analysts to analyze all of the logs of hundreds of servers every time an audit needed to be performed – a task that took IT employees away from their day-to-day responsibilities. With the implementation of Likewise Enterprise, GAP Inc. Direct has reduced the time commitment to approx. 40 hours per quarter.

SOLUTION
The Gap Inc. Direct needed an identity management solution that would communicate between Active Directory and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to automate the control of user access and permissions throughout the company.

To automate more of the process and free up systems administrators for more valuable work, as well as make user access permissions in this mixed operating environment simpler, Arcuri deployed an identity management tool from Likewise Software.

Likewise Enterprise, built with Red Hat technologies, enables enterprises to securely authenticate users in mixed operating systems environments that include Linux, UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows systems, with Microsoft Active Directory, and includes world-class migration, group policy, audit, and reporting modules.

The Gap Inc. Direct has set up group profiles for several different kinds of employees, so administrators don’t have to configure profiles individually. Likewise Enterprise also produces reports by user, by date, and by server.

BENEFITS
Today, Gap Inc. Direct is a Red Hat shop and “proud of it,” said Arcuri. “We run the majority of our systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and utilizing Likewise Enterprise has enabled us to control and manage system access for identity management, and has enabled us to increase the number of Red Hat systems,” he said. The support Gap Inc. Direct has received from Red Hat and Likewise to make this run smoothly has been superb, said Arcuri. “Whenever we have a high-impact issue, both Red Hat and Likewise are there for us – through upgrades and patches – even with us pushing the operating system to its absolute limits,” he said.

As far as benefits go, first and foremost, Gap Inc. Direct has realized tremendous cost savings. “The ROI [return on investment] of the Red Hat-Likewise solution is hundreds of thousands of dollars annually once you add the hardware and software savings to the reduced costs of manually auditing our systems. Likewise Enterprise’s compliance enhancements allowed us to expand our use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Arcuri.

The scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also been more than what Arcuri had hoped for. Gap Inc. Direct recently added a new brand of women’s sporting apparel – Athleta – which involved creating another Web site in addition to the existing gap.com, bananarepublic.com, oldnavy.com, and piperlime.com sites. “Building out another brand was easy, because we were able to leverage the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure, plus with Likewise we had all of the access policies and permissions in place,” said Arcuri.

Finally, the reliability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers has been exemplary from the start according to Arcuri. “By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Likewise Enterprise, everything just fell into place,” he said. “Once we achieved compliance and realized just how stable, reliable, and high performing the operating system was, we were free to concentrate on getting the applications themselves developed and out the door. Our need to support five world-class brand names requires a world-class infrastructure, and that’s what Red Hat and Likewise have provided.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Local Government

Geography: The Netherlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [ PDF ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: MedQuist Inc.

Industry: Clinical Documentation Workflow Solutions

Geography: Mount Laurel, New Jersey

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

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: x86 servers

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Sensei, Inc.

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: US

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Discount Tire Company

Industry: Consumer – Automotive Retail

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

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

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

Hardware: 50 Dell x86 servers

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Sherwin-Williams Company

Industry: Paint and Coatings

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To develop and deploy functionally rich Web applications using a standards-based platform supported by a single vendor for both home office and field use

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Migration Path: HP/UX and Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: x86 servers

Benefits: Improve time to market of mission-critical applications. Increase staff productivity and efficiency using JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Higher-quality applications.

“JBoss has been a great fit for solving our primary business and technical challenges. We’ve accelerated the process of getting developers trained and up to speed. We’ve managed to get our arms around a vast set of web technologies by limiting our scope while providing our business users with the applications they need to be successful.”
-Alan Flowers, manager of the Java-Web-Integration Services team at Sherwin-Williams

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1866, The Sherwin-Williams Company is a global leader in the manufacture, development, distribution, and sale of coatings and related products to professional, industrial, commercial, and retail customers around the world. The company manufactures products under well-known brands such as Sherwin-Williams®, Dutch Boy®, Krylon®, Minwax®, Thompson’s® Water Seal®, and many more.

For more than 143 years, Sherwin-Williams has been committed to making and marketing innovative products of superior quality; operating a safe, clean and friendly workplace while observing the highest ethical standards in business conduct.

With global headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio Sherwin-Williams branded products are sold exclusively through a chain of more than 3,300 company-operated stores and facilities, while the company’s other brands are sold through leading mass merchandisers, home centers, independent paint dealers, hardware stores, automotive retailers, and industrial distributors.

The Sherwin-Williams Global Group distributes a wide range of products in more than 30 countries around the world. For more information, visit www.sherwin.com

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
Sherwin-Williams operates in three segments: Paint Stores Group, Consumer Group, and Global Finishes Group. The Consumer Group segment engages in the development, manufacture, and distribution of paints, coatings, and related products to third party customers primarily in the United States and Canada, as well as to the Paint Stores Group.

In 2005, the Consumer Group segment of The Sherwin-Williams Company migrated its web application infrastructure from a combination of HP/UX and Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, primarily for standardization and reliability reasons. Last year, the Consumer Group embarked on an ambitious plan to develop web applications that run in a standard browser in this environment. Among other goals, Sherwin-Williams wanted this standard platform to create a new portfolio of applications to promote operational excellence and green initiatives.

“We hoped to create a desktop-like user experience even though these would be Web applications,” said Alan Flowers, manager of the Java-Web-Integration Services team at Sherwin-Williams. Among other criteria, “we needed something we could support over the long term and sought a trusted relationship with our main vendor,” he said.

Sherwin-Williams was pleased with both the quality of the technology and the “excellent” level of support received from Red Hat for their infrastructure deployment. Flowers didn’t hesitate to evaluate JBoss Enterprise Middleware when it came time to consider a middleware platform.

“We were already satisfied with Red Hat and this contributed to the decision to use JBoss for our middleware needs.”

SOLUTION
After bringing JBoss in-house and putting it through a rigorous due diligence process, Flowers was satisfied he’d found a suitable solution. “Given our existing commitment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our business goals and our desire to be very forward-thinking in our approach to Web applications, JBoss was the logical choice,” he said. Today, Sherwin-Williams is using JBoss Enterprise Middleware, specifically JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, in addition to running its Web IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Especially helpful was the fact that members of the Red Hat team did more than just fulfill the sales order; they provided Sherwin-Williams with strategic planning advice. “Red Hat sent experienced professionals over who had an in-depth knowledge of the JBoss offerings,” said Flowers. “We outlined what we were trying to accomplish, talked about our future plans, and were introduced to JBoss’ integrated development environment. This gave us a great head start. You can get plagued about what to use, what not to use, and what will be around down the road.” By standardizing on the Red Hat product line, “We know our platform, we know it will be supported, and we can get our people up to speed quickly and efficiently,” he said.

Flowers also liked the access he was given to senior Red Hat and JBoss engineers. As part of his due diligence, he attended JBoss World, the JBoss annual user conference, last year, and was “ pleased to meet the actual engineers who created the products I’d be using,” he said. “That kind of direct access is rare among top-tier IT vendors.”

BENEFITS
One of the benefits of adopting JBoss has been a development cycle time savings. “One of our primary goals was to create a swift Web development environment,” said Tracey Richards, manager of Electronic Commerce Services for Sherwin-Williams. “We’ve now begun to reach that goal.”

“We attended training, defined our scope, and documented our standards in preparation for development using JBoss,” said Flowers. Sherwin-Williams has also been able to reduce its overall technology portfolio. Since AJAX is embedded in the JBoss middleware stack and developers don’t have to deal with Java scripting, there is less code to manage and maintain.

Implementing a standards-based platform from one technology provider was a critical driver of Sherwin-Williams’ decision to go with JBoss. “Since we were developing business-critical systems, we wanted a single vendor to support the entire software stack, from top to bottom,” said Richards.

“We feel confident developing Web applications having the applications stack and operating system from the same vendor,” agreed Flowers. “Whether we get our account manager on the phone, or a Linux or JBoss expert, we’re certain that we will be well served.”

“JBoss has been a great fit for solving our primary business and technical challenges,” said Flowers. “We’ve accelerated the process of getting developers trained and up to speed. We’ve managed to get our arms around a vast set of web technologies by limiting our scope while providing our business users with the applications they need to be successful.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Hong Kong

Business Challenge: Rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace website with an efficient financial information portal, and to leverage virtualization technology to reduce hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows and UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux AP with integrated virtualization

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate

Hardware: Intel Xeon based servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits: High-performance, flexible IT infrastructure delivered through the integrated virtualization technology in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 50-70% Reduction in software and hardware costs

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors. We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs.”
-Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Quam Limited serves both institutional and retail investors and provides an array of services supporting participation in capital markets and wealth management. The company’s history goes back to the founding of Quam Limited in 1986 and the listing of Quam Ltd on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1997. Today Quam Ltd is the holding company of a diverse financial services and wealth management group with a major and fast-growing stake in Mainland China through strategic alliances and intermediaries.

The Quam Limited used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with virtualization technology and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, to re-build its website, www.quamnet.com, as a high-performance information portal in three languages and serve several million customers. The new portal is designed to combine the financial services offerings with an online financial information and investment advisory portal, for retail clients and investor relations services for corporate clients.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 1998, Quam built the first financial services website in Hong Kong. However, by the spring of 2007, Quam’s rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace the existing website with an efficient financial information portal that would provide a much stronger link between the firm’s financial services and its hundreds of thousands of members.

Slow access time was becoming a problem with the old website. “In our business, users expect very rapid response time,” said Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited, “and our infrastructure was not able to handle the large user base that we had acquired.”

The financial information portal also has to process direct connections to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for stock announcements on listed companies as well as wire news services, including Xinhua and Infocast Financial news for news of Hong Kong and Asia.

“We have a very large number of active members, many of whom are involved in online trading,” said Choi. “We needed to provide them with market information, including financial news, reports, analysis and real-time stock quotes.” In addition, the financial information portal needed a redesign of its front-end, the Content Management System, and back-end, the Customer Relations Management System, in order to enable Quam to know and serve our members better.

Another problem with the old website was the inflexible infrastructure, which made updating web content a tedious business. “Our financial information has to be altered frequently, so we needed a fast, simple way of updating the site,” said Choi.

When Philip Choi joined Quam in May 2007, he was asked to completely re-build the website. “We were asked to totally revamp and restructure the website, so we basically did everything from scratch,” said Choi.

SOLUTION
The main operating systems used in the existing website were Windows and UNIX. “For the financial services industry, Windows may have some security issues,” said Choi. “UNIX is more costly, in terms of license fees and related hardware. I also had to consider the availability of skilled support labor.”

In his previous experience, Choi had used Red Hat Enterprise Linux successfully, so he decided to measure it against the existing alternatives. “One advantage would be that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can run on powerful and inexpensive servers, with a wide choice of hardware vendors,” said Choi, “So we would not be locked into any proprietary technology.”

Another factor in Quam’s decision was the wide acceptance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the leading platform within the financial services sector. Quamnet has the same demands for performance, availability and security as other major financial institutions, said Choi. “Like other players in the financial services market, we seek alliance with the leading vendors to optimize the performance and security of our operations.”

Today, Red Hat is a very mature OS, and the vendor provides high quality direct support. “I have confidence in the top management of Red Hat in Hong Kong and believe the company is a long-term partner for Quam,” said Choi.

Quam IT Department started the study project on the new financial information portal in May 2007, and the staff talked to several vendors. “We decided to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management, and flexibility,” said Choi.

Red Hat Consulting provided guidance and hands-on support to the Quam IT team, right from the planning stage. “Once our server hardware was installed, Red Hat Consulting certified the platforms as stable and scalable and carried out all the software installation work, providing a guarantee to remedy any platform issues,” said Choi.

Throughout the installation process, Red Hat helped Quam with the sizing and planning of how to configure the resources. “We gave them figures, such as the number of portal visitors and page views per day that we needed to support,” said Choi. “This helped us determine how many servers, how many CPUs and how much memory we needed. We have a requirement of so many transactions per second, and we need to guarantee the response time provided to end-users.”

Quam’s infrastructure includes server farms to support front-end users’ access and back-end service delivery with all Intel Xeon based servers on rack mounted blades. Quam relied on Red Hat for the majority of the sizing work on planning the financial information portal, server utilization, and connections to the database and application layers.

In the Red Hat Linux Advanced Platform, virtualization is more powerful than ever. Features such as distributed lock management, global file system, logical volume management, can now operate over multiple physical systems and guest operating environments.

Quam also uses Red Hat Network Satellite to help the company keep its open source environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and virtual servers. “The beauty is we can reassign memory and CPUs on-the-fly and whatever applications need more resources, we can provide them immediately,” said Choi.

Clustering is one of the elements of virtualization that Quam required. Red Hat Advanced Platform Virtualization Technology allows Quam users to easily move applications and resources between servers.

Powerful middleware: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
The financial information portal build was carried out at high speed, aided substantially by Red Hat Consulting, and was mostly complete in months. “My in-house programmers had to write a number of new applications from scratch, mostly using Java J2EE,” said Choi. “It was then subjected to extensive testing, after which we went live in mid-January 2008.”

To support the large number of applications on their financial information portal, Quam selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which it found to be the best platform for innovative and highly scalable Java applications. Integrated and simplified, it includes powerful open source technologies for building, deploying and hosting enterprise Java applications and services.

A key part of Quam’s use of JBoss Application Platform is Hibernate, a framework that
enables users to express queries in native SQL, an extension called HQL, or with an object-oriented Criteria and Example API. Hibernate provided a ubiquitous object-relational mapping and persistence framework which does not require hand-written SQL or stored procedures and this provides a significant increase in performance and scalability.

Another JBoss technology used was the JBoss cluster, which is a group of nodes comprising JBoss server instances within a server partition. “Individual nodes can be added to or removed from a cluster at any time,” said Choi. “JBoss Clustering provides high availability for J2EE applications running inside of JBoss.”

The use of JBoss middleware enabled Quam to speed up the creation of applications. “Our system is very stable, and that enables our IT team to concentrate on the programming operation,” said Choi.

BENEFITS
Quam has invested in multi-lingual market communications. “Our financial information portal provides both traditional and simplified Chinese language versions, plus English,” said Choi. “Our competitors have traditional Chinese only, some with English. I am proud of the fact that we were able to build a best-in-class information portal with Red Hat within six months, in three languages.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform provides integrated server and storage virtualization technologies. The virtualization provided is easy-to-deploy, simple to manage, flexible. “Red Hat Virtualization has enabled us to reduce the numbers of servers we need,” said Choi, “and that in turn has reduced the space, cooling and power consumption.”

For users, the new information portal provides a much faster response to queries, even at peak times during the stock exchange trading hours. It’s also much easier to update information on the new financial information portal. JBoss provides a programming framework which facilitates changes to business logic using minimum programming effort.

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors,” said Choi. “We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. But we are not locked in to any vendor. The beauty of open source is that it enables freedom of choice.”

Red Hat service team not only supported the financial information portal build, but also provided valuable information on best practices. This was vital in helping Quam to achieve an outstanding time-to-market for the project. “The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs,” said Choi.

The success of the project confirms the value of open source solutions as a long-term strategy. “Overall we made a solid decision in choosing Red Hat as our partner and our customer’s have benefited from our decision to use Red Hat and JBoss technologies,” said Choi.

“Our next project will be a financial information portal specifically for the Mainland China market and we will need to deploy servers on a larger scale,” added Choi. “We are committed to open source software over proprietary software, and we definitely plan to keep using Red Hat in future.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Wall Street Systems

Industry: Financial Services – Software

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: Create new revenue streams by responding to customer demands for treasury and financial management software available as a service 24/7. Cut costs and improve reliability and scalability of internal systems. Ensure market competitiveness by reducing the infrastructure investment required by customers.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, WebSphere, WebLogic, Apache Tomcat, Oracle DB

Hardware: Intel® Xeon® based x86 servers

Migration-Path: Solaris on SPARC Servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization on Intel Xeon based servers

Benefits: Created new revenue opportunities and maintained its industry leadership position; Cut costs and boosted operational efficiencies and system reliability

“Our clients see that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is reliable. They are completely comfortable knowing that they can run their largest, most critical systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and that they’ll get enterprise-class support.”
– Mark Tirschwell, chief technology officer, Wall Street Systems

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
If money is the lifeblood of businesses, Wall Street Systems keeps it circulating. An award-winning provider of functionally rich, integrated, and scalable financial applications, Wall Street Systems helps financial institutions as well as enterprises throughout a variety of other industries improve their workflows and increase control of corporate treasury, bank treasury, central banking, FX trading, and global back office operations. With regional headquarters placed strategically in major financial centers around the globe – including New York, London, and Singapore – Wall Street Systems has a truly global reach, and its name has become synonymous with exemplary customer service and technical innovation. Founded in 1986, the firm employs 500 and serves more than 300 blue chip clients that routinely process millions of transactions and trillions of dollars daily.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Wall Street Systems saw opportunities on two fronts: revenue generation and cost cutting.

First, it saw that by offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions of its best-selling financial applications, it could create new revenue streams and sharpen its ability to compete aggressively against other financial software firms in its increasingly cost-conscious market niche. Secondly, Wall Street Systems was seeking – like most businesses in today’s economic climate – to cut costs itself by streamlining international operations.

Wall Street Systems’ products were first offered for the VMS environment. Over time, the firm migrated them to HP-UX, and then Sun Solaris. But beginning in 2001, customers increasingly began demanding Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions of its applications. “Our clients wanted the ability to replace their SPARC and specialized UNIX boxes with off-the-shelf Intel Xeon servers,” said Mark Tirschwell, chief technology officer of Wall Street Systems. “Businesses could see where the world was going, and the market opportunity for us was clear.”

That market opportunity soon prompted Wall Street Systems to re-examine its own internal Solaris-based infrastructure. Solaris 8 was nearing end of life (EOL) and Wall Street Systems was facing a major upgrade in any case. Then, a relatively small operational issue convinced Tirschwell that it was indeed time to migrate: building a demo of Wall Street Systems software to show to sales prospects. “We had seen the writing on the wall, and were beginning the port of our products from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Tirschwell. “We were able to shrink our software down to a demo form to run on x86 laptops. I was impressed at its efficiency and reliability. I decided to move all our in-house systems over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers.”

SOLUTION
Today, Wall Street Systems offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based versions of all its flagship financial applications. Additionally, it runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform on Intel Xeon based servers internally for all development and quality assurance (QA) activities. And early on, Tirschwell committed to a virtualization strategy based on the integrated virtualization technology included as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. Today, Wall Street Systems runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform on top of more than 250 virtual machines on 70 physical servers.

BENEFITS
The benefits of moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform on Intel Xeon servers were immediate and substantial. First, there were the increased revenues from selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions of its software to customers – both new Wall Street Systems clients, and existing users that were migrating their own operations from proprietary RISC/ UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard based Intel Xeon servers.

Cost is the primary driver. “Every single one of our sales prospects today that is on HP-UX or Solaris asks us for two bids – one for their primary environment, and one for Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” Tirschwell said. The cost comparison can be staggering: The capital expenditures required for a Solaris installation – once software licenses and hardware costs are taken into account – can cost upward of $1 million. “This can be compared typically to just $250,000 for a Red Hat Enteprise Linux deployment,” said Tirschwell.

But the cost savings wouldn’t have been enough if Red Hat Enterprise Linux also hadn’t offered rock-solid reliability. “Our applications represent some of the most mission-critical systems our clients have,” said Tirschwell. “They require 99.999 percent uptime. If they go down, they have the potential to lose millions of dollars.” Our clients see that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is reliable. They are completely comfortable knowing that they can run their largest, most critical systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and that they’ll get enterprise-class support.”

Internally, Wall Street Systems has experienced tremendous cost savings as well. “The combination of being able to use off-the-shelf hardware and virtualization has really driven down costs in our data center,” said Tirschwell. “We’ve gone from 15 racks of equipment down to 12, specifically because virtualization allows me to maximize hardware usage.”

Additionally, there are indirect savings due to operational efficiencies. “My administrators love the Red Hat Enteprise Linux interface – it’s intuitive and the tools are easy to use,” he said.

Wall Street Systems has also committed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a critical new venture: moving some of its flagship products over to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The infrastructure for those products is based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers.

“I wouldn’t be in the SaaS business if it weren’t for Red Hat,” he said. “If we’d had to make the capital investment in infrastructure that HP-UX or Solaris would have required, and the margins for achieving profitability with SaaS business just wouldn’t be there.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Consumer Retail: Wellness

Geography: Singapore

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Business Challenge: SK-II Boutique needed a customisable spa management system that enables realtime sharing of data and generates timely reports

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss 4 Java Application Server running mobySPA, a web-based Spa Management System. It was developed based on mobyClinic, a Clinic Management System, used by more than 100 users.

Benefits: Gained a customisable solution that delivers real-time reports and ensures timely commission payment

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BACKGROUND
SK-II Boutique Spa is a collaboration between renowned skincare brand, SK-II and Singapore-based luxury spa specialist Senze Salus. Combining the goodness of SK-II products with excellent spa services, it provides an experience that tantalizes the senses and leaves customers with radiant, crystal clear skin.

The spa pays special attention to customers’ skin concerns and tailor treatment according to their skin care needs. Its team of experienced beauty therapists provides a customised treatment plan, and follow-through with careful monitoring to ensure progressive improvement.

Believing that skin care is a long-term process, the spa’s aim is to help customers develop and preserve crystal clear skin.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As the business grew over the past three years, SK-II Boutique Spa realised that its point-of-sale (POS) system was not able to cope with the complexities that were inherent in spa operations. For example, commission structure and payout are complex because they are multi-dimensional, involving both sales and operational staff, such as the therapist who executes the facial.

Realtime reports with accurate and up-to-date data also needed to be accessible from multiple locations — the corporate headquarters and two outlets — for decision-making and payroll.

The technical challenge was the complexity in requirements, plus the need for multiple location support, including the possibility of cross-border implementation as the spa has plans to expand to other countries.

“We were using a POS system which was based on Windows. It was a closed and inflexible system,” said Calvin Tan, managing director of SK-II Boutique Spa. “What we needed was a highly customisable system that is scalable
and can grow with us.”

While he wanted a customisable solution, Tan was mindful that a technically competent vendor was required to ensure stability of the application despite the customisation.

SOLUTION
SK-II Boutique Spa shortlisted and evaluated a few solutions before deciding on a dual core Intel server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, JBoss 4 Java Application Server, and running mobySPA, a web-based Spa Management system. It was developed based on mobyClinic, a Clinic Management System, used by more than 100 users. The decision was based on the scalability of the solution, the proven track record of Red Hat, and the availability of reliable support.

“We chose Red Hat and its operating system and middleware products because it provides cost-effective solutions
that also deliver on performance, security, and reliability. The application is scalable and allows for expansion of fea-
tures as well as support for our growing business and database,” said Tan.

Customer relationship management (CRM) and short messaging service (SMS) type functions can be added as and
when required. “Although our system will be further customised, we were confident in what we saw, giving us the comfort of a robust and proven platform,” said Tan.

SK-II Boutique Spa was also impressed with the implementation track record across various industries of Philip Tang & Sons (PTS), a Red Hat Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP) Partner.

Availability of support was another key consideration. Tan noted that the skill set availability and technical competency of the vendor in supporting the server operating system and application were important. “This is also why we choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5,” he said.

BENEFITS
PTS took just two months to customise and implement the Red Hat-based solution. SK-II Boutique Spa is pleased with
the results as the system has proven to be stable and reliable, with excellent uptime.

“Our IT platform can now do things which it could not do previously, such as having realtime access to data. Our old POS systems were not networked so data could not be shared. Now, we can view data in realtime and generate
whatever reports we require in a jiffy,” said Tan. “The timeliness of management reports is critical and assists greatly
in decision-making.”

Payroll used to be a challenge for SK-II as it took about a week to collate data to pay staff salary and commission. This process is now quickly and easily completed, and the spa can pay staff more timely and accurately, leading to
better employee relations.

Tan noted that the Red Hat subscription model allowed his company to defer the high initial investments and has allowed the company to convert the cost from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. This has allowed the spa to stage its investments in the entire platform, which was important as it needed time to refine the loyalty programme and software application functionality.

“Our experience with Red Hat and open source has been great. The operating system and application have run smoothly and are very flexible, allowing us to customise according to our needs,” he said.

Franklin Tang, marketing director of PTS, pointed out that the technology partnership with Red Hat under iLIUP has
enabled his company to develop and deliver solutions that are relevant to the market. “Once again, Red Hat has been very supportive and instrumental in ensuring the successful implementation at SK-II Boutique Spa,” said Tang.

Following the successful implementation and proven experience with the Red Hat solution, SK-II Boutique Spa plans
to upgrade the platform to involve more CRM functions to better satisfy its members’ needs.

“We are very satisfied with the reliability and robustness of our Red Hat platform. We have been running our systems without any glitches, unscheduled downtime, nor maintenance requirements,” said Tan.

Fast Facts

Industry: Food and beverage

Geography: Singapore

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Business Challenge: Develop a reliable system to run its customer loyalty programme

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss 4 Java Application Server running mobyLoyalty, a loyalty application developed in Java

Benefits: Achieved a reliable loyalty programme offering rewards points to customers

BACKGROUND
The Coffee Connoisseur (TCC), a leading purveyor of gourmet coffees in Singapore, offers an extensive range of exclusive top-quality coffees, brewed to perfection using a variety of methods including syphon, ice coffee dripper, and espresso techniques.

Customers at TCC enjoy a cosy, welcoming ambience where they can fully appreciate the pleasure of savouring a truly excellent cup of coffee. Each of the chain’s art boutique cafés features a unique design and ambience to suit the local clientele. Besides coffee, it also serves a comprehensive menu of delicious starters, main courses, and desserts.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The food and beverage industry is highly competitive and a key to success is not only attracting but retaining customers. Having established a brand name in Singapore, TCC wanted to develop a strong customer retention strategy centered on its brand and quality of products and services.

This involved the rolling out of a customer loyalty programme that offers members discounts off total bill, special deals, and exclusive offers to arts events and performances.

“The technical challenge was the implementation time frame,” said Henry Tan, marketing communications manager of TCC. “We had a very tight deadline to come up with a system to support this programme.”

SOLUTION
TCC evaluated several vendors based on the loyalty application. Following extensive assessment, it decided on mobyLoyalty, a customer loyalty application developed in Java, running on servers based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss 4 Java Application Server. The solution was recommended by Philip Tang & Sons (PTS), a Red Hat Business Partner.

The coffee chain based its decision on the proven track record of Red Hat, scalability of the solution, and availability of reliable support.

“We found PTS to have an extensive track record of implementations for various industries, as well as good clientele base. The mobyLoyalty application which was developed and deployed in a telco scenario. Which gave us the comfort of knowing that it is a robust and proven platform,” said Tan.

TCC also wanted a solution that is scalable, allows for expandability of features, and can support its growing business and database.

The mobyLoyalty system deployed by TCC has already gone through enhancements over the past two years. It is also capable of having customer relationship management (CRM) and short messaging service (SMS) functions, should the business require it.

Availability of support was another key consideration. “The skill set availability and technical competency of the vendor in supporting the server operating system as well as application was important. That is also the reason why we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux — both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss are cost-effective solutions that simultaneously deliver reliability, high performance, and offer scalability,” said Tan.

PTS deployed the entire platform and application on an Intel server within two months of the award of the contract. This included all the customisation on the back-end as well as integration to the point-of-sale (POS) terminals to accumulate and redeem points seamlessly. Training for all retail staff was done within this timeframe.

BENEFITS
Thanks to the solution, TCC was able to launch its loyalty programme and attract almost 50,000 members in just three years.

“The scalability of the Red Hat-based solution has enabled us to support this rapid membership growth and the expansion of our chain to 30 outlets. We need not upgrade the platform at all,” said Tan.

The customer loyalty system has run smoothly – with only one scheduled maintenance during closing hours – since its deployment. “This is excellent considering that it is supporting our chain of 30 outlets every day of the year. We are delighted with the reliability of our Red Hat solution,” he said.

Tan is also impressed with the Red Hat subscription model, which allows the coffee chain to defer the high initial investments and converts the costs from capital to operational expenditure. “This allows us to stage our investments in the entire platform, which is important as we needed time to refine the loyalty program and software application functionality,” he added.

According to Franklin Tang, marketing director of PTS, Red Hat has helped to ensure the successful deployment of the solution at TCC.

“Red Hat has been extremely supportive and is an excellent global corporation partner under the Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP). It is very committed to the programme and in supporting small and medium enterprises. We have benefited much from its reliable support,” said Tang.

Going forward, TCC plans to upgrade the platform to involve more CRM functions to better satisfy its members.

“We are very satisfied with the reliability and robustness of our Red Hat platform. We have been running our systems for over three years without hitches, with excellent uptime and with few maintenance requirements,” said Tan. “We are happy with PTS’ recommendation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss as the platform has been very stable.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Real Estate

Geography: Germany

Business Challenge: Dramatically reduce energy use and operating costs while improving overall performance and manageability of servers and maintaining zero downtime

Migration Path: 32-bit Windows server environment to 64-bit server environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in virtualization technology

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat Global Support Services

Hardware: HP Blade Systems

Benefits: Reduced energy usage by 25 percent and hardware cost per server by 60 percent, carved out operations costs by 10 percent with streamlined systems management, achieved full return on investment for the project within three months, and maintains consistent zero downtime

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BACKGROUND
ImmobilienScout24.de is one of the most successful real estate listing companies in Europe. Servicing primarily German-speaking countries, the site has more than three million visitors each month and serves more than 800 million pages. Headquartered in Berlin, the company currently has approximately 400 employees and serves more than 95,000 realtors – its paying customers.

Since its website is the core of its business, uptime and performance are crucial factors for meeting customer expectations. To meet these demands, ImmobilienScout24 had previously migrated from a 32-bit Windows server environment to a more sophisticated 64-bit server environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and added a second fully redundant active-active data center in Hamburg to support its existing datacenter in Berlin. Each location had approximately 100 physical servers running a variety of applications including Oracle, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, and LAMP-based subsystems as well as PHP and Perl for front-end applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
With many servers scheduled for end-of-life in 2008, ImmobilienScout24 planned a major virtualization initiative with the goal of speeding provisioning time and lowering overall operating costs per server instance.

However, early in the year, ImmobilienScout24’s Tier-1 datacenter provider came to the company with dramatic news—the vendor could not provide any more power, at any cost, to ImmobilienScout24’s servers. Energy prices were rising quickly and the provider had been given new limitations on its electricity supply to certain locations.

Considering the company’s growth rate, ImmobilienScout24 knew that it would begin to exceed the new power limitation within a few months and had to act quickly. Evaluating other datacenter providers was considered, but the cost and complexity of migrating datacenters was extraordinary and would likely result in some downtime – an unacceptable option.

In reviewing its planned virtualization project, ImmobilienScout24 found that it could reduce power consumption and allow the company to continue its rapid growth into the future. However, this meant completing an eight-month project in just four months.

SOLUTION
Giving the virtualization project priority, the ImmobilienScout24 team quickly got to work planning the migration of 200 old physical servers onto 90 new physical servers with more than 400 logical server instances.

The first challenge was in selecting a virtualization solution. In its test lab in Berlin, ImmobilienScout24 worked closely with their Operations Service provider, Computacenter to begin a series of tests to monitor and measure the performance of a variety of services on both physical and virtual machines. The company measured that services running on VMware typically showed a 20 percent performance degradation compared to services running on the physical server.

When it tested Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform virtualization capabilities, tests showed only a mere three percent difference between virtual and physical machines – an impressive virtualization performance result.

ImmobilienScout24 also considered pricing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes virtualization integrated in the operating system at no additional cost – a benefit few other vendors are able to deliver. It eliminates the need to add an additional, and often expensive, third-party vendor layer to its solution, while delivering leading performance. Combining performance and cost benefits, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform was the solution of choice for ImmobilienScout24.

The second challenge ImmobilienScout24 faced was designing a system that would maximize redundancy and performance for each service. And, while also ensuring that the failure of one service would not affect the rest of the system. Achieving specific utilization levels was less important to ImmobilienScout24 than cutting energy and ensuring redundancy and uptime for the project.

So, ImmobilienScout24 worked closely with Computacenter to deploy Red Hat Cluster Suite, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform at no added cost, to create a comprehensive network design that included failover clusters between different physical machines. It also updated its Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers to support both 32- and 64-bit virtual machines. By carefully designing the clusters and physical and virtual machines, the team created a system that could easily accommodate future growth, while maintaining 100 percent uptime.

To manage its systems, ImmobilienScout24 also utilizes Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, a reliable, easy-to-use systems management solution that provides simple tools to efficiently manage the lifecycle of systems on its network. With RHN Satellite, ImmobilienScout24 was able to streamline its management and reduce costs.

In the conception phase of the project there were sometimes up to ten people contributing to the project, but in the datacenters, the brunt of the project was implemented by a team of four. “Executing this rapidly with a fixed number of people simply would not have been possible with most other vendors,” said Oliver Schindelhauer, project leader. “Administrative tasks including imaging, server provisioning, and mapping are really fast with Red Hat.” The team started the project in February and was finished by the end of May—on schedule and without any downtime.

BENEFITS
The project was considered an all-around success and resulted in significant savings for ImmobilienScout24. Power consumption was reduced by 25 percent – 21 megawatt hours per month – without affecting performance or uptime. Hardware cost per server was reduced by 60 percent, and the project reduced ImmobilienScout24’s licensing costs by 50 percent with the use of open source software. The project also reduced operations costs by 10 percent through simplified system management.

“Without this solution we would not have been able to continue the growth that our executive team planned for the year,” said Dr. Oliver Zeiler, chief technology officer for ImmobilienScout24. “But now, we have a significantly more agile and cost-efficient datacenter and services infrastructure. In fact, with the cost savings we’ve achieved with Red Hat, this project will have paid for itself in three months.”

FAST FACTS

Company: CSS Corp.

Industry: Information Technology

Geography: Global, headquartered in San Jose, California

Opportunity: To reduce IT costs and increase user productivity by improving the performance and eliminating downtime of Lotus Notes and Domino applications being used throughout the worldwide enterprise.

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite Server, Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino.

Hardware: 64 servers, divided between Dell 2950s, HP DL380s, and IBM X3650s and desktops.

Benefits: Dramatically improved application performance for users, improving their productivity while freeing up IT resources to focus on more strategic issues for the business.

“Because of the difference in performance and reliability running Lotus Notes and Domino on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are going back to our customers who run Notes and Domino applications and convincing them to switch as well. The IBM-Red Hat partnership is a win-win situation for all concerned.”
– S.Pranatharthi Haran Practice Head – IBM Services, CSS Corp.

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BACKGROUND
Founded in 1996, Cybernet-SlashSupport (CSS) Corp. is a leading provider of global technology operations management services. With more than 5,000 employees working in offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, CSS’ mission is to foster a 100 percent satisfied customer base, and is committed to building long-term client partnerships that maximize system quality, availability, and reliability. CSS has two business units: Cybernet Software Systems is a business and technology solutions provider specializing in software design, development, and sustenance services to enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs); SlashSupport provides technical support services to enterprises.

OPPORTUNITY
As a leading global information technology (IT) firm providing software development, support, and consulting services, CSS needed its business and technology professionals to work at top efficiency. Priding itself on eliminating excess expense and operational inefficiencies from client engagements, CSS needed to do the same internally. And as the entire 5,000-employee organization used Lotus Notes and Domino applications running on Microsoft Windows to communicate and collaborate on key business and technical processes, the reliability and performance of those applications was a critical aspect of its ability to succeed.

These applications included critical human resources systems such as the basic employee information database, the travel management system, the performance appraisal system, and the bills tracking system. Also on Lotus Notes and Domino were mission-critical financial systems including budgeting, procurement, and financial concurrence systems. Lotus Notes and Domino were also used for important administrative systems such as the electricity consumption and telephone bills trackers.

All in all, the company was extremely dependent on Lotus Notes and Domino applications. Any downtime of any of these systems directly and severely impacted the day-to-day operations of CSS. “And given the fact that CSS is a global company, it was essential that these systems be available round the clock,” said S.Pranatharthi Haran Practice Head – IBM Services, CSS Corp.

But these important Notes and Domino applications were plagued with performance and reliability problems. First installed in 2001, the Windows servers frequently crashed and needed to be rebooted, making critical applications unavailable to users at times of high business urgency.

Frequently, our Windows machines’ CPU and memory utilization would go up to 100 percent due to our viruses and memory leakages in the system,” said Haran. “When this happen, our internal applications would go down, which had very serious implications for our business.”

Then there were performance issues. The applications often ran slow or froze altogether, making it difficult for CSS’ professionals to get their jobs done.

“Over time, the performance of the systems were getting slower, and the server was hanging more and more often,” said Haran. “It was really impacting our users’ daily activities.”

On the IT side of the house, CSS IT professionals were spending a great deal of their time putting out fires and dealing with tactical systems issues rather than devoting themselves to issues that were more strategic to the business. Patch management was an especially thorny problem: the CSS IT team had to spend eight to nine hours per month installing Windows patches alone – this in addition to other server-related maintenance tasks.

“Every 15 days, Microsoft would release the patches for Windows servers and service packs,” said Haran. “These patches needed to be tested in our lab before being deployed, which consumed a significant number of our personnel hours on a regular basis.”

All this time, CSS was growing into new territories and countries, and it was the responsibility of our IT division to get the new locations, premises, and people up to speed as soon as possible. “That’s IT’s primary agenda. Yet because of these server-related issues, the majority of our IT professionals’ time was spent taking care of problems rather than these other key, more strategic tasks,” said Haran.

SOLUTION
After experiencing numerous crashes and deteriorating performance for more than two years, CSS decided to migrate from Windows to Linux platform. It put three versions of Linux through their paces: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; SUSE Linux from Novell, and Debian, from Ubuntu, paying special attention to patch management, resource utilization, and security concerns with Domino client access.

CSS is also transforming its desktop strategy by moving to the IBM Open Collaboraiton Client powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. This new environment gives CSS a more secure and cost effective Microsoft desktop alternative that provides a pathway to the future.

One of the main reasons that CSS chose to go with Red Hat was the quality of the support. In the past CSS had had experiences with SUSE support, but “the support that Red Hat provides is legendary in the open source industry. We didn’t have to think twice,” said Haran.

BENEFITS
CSS has experienced significant benefits from the migration from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For starters, application performance was dramatically improved – between 30 percent and 40 percent. The reliability of the applications was also boosted considerably – since the migrated 2.5 years ago, CSS hasn’t experienced any server crashes under Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

On the desktop front, switching over to Linux has significantly improved the performance of Lotus Notes and Domino-based applications. A robust operating system on the server side coupled with an improved graphical user interface has significantly lessened the learning curve for users, reducing the need for training and substantially increasing productivity.

Migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux couldn’t have gone more smoothly, said Haran. It only took 30 days for three engineers to migrate application servers with more than 230 applications and databases, and seven days for them to migrate a mail server with more than 2,000 mailboxes.

Users have been most appreciative, as their productivity has shot up under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, the recruitment center application depends on manual data entry by temporary employees. In Windows, employees were able to create and update 30 documents per hour. Under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they were able to process 66 documents per hour.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also allowed CSS to optimize its use of hardware. “Using VMware, we were able to create a number of virtual machines under Red Hat Enterprise Linux – I could consolidate eight different Web server applications onto a single server in a single operating system,” said Haran. “This not only saved us money, but provided for high availability.”

The industry-renowned Red Hat support provided during the migration period was excellent, said Haran. “Once, one of our key applications wasn’t working properly, so we called Red Hat. Their engineers actually provided us with some custom code that solved a very complicated problem we were having,” he said.

From a sheer cost perspective, Red Hat Linux has turned out to be a boon as well. Each Red Hat Enterprise Linux server costs just $1,500 as compared to $2,700 per Windows server.

Most significantly, CSS’ precious IT resources were freed up to focus on more strategic issues. Today, updating the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers with new patches takes just one to two hours a month rather than eight to nine hours per patch required under Windows. And there have been any number of intangible benefits, as well, said Haran.

“In our business, time is money,” he said. “We work on projects on an hourly basis, and have to give our clients accurate estimates of the number of person hours a project will take. Our success is based upon bringing projects in on time and under budget. With Red Hat Linux driving our Lotus Notes and Domino applications, we keep our clients happy while maximizing profitability.”

“Because of the difference in performance and reliability running Lotus Notes and Domino on Red Hat Enterprise, we are going back to our customers who run Notes and Domino applications and convincing them to switch as well,” said Haran. “The IBM-Red Hat partnership is a win-win situation for all concerned.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Utility

Geography: Italy

Opportunity: Combine varied IT systems following the merger of two companies, while modernizing obsolete equipment, reducing costs, and ensuring compatibility with existing solutions

Migration Path: AIX Unix and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Solution:

• Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, SAP systems, Oracle database, Apache, MySQL, Open CMS, customized billing
• Hardware: HP Proliant and Bull servers based on Itanium2, SAN for storage (25TB overall)

Benefits: Increased performance levels, system stability, and continuity, while simplifying usage, reducing overhead, and combining two radically different IT systems

“In addition to providing us with reliable support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux represents a strategic choice for us. By moving to the new platform, performance improved and systems became more stable, thus allowing us to greatly increase productivity.”
– Roberto Ganio Mego, Iride Energia’s system administrator

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BACKGROUND
The IRIDE Group, an important player in the Italian utilities market, was formed at the end of 2006 as a result of the merger of AEM Torino and AMGA Genova. Its aim is to provide services to residents and businesses throughout local urban areas.

The IRIDE Group is composed of the parent company IRIDE S.p.A. and four sector-leader companies. IRIDE ACQUAGAS distributes gas and water. IRIDE ENERGIA produces and distributes electricity and thermal energy for district heating. IRIDE MERCATO sells electricity, gas, and district heating. And, IRIDE SERVIZI provides technological services to municipalities and telecommunication infrastructure management services.
The IRIDE ENERGIA division of The IRIDE Group produces and distributes electricity and thermal energy directly to customers. It’s active in energy planning and consulting, and also carries out additional activities such as engineering, planning, and reliability studies. The company produces electricity and thermal energy through renewable energy sources like hydroelectric plants, or through equavalent sources like cogeneration plants.

OPPORTUNITY
When AEM Torino and AMGA Genova merged to form The IRIDE Group, two radically different information systems had to be seamlessly combined, while keeping performance high and costs low. AEM Torino’s system was based mainly on a combination of Unix and Linux, while AMGA Genova’s system was Microsoft-based. The combined company searched for a cost-effective solution that could provide a consistent, reliable platform that was compatible with its Oracle databases.

SOLUTION
AEM Torino first selected Linux in 2003 when the company saw opportunities to improve its IT infrastructure, previously based on AIX (Unix) mainframes and systems. At the time, there was a need to modernize the company’s equipment, while reducing costs. There was also a desire to follow the evolution of its Oracle technology, which played an important role in the company’s overall IT strategy.

After original tests provided positive results with Linux solutions, Iride Energia decided to implement Linux for its external environments, like its proxy server and application servers. Initially, the company deployed Fedora and experienced ease of use and reliability. Soon, the requirement for ongoing support made it necessary to select a commercially supported product.

The requirement for compatibility with Oracle solutions led the company to Red Hat. Known for its high-quality support services, Red Hat was selected by Iride Energia after tests carried out on alternative products fell short of requirements. During the migration to Red Hat solutions, SAP certification was also added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, delivering increased value to Iride Energia.

“Our experience with Linux is a long-standing one, since we had opted to operate within an open source environment as early as 2003,” said Roberto Ganio Mego, Iride Energia’s system administrator. “We wished to update our IT infrastructure and improve its performance, while ensuring that we received excellent quality of service, such as Red Hat provides.”

The process of migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was very straightforward for Iride Energia. All production hardware was replaced and equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which today is present on all Iride Energia servers, amounting to approximately 35 subscriptions. All company applications also currently operate on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, including Oracle databases, various types of Web services (proxy servers, web servers, etc.), content and document management systems, and application servers. The company billing system, developed in-house using Java technology, is also highly compatible with Linux and complements the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 implementation.

Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Iride Energia has also launched a virtualization program that has resulted in the creation of 150 virtual machines installed on 15 physical hosts.

BENEFITS
The advantages of moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux were immediately evident for Iride Energia. With the ability to successfully combine two different companies with very different IT systems, the entire IT infrastructure immediately benefited from increased stability, resulting in a significant increase in productivity. Simultaneously, cost savings due to the elimination of software licenses allowed for the company’s hardware equipment to be updated, further increasing system performance.

“Following the merger of AEM Torino and AMGA Genova, the Iride Energia IT department was faced with the monumental task of integrating two disparate sets of IT systems and data. By moving all of the systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we have been able to simplify operations, reduce costs, and increase performance, while ensuing compatibility with our Oracle and SAP databases,” said Ganio Mego.

Fast Facts

Industry: Transport

Geography: Australia

Business Challenge: To support Europcar’s focus on customer service by delivering a desktop solution that could affordably meet a range of user requirements

Migration Path: Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop

Solution:

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop, customised TelNet booking application

Benefits: Experienced decreased TCO and increased ROI, performance, flexibility, and ease of management

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop immediately solved our licensing issues and certainly decreased our licensing costs. It also met 100 percent of our users’ needs. In fact, the Red Hat desktop solution has enabled us to adopt a new hardware policy that ensures that we maximise our hardware ROI.”

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BACKGROUND
As one of the world’s leading car rental companies, Europcar has a network of over 2,600 branches across 118 countries, including 110 offices around Australia. It operates a large fleet of quality vehicles and continues to grow as new locations and regional franchises open regularly.

The company relies heavily on its technology infrastructure to power its car-rental reservation systems. Its IT department is divided into three teams, including Help Desk, Infrastructure, and Business Systems. Together, these teams provide internal 24/7 support for Europcar’s server platforms and applications and allows for the expanding functionality of its systems. Europcar is committed to establishing technology systems that deliver high levels of customer service delivered through cost-effective solutions.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Europcar faced the challenge of discovering a cost-effective internal desktop solution that could offer ease of management for its geographically diverse locations and varied users. Previous solutions had caused complications with licensing and second-hand hardware, and deploying technology solutions across more than 110 geographically diverse locations is challenging.

“We were particularly focused on enabling more effective and efficient use of our booking application, an open source TelNet program,” said Scott Allen, CIO at Europcar Asia Pacific. “These branch and call-centre users are incredibly important to the business because they have the customer contact and are the ones managing the fleet and vehicle availability.”

SOLUTION
To address its desktop challenges, Europcar turned to open source solutions. “Europcar’s policy is to always consider open source when investing in new technology because we know it’s the best way to minimise costs and do more with the budgets that we’re allocated every year,” said Allen.

Europcar first trialled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop in its call centre, installing it on a segmented number of PCs with the TelNet-hosted booking application. The Red Hat desktop solution’s interface was well-suited for both the users working with the booking application and for the users still needing access to Microsoft applications.

“We started the trial in our call centre and the feedback was fantastic. We then extended it into our finance department with some fairly high-end users, so that we could road test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop running some of the applications we would need to provide through the Citrix environment. Those results were also extremely positive and we had no hesitations about moving forward,” said Allen.

After the completion of these successful trials with Red Hat solutions, Europcar selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop as part of its strategy to bring in low-cost hardware components and eliminate excessive licensing charges. The Red Hat desktop solution was deployed internally across the entire organization and has allowed Europcar to simplify its end-user experience, reducing the need for re-training as a part of the move away from its previous Windows platform.

“Given that customer service is so important to us, we knew that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop was a reliable selection. Red Hat took an open source product and turned it into an industrial-strength solution that was completely enterprise-ready,” said Allen.

BENEFITS
Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop, Europcar has benefited from flexibility, cost savings, increased ROI, and scalability for its internal desktop deployment.
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop immediately solved our licensing issues and certainly decreased our licensing costs. It also met 100 percent of our users’ needs,” said Allen. “In fact, the Red Hat desktop solution has enabled us to adopt a new hardware policy that ensures that we maximise our hardware ROI.”

Europcar is also pleased with its success in making a mixed environment, running both open source and Microsoft applications, work to meet a range of user requirements. “A percentage of our users still occasionally access Microsoft applications, and even with open source, they are doing it without any constraints. The fact is that today we have a very flexible environment that we can tailor for individual users – and that’s thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop.”

For the future, Europcar faces significant growth opportunities that involve geographical expansion and plans to grow its fanchise network. Already, countries including India and Thailand are being serviced through Europcar’s central booking application running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop. With the company’s growth will come expanded use of Red Hat solutions.

“During our evaluation process for a new solution, we had to ensure that our Red Hat platform could grow with the business. The work we’ve done to date has proven Red Hat has the scalability to support our future plans for growth,” said Allen.

FAST FACTS

Industry:Local government

Geography: Florida

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

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

Software: SAP running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: HP Superdome and HP BL460s and BL860s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.specsavers.co.uk

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

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

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

Category: Innovation in Government
Submitted by: Douglas Babb
Vertical: Government
Geography: Hill Air Force Base, UT
Website: http://www.hill.af.mil

Overview
Selected for use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to greatly reduce or eliminate system crashes, simplify a complicated operating environment and have minimal user disruption.

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

Hill Air Force Base in western Utah is part of the U.S. Air Force. Encompassing nearly 7,000 acres, Hill AFB is Utah’s leading employer with almost 23,000 military and civilian employees. It is estimated that Hill AFB’s national economic impact is more than $2 billion.

Begun in 1939 as Ogden Air Depot, the base was soon named Hill Field after Major Ployer Peter Hill. Hill Field opened in 1940 and was a crucial maintenance and supply base during World War II. Hill Field officially became Hill Air Force base in 1948. In the 1950s, Hill AFB personnel began maintenance support of various jet aircraft and missile systems. That support continue to this day. Despite downsizing by the government in recent years, Hill AFB has continued to grow. The Base Realignment and Closure Commission directed the workload from both San Antonio and Sacrament Air Force Logistics Commands. The Utah Test and Training Range, housed on Hill AFB, is one of only 5 live-fire air force training ranges in the county.

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

Hill AFB’s existing system went down eight times in three months. With about 18,000 users on base, many of whom are doing highly sensitive and deadline-driven work, it can cost up to $1 million per hour when Hill’s systems are down. Before Red Hat, Hill AFB has a very complex Windows and Oracle system that had been built over six years. There were surges in performance, long load time for applications and an unreliable system. According to Doug Babb, the IT systems architect at Hill and project manager for this undertaking, the existing system was providing “unacceptable application performance.”

The technical challenges Hill AFB faced were immense but the problem becomes even greater when considering that Hill had not budgeted for a system refresh, leaving very little money for new software

What was the desired solution?

Hill AFB needed a cheaper, faster, more reliable system that would greatly reduce or eliminate system crashes, simplify a complicated operating environment and have minimal user disruption. The new system needed to add enhanced capacity for an increasing number of applications and users. Being a part of the U.S. Dept. of Defense meant that Hill needed a system that could guarantee security and reliability. Hill’s IT specialists were also looking for a data center solution that would be transparent to the end user community and allow for business continuity.

Financially, Hill needed a system that would provide reduced total cost of ownership, lower capital expenditures both initially and in the long-term, and a reduced time-to-value. The lack of an allotment in the budget for the system overhaul put extra pressure on to find a solution that could solve the technical problems while not putting the IT department in the red.

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

When choosing a vendor for the new system, the IT managers at Hill AFB considered both Windows 64-bit and Linux. Frustrated with their current Windows environment, it became clear to the IT architects that Linux was the preferred solution. Because of security concerns, Hill needed to run security-enhanced Linux that was common-criteria certified. Red Hat Enterprise Linux stood out as the only Linux that was able to meet security concerns.

In addition to having enhanced security, Red Hat’s solutions were much more economical than others. To sustain the existing environment and increase capability, it would have cost Hill a minimum of $5 million per year to use Solaris. Red Hat Enterprise Linux cost $100,000, just two percent of the cost of the old operating system.

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

Hill AFB is currently a little more than one year into their data center restructuring, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their new operating system. To integrate the new environment, Hill’s CIO built a new system from scratch without affecting existing users. Hill’s IT department performed aggression testing, deployed a test environment and had users review the new environment before switching the OS. The 11-step process used the Hill’s IT system architects, along with the technical capabilities of RHEL, allowed Hill to see immediate results and value.

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

The project saved time and money, the two most important resources in any business, particularly the military. RHEL began saving the IT professional at Hill time almost immediately. The system was received on a Friday and was already running on Monday. There have been few, if any, glitches. The costly and frustrating systems failures have been eliminated and Hill’s programs and applications are more reliable. Hill’s data center now runs smoothly and efficiently, leaving personnel to focus on their jobs instead of worrying about their IT structure.

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

The value gained from implementing Red Hat was tremendous. Using RHEL as the new OS, Hill AFB reduced its footprint by 25 percent. The nightly load time for the base’s largest application has been reduced from an average of 12 hours to just 3 hours per night. There is an increase in capacity, reliability and security, allowing end users to work more efficiently. RHEL has eliminated performance surges and identified bottlenecks in the system, providing a more streamlined environment. End users were minimally disrupted by the change in systems but have since noticed a more improved IT environment. The total cost of ownership has been greatly reduced.

Because of Hill AFB’s military status and lack of budget allocation for this project, there was no efficiency gained but an IT crisis was averted. At just two percent of the cost of the old system, RHEL has performed substantially better and has increased system reliability, allowing IT professionals to focus on other areas.

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

The Hill AFB IT environment was a mixed Microsoft-Oracle one prior to the Red Hat deployment. Nearly 18,000 users were affected by the change to Red Hat.

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

All people involved in the Hill AFB Red Hat deployment were Red Hat certified, providing them with the necessary skills and capabilities to implement RHEL with minimal problems. Hill’s IT architects drew from the experiences of others who have used open source by becoming actively involved in the open source community and collaborating with others using open source for similar projects.

Though, because of their extensive training and learning process, they did not use Red Hat support services during deployment, the IT architects at Hill AFB are considering using Red Hat’s training services during the next year to expand their knowledge of Red Hat solutions and open source.

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

Hill AFB IT architect Doug Babb and project manager Mike Jolley have several recommendations for others facing similar challenges. Do not rely on the opinions of others because they may be based on incorrect assumptions. When making a large-scale changes such as this, be inclusive and courteous to all those involved. This includes explaining the reason for the change and anticipating “human factors” when implementing a new system. Make sure the IT department has discussed how to change in increments, manage the overhaul and ensure that end users feel they are getting enhanced value from the new implementation.

Doug and Mike also recommend extensive testing of any new system. “One test is worth a thousand expert opinions,” said Babb. Running tests, analyzing results and incorporating any necessary changes help tremendously with making the deployment efficient and effective. Finally, Doug and Mike note that it is important to keep in mind the effects on IT heating and cooling systems, as many people forget to look at this crucial element.

Industry: Travel

Geography: Australia

Challenge: Microsoft-based infrastructure could not scale to match Wotif.com’s 100% growth rate.

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
Software: Oracle10g Standard Edition, Java 1.5
Hardware: AMD Opteron
Systems Management: Red Hat Network

Benefits: Increased performance upto 500% peak load. Lower TCO. Simplified systems administration

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Wotif.com, founded in 2000, (www.wotif.com) is Australia’s leading last-minute accommodation website and the global specialist in its field. Its easy-to-use booking engine offers travellers accommodations within the next 14 days at competitive rates. Wotif.com’s portfolio includes over 6,000 hotels, motels, serviced apartments, resorts, guesthouses, and bed & breakfasts worldwide.

Wotif.com is headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, with offices in Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Properties listed with Wotif.com can be booked online or through the Customer Service Center, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We’re very satisfied with Red Hat and currently have no plans to change. While Red Hat continues to offer us an open architecture, transparency, strong relationships with tier one vendors and a quick resolution on any issues, we will see them as a strategic partner in our business.

Online travel booking sites have exploded over the past few years. Wotif.com’s website processes nearly 2 million user sessions per month, growing at more than 100% per annum. The site has more than 370,000 subscribers and makes more than 100,000 bookings monthly.

Explosive Growth demands better technology

When Paul Young, Chief Information Officer for Wotif.com, joined the company in 2002 it was essentially a Microsoft shop. Wotif.com was having enormous issues with performance, scalability, and system availability because of 80-100% yearly growth.

“Basically, the existing infrastructure just could not cope with the increasing demand being placed upon it,” explained Young.

Young’s job was to determine which solution would be able to address these critical issues over the next five to seven years.

Searching for vendor support

Young was very familiar with UNIX®, Linux®, and open source technologies, having used them for a long time as a programmer and later as a professional manager.

Young decided that Wotif.com’s overall architecture needed a solution that was scalable, open source, and UNIX-like. Buy-in and support from tier-one vendors like Oracle was also essential. The platform that best met these needs was Red Hat® Enterprise Linux.

I’m able to leverage off the best hardware and best processors available and find a Red Hat kernel that will run on it. With Red Hat I can port across to the hardware platform of my choice and off we go.

“When we were first researching solutions a few years ago, Red Hat stood out because of its partnerships with major vendors like Oracle and IBM. There is not much difference in terms of the operating system with the Linux variants on the market, but even now, I still believe that Red Hat leads the way with industry partnerships. It’s this vendor support that makes Red Hat a comfortable proposition to take to senior management,” said Young.

The Solution = Red Hat + Oracle10g + AMD Opteron

Wotif.com is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS on 64-bit AMD® Opteron® servers. The overall solution also includes Oracle® Database 10g® Standard Edition and Java® 1.5. Development is done using agile programming for rapid production of an application server with Java and J2EE™ on Fedora™ Core 3 machines.

Site architecture is based on open standards and utilizes high quality open source software where applicable. The Wotif.com site can handle all customer, supplier, and administrative requests, as well as integrated requests from third-party reservation systems.

Young appreciates the flexibility that Red Hat gives Wotif.com with its hardware choices. “I’m able to leverage off the best hardware and best processors available and find a Red Hat kernel that will run on it. In a business where hardware is changing rapidly, I don’t want to have to change all my operations, operating systems, processes, and procedures to get the best environment. With Red Hat I can port across to the hardware platform of my choice and off we go.”

Lower cost, Higher performance

Wotif.com has found numerous benefits from its Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration, in areas such as performance, cost, and ease of administration. For example, when running any enterprise application there are a number of jobs that need to happen around the edges, like running reports, processing web logs, and backup tasks. Using the tools available with Red Hat Network these tasks can all be done seamlessly in the Red Hat environment, something that was much more difficult in a Microsoft infrastructure.

Wotif.com has also found its Red Hat environment to be much more cost effective. “I find it astounding that anyone could say that TCO for Microsoft servers is less than Linux-based servers! I have seventeen years experience in this industry and I’ve never seen this to be the case — it’s all marketing hype. I think that there is a new group of more savvy IT professionals coming through, and the marketing and their real-life experience just don’t match up,” said Young.

I’m able to leverage off the best hardware and best processors available and find a Red Hat kernel that will run on it. With Red Hat I can port across to the hardware platform of my choice and off we go.

The core benefit for Wotif.com has been in performance and availability. As a global operation running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Wotif.com cannot tolerate downtime. They must guarantee customers the same experience, regardless offluctuating usage or system load, and especially at peak load.

Under Wotif.com’s current architecture, extensive load testing has found that the site can run at 500% peak load. According to Young, there was no way that would have been possible with the previous infrastructure.

“For us, performance management has a huge focus. One of the primary issues facing online businesses is the fluctuating nature and periodic bursts of traffic. It’s relatively simple to design a site that operates at speed for normal customer loads. However to handle peak periods when traffic can reach levels of 200-300% of normal loads a site requires a sophisticated and complex site architecture. Our continuing rapid growth compounds this issue. We’s relatively simple to design a site that operates at speed for normal customer loads. However to handle peak periods when traffic can reach levels of 200-300% of normal loads a site requires a sophisticated and complex site architecture. Our continuing rapid growth compounds this issue. We’ve invested a lot in ensuring a consistent positive customer experience on our site under varying load conditions and it’s essential that our IT infrastructure is able to back that up. At Wotif we want to ensure that our customers have an excellent experience every time they book accommodation with us,” explained Young.

Committed to excellence

Wotif.com sees Red Hat as part of an overall approach to nimble and flexible operation within the IT market. The business is committed to open standards, non-proprietary open source software and operating systems, and open architectures.

“We’re very satisfied with Red Hat and currently have no plans to change. While Red Hat continues to offer us an open architecture, transparency, strong relationships with tier one vendors, and a quick resolution on any issues, we will see them as a strategic partner in our business,” concluded Young.

Industry: Media

Geography: Germany

Goal: Migrate to Linux from UNIX and Windows NT in order to reduce costs and increase stability and performance

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Software: SAP Applications & SAP Database
Hardware: Dell multiprocessor servers

Benefits: Lower cost. Impressive stability. Central systems management. Professional support.

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With a workforce of over 11,500 and revenue of more than 2.44 billion Euro in fiscal year 2004, Gruner + Jahr is Europe’s largest magazine publishing house. They have achieved this status by creating high quality products, and therefore will accept nothing less than the highest quality from their IT infrastructure.

Like most companies, Gruner + Jahr is faced with the challenge of having to achieve ever greater performance with ever fewer resources. Attracted by the low-cost of Linux, they began experimenting with Linux for web servers in 2000. Now they are operating numerous business-critical applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including e-procurement applications, SAP application servers, and database servers.

Certification of applications used by us as well as professional support are essential prerequisites for operating system platforms in our company. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also offers excellent performance. That’s what made our decision in favor of Red Hat easy.

– Achim Woost, Group Leader

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers benefits over both to UNIX and Windows NT

Prior to the introduction of Linux, Gruner + Jahr’s IT infrastructure was built around UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT. It soon became obvious that a migration to standards-based hardware and Linux would offer decisive benefits. Intel-compatible hardware from Dell and Linux offered a considerably lower price than their UNIX systems, while maintaining impressive performance. Additionally, Linux offered stability and security benefits when compared to Windows NT.

The decision over which Linux vendor would be best for Gruner + Jahr underwent careful consideration and passed through several stages before Red Hat was chosen. One of the main reasons Gruner + Jahr chose Red Hat was the high number of ISVs who had certified their applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Certification of applications used by us, as well as professional support, are essential prerequisites for operating system platforms in our company. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also offers excellent performance. That’s what made our decision in favor of Red Hat easy,” said Achim Woost, Group Leader at Gruner + Jahr.
SAP applications and databases port easily

Woost further explains, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a further advantage–we were able to transfer the scripting and monitoring systems from existing UNIX installations. Red Hat is clearly orientated towards business use.”

Gruner + Jahr first started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP on application servers in 2001. They chose applications servers as the first area of deployment because, even though they are mission-critical, a system failure could be tolerated more easily there than in database servers. However, the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux impressed the IT team at Gruner + Jahr, so they felt confident in porting their mission-critical SAP database servers to Enterprise Linux. More than ten Dell multiprocessor servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS are in use at Gruner + Jahr for SAP applications.

In order to keep their systems as efficient and reliable as possible, Gruner + Jahr makes use of Red Hat Network’s (RHN) Update Module, which is included in every subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHN makes it possible for Gruner + Jahr to maintain individual systems via a simple graphical user interface, prioritised messages, errata information, RPM dependency tests, and automatic updates.

Red Hat, Gruner + Jahr relationship is exactly right

Overall Woost sees his experience with Red Hat as extremely positive and plans to continue expansion of the existing installation. “We are very pleased that Red Hat is working hard on functions which are important for enterprise deployment. We have enough UNIX know-how in our team to basically run and maintain our Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation without a system house partner. If we do have problems, we are protected by our Enterprise Linux subscription, which includes support from Red Hat,” Woost explains. “All the advice we have received from Red Hat up to now has been extremely efficient and supportive, not to mention unbureaucratic. That’s how we like our relationships to our technology suppliers to be.”

City of Bloomington increases performance while trimming budget

Industry: State & Local Government

Challenge: Increase performance despite sharply decreased budget
Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Application: Oracle11i, GenaWare’s GenaMap
Integration provider: Mascon IT

Benefits: Dramatically improved performance. Lowered maintenance and support costs. Delivered project within budget.

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When budgets are slim, many municipalities are forced to compensate with service cutbacks. But the City of Bloomington, Indiana (pop. 70,000) continually looks for a better way. The City’s Information Technology Services Department (ITSD), saw a recent budget shortfall as a big opportunity to achieve two important goals. By migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the City increased performance and flexibility in their most mission-critical systems while chalking up significant savings over their previous Unix-based environment.

Planning for Success

Gregory Volan, Chief Information Officer for the City of Bloomington, holds responsibility for delivering a robust IT environment to meet the growing and diverse computing needs of the City’s departments. In the past, the City’s Oracle applications and many other mission-critical systems ran on a Unix platform. Over time, the costs and performance issues associated with maintaining and supporting their Unix environment became inefficient. So, in their constant quest to improve their service, the City began to investigate the comparative benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Volan explains, “Our Unix systems were slow because our servers were outdated and we could not afford to replace them with new equipment. But it still cost a tremendous amount to maintain and support the older Unix servers. We were sacrificing performance to keep costs down. Linux gave us the opportunity to improve performance significantly without having to increase our budget.”

For several years, Bloomington’s ITSD had been building knowledge and experience with Red Hat Linux. The cost efficiency of open standards-based systems is a tremendous draw for budget-minded City managers, and as Red Hat Linux proved its reliability, confidence in a decision to migrate the entire City to the mission-critical Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform grew. According to Volan, “There was a strong desire for the City to use open source systems, and that was one of the attractions of Linux. The Unix platform was not capable of handling the new environment and was costing the City extensively. We were not sure whether we could afford to incur more costs with the current environment, as growth and scalability became critical issues for us. On the other hand, cost is not the only factor when it comes to our mission-critical applications. The reliability of the Linux platform and Red Hat’s position as an industry leader were both important factors in making the decision to move our mission-critical applications over to Linux.”

Migration Central

Bloomington’s Geographic Information System (GIS) application, GenaWare’s GenaMap, is among the most important of the City’s applications. Certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, GenaMap was a smooth migration task for the ITSD staff, who were already well versed in Linux. Emphasizing the importance of a staff trained on Red Hat products, Volan states, “What mitigated much of the migration risk was that we had a knowledgeable staff. We already had several years of experience supporting Red Hat Linux systems, and we did not have to factor in retraining expenses, which otherwise could have reduced or eliminated the cost benefits of switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “And the savings made it possible to make other needed improvements. “When we switched the GenaMap solution from the old environment to the new IBM servers running Linux, the performance increased by several orders of magnitude. It was dramatic.”

One of the most critical IT applications for the City of Bloomington is its Oracle Financials system. Turning to Mascon IT, a Certified Solution Partner for Oracle E-business Solutions, the City was able to leverage the savings realized in their previous migration to launch their next effort. “We were upgrading to the latest version of Oracle and realized we had performance issues with the equipment,” explains Volan. Mascon’s strong expertise at delivering Oracle upgrade solutions coupled with Red Hat’s reliability and efficiency with running Oracle-based systems gave ITSD the confidence needed to make two major changes to their environment. They were able to upgrade their Oracle Financials application and migrate it to Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the same time. Again, the improvement in performance was remarkable. In one case, an essential report that had previously required more than two hours to run was completing in approximately two minutes in the new environment.

Grace Under Pressure

Recent changes in many states, including Indiana, have decreased the amount of state tax revenue that passes directly to municipalities. For the City of Bloomington, the immediate impact of this change is about $500,000 per year. As the City responds to this revenue shortfall, there continues to be increasing pressure for departments to hold or cut expenses when possible.

Migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has allowed the ITSD to stay within their declining budget while still answering the City’s rising needs for computing power, flexibility, and efficiency. The City of Bloomington’s IT environment has been significantly improved, and Greg Volan could not be more pleased. “We were certain that Red Hat Enterprise Linux–with its performance, reliability, and support options–was the optimal platform for these critical initiatives. We no longer have to pay substantial support and licensing costs for the Unix OS and hardware. We are achieving great performance from our Linux machines. And we were able to meet budget requirements without reducing any of the services we were providing to other departments.”

Bank expects to save $1 million over two years after adopting Linux as its infrastructure platform.

Industry: Banking
Geography: India

Central Bank of India is one of the largest banks in India. Established in 1911, it was the first Indian commercial bank to be wholly owned and managed by Indians. Sir Sorabji Pochkhanawala, founder of the Bank proudly declared on its establishment that Central Bank was the ‘property of the nation and the country’s asset.’ The bank’s customer base of 25 million is among the largest in the industry and it has 3115 branches spread across the vast geography of India. Progressive management and far-sighted leadership have ensured that the bank has maintained its status as an asset for the country.

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Challenges

CBI’s Total Branch Automation (TBA) applications were running on a diverse mix of platforms. The bank had around 13 different TBA software vendors with each vendor’s software optimized for a different platform. The banking network was therefore a mix of Windows, Sun Solaris, Novell Netware. Also, multiple solutions from various vendors meant a lot of effort on training the staff and frequent job transfers added to the challenge of training the employees.

With 3115 branches and 286 extension counters across India, scaling up its heterogeneous network was a major challenge for the bank. Changes in banking regulations also mandated that banks had to achieve total computerization by December 2004. In the year 2000, CBI therefore decided to look at revamping its computing infrastructure.

For CBI, scalability, ease of support and maintenance was a key requirement in selecting the operating system platform. The bank has a far-flung network that reaches remote parts of India; one of the bank’s branches is located 12,000 feet above sea level. In case of a system failure, getting support to these locations would be difficult. Therefore, CBI wanted a system that was robust, relatively immune to viruses and could be supported and maintained easily even in remote locations. This would allow the bank to minimize downtime and deliver a consistently high level of customer service throughout its network.
Being a bank, reliability and security were both high on the priority list. On the LAN based solution that the bank was using earlier, reliability was a problem. Virus attacks would bring the whole network down and CBI did not have the expertise to resolve these problems at the grassroots level. Network downtime, system crashes etc were problem areas because they brought business to a standstill and adversely affected customer satisfaction.

Solution

Though Linux was relatively new as an enterprise operating system in 2000, the momentum behind the platform convinced CBI that it should go with Linux. The support provided by Red Hat and by IT giants like IBM and Oracle added to the crucial peace-of-mind factor and made the choice easier.

The bank narrowed down its list of TBA vendors to two. Also, these vendors were willing to port their applications to Linux. TBA applications on the Cobol/Btrieve/Novell Netware platform were migrated to the more robust Red Hat and Oracle combination.

CBI’s pilot tests of the Red Hat and Oracle combination went off so smoothly that its employees were not even aware of the migration from the legacy Cobol/Btrieve/Novell Netware environment.

“That was a turning point and we decided to carry the migration to Red Hat Linux forward. Normally, there is resistance to change but in this case, people were not even aware anything had changed. The migration to Red Hat Linux has been so successful that we have now rolled it out over 1,115 branches,” says Raghuraman.

Most of CBI’s 25 million customers are now served by the bank’s implementation of Linux that supports critical banking processes including inter-branch reconciliation, accounts and balance sheet dealing, credit disbursement, telebanking and cheque collection.

Benefits

K Raghuraman, GM, IT, Central Bank of India, estimates that by standardizing on Red Hat in the branches across the Bank, CBI will generate savings of about $1 million over a two year period by way of License fees, Training and Maintenance cost.

Many of the bank’s branches are being computerized for the first time and therefore ease-of-maintenance is extremely important. The bank found that Linux fits the bill because its stability eliminates the need for heavy-duty support. The bank cannot afford to have its computers crash or hang especially when customers transactions are being executed.

“In a nutshell, the advantage of using Red Hat is that it is hassle free. In the cities, maintenance and support is not such a challenge because you can always find people to rush to the location and resolve the problem; you can’t do that in a remote branch that’s 12,000 feet above sea level. We have proved to the world that Linux works in a decentralized and geographically dispersed network like ours.

“Red Hat’s OS requires very little maintenance and that’s a boon for a bank like ours that has many far-flung locations. The system runs smoothly; it does not have the virus issues that plague other platforms and we haven’t had problems with scalability or corruption of data. Our Linux systems have been trouble-free since we started deployment,” says Raghuraman. By using a more robust and secure system that’s less prone to virus attacks and system crashes, the bank has increased customer satisfaction levels at the branches.

Raghuraman feels that, in today’s competitive world, Linux helps CIOs by helping them cut costs without compromising on security and sustainability.

“When we started deploying Linux, other banks asked us, “Are you sure you want to go with Linux? However, the fact that companies like IBM, Oracle and Red Hat were supporting Linux was a comfort to us. There is a lot of funds flowing into this area, support is easily available, there is plenty of research happening on Linux and its long-term sustainability is not in doubt. The choice was therefore very clear,” says Raghuraman.

At CBI, typically, the Linux-based systems are rebooted only once a year ensuring trouble-free maintenance for the bank. The bank has initiated an internal training effort program that covers 400 employees with some level of computer literacy. These staff members will be posted in key locations across the country to manage the IT infrastructure. Raghuraman feels that in today’s competitive environment, companies have to keep a tight leash on costs and Linux has helped the bank in this regard.

Conclusion

CBI has been a pioneer in the usage of IT and recently moved its entire computing infrastructure to Red Hat. CBI has executed successfully on a formidable challenge. By migrating to a completely new operating system, database and TBA application across 1,115 branches, the bank has conclusively proved that Linux is ready for enterprise desktops and servers even in a decentralized environment. In fact, CBI has made it mandatory that going forward all its applications should be on the Linux platform. The bank now plans to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux across all the remaining branches too. The bank also plans to deploy Linux across 23 Regional Rural Banks that it controls. These banks consist of 1,770 branches and over 5,000 computers. The cost savings expected through the deployment of Linux is therefore substantial.

Beyond cost savings, the bank also aims to empower its people through technology. “We want to deploy this technology even in remote branches and free our people from repetitive tasks so that they can focus on customer service and other activities that help grow the bank,” says Raghuraman.

For CBI, its bold bet on Linux has paid off handsomely and the bank’s IT infrastructure has become a role model for banks and enterprises to emulate.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux to power mission critical banking services on approximately 1,000 servers and 10,000 desktops. Largest deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the Indian BFSI segment till date

Industry: Banking

Geography: India

Challenges: Automate more than 1000 branches across the country. Modernize branch automation. Retain existing hardware. Seamlessly migrate a custom designed TBA package to the latest platform.

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Application: Integrated Branch Banking Software (IBBS)

Benefits: Improvement in system performance by more than 8 times. Significant TCO reduction by eliminating the need for purchasing new hardware and software licenses

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

Introduction

Founded in 1906, Canara Bank is one of the premier banks in India, with a network of 2508 branches across the country. The bank was the first to launch networked ATMs in India and obtain an ISO Certification. Canara Bank has also achieved the distinction of being the country’s highest net profit earner among nationalized banks for the year March 2005.

The bank has already carved a niche in providing IT-based services such as Networked ATMs, Anywhere Banking, Telebanking, Remote Access Terminals, Internet & Mobile Banking, Debit Cards, etc. Canara Bank has a vision to help improve the economic condition of the common people of India by inculcating the habit of savings in rural areas.

Challenges

Canara Bank achieved 100% computerization very early in the course of its operational history. It deployed a number of bank automation tools such as a customized Total Branch Automation (TBA) package called Integrated Branch Banking Software (IBBS), which was developed by its subsidiary, CanBank Computer Services Ltd. (CCSL). IBBS was deployed on Novell NetWare at close to 1400 medium sized branches across the country.

Canara Bank follows a detailed tendering process for new hardware purchases, in which contracts are awarded on the basis of bids. After nearly a decade of deploying IBBS, the bank had purchased different types of hardware from multiple vendors. As a result, standardization on Novell NetWare became difficult, and supporting the legacy IBBS application became a challenging task.

Moreover, IBBS was developed using Microfocus COBOL and designed to run in a 16-bit DOS environment. With poor support for the TCP/IP protocol stack, the NetWare servers running IBBS could not be integrated into the corporate network easily. Essentially, the NetWare servers functioned as branch file servers, without any data connectivity. Regular maintenance of different versions of IBBS across 1400 branches was a painstaking effort in the absence of network support. Patching, troubleshooting and version upgrades had to be conducted onsite. Branches in rural and remote areas were particularly difficult to access and required support personnel to travel frequently. Also, the availability of certified hardware on NetWare was limited, which made adding new machines difficult.

As Canara Bank’s customer base expanded, its banking services began to scale, creating an immediate need for Internet Banking, Anywhere Banking (banking from any CanBank branch across the country) and an expanded ATM network. Novell NetWare’s closed legacy environment did not allow room to accommodate these new technologies. Canara Bank had to purchase additional machines running Microsoft Windows to interface with these new technologies, which was extremely inefficient from a hardware utilization standpoint. New hardware and Microsoft Windows licenses strained budgets and made new technology projects difficult to scale and sustain.

When additional branches were added to the bank’s network, procuring new servers that were certified to run on NetWare was difficult, as IHVs had ceased to provide support for older versions of the OS. Micro Focus had also ceased support for the COBOL version on which the IBBS package had been developed. A combination of all these factors made migration attractive.

Migrating the 1400 odd legacy NetWare servers posed another challenge: Canara Bank wanted to switch platforms but not hardware. Deploying the latest OS available, without going into a hardware refresh cycle that would cost millions of rupees was a challenging task. The bank had amassed about a dozen different types of machines after a decade of deploying IBBS. This heterogeneous mix of hardware that spanned across more than 1,000 servers and 10,000 desktops made the project very complex. Canara Bank began to look for a platform that could deliver the latest innovation along with complete hardware freedom.

Solution

After a detailed evaluation phase, Canara Bank decided to modernize branch automation by re-deploying IBBS on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. The bank selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its platform of choice to replace NetWare servers at more than 1,000 branches across the country, after a successful pilot run. The project marks the largest roll out of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the Indian BFSI vertical so far. The package was ported from NetWare to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform by CCSL.

The architecture of the application deployment was changed to a server-based processing model from the earlier client processing model. In addition to leveraging the improved performance provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the server, this architecture provide several other benefits. For example, performance improvements can be achieved by upgrading only the server and clients need to be replaced only in case of hardware failure. This will result in substantial savings on hardware over the life of the system.

A customized, light version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 was specially developed by the Red Hat Engineering team to suit Canara Bank’s existing desktop hardware infrastructure. SSH connectivity allowed Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers to be easily and securely networked. This connectivity was used for both client access as well as for secure access for remote maintenance.

Upon the completion of the project, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will be deployed on more than 1,000 servers and 10,000 desktops at Canara Bank. Under the first phase of deployment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been rolled out at approximately 500 branches in a record time of three months. Close to 500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and 5000 Red Hat Desktops have been deployed in this phase. As part of its vision to introduce 100% modernization into its banking services environment, Canara Bank is actively pursuing deploying Enterprise Linux in additional branches as well.

Red Hat worked closely with Canara Bank to provide a stable and fine tuned platform for its desktop and servers. Red Hat also provided training and help desk services to Canara Bank for deployment and sustenance of the project over a long term. Reliable support and professional services and consulting were key factors behind Canara Bank’s decision of selecting Red Hat as its vendor of choice.

Benefits

Daily closure of books under the IBBS system running on Novell NetWare used to take over two hours on an average. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3, the closure time was brought down to 15 minutes. Systems became more responsive with Red Hat’s 32-bit operating environment as opposed to the earlier 16-bit DOS technology running under NetWare.

With Enterprise Linux, Canara Bank could eliminate the need for purchasing separate hardware and Windows licenses for deploying ATM listeners.

According to officials at Canara Bank, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled Canara Bank to reduce infrastructure costs significantly. However, the low TCO aspect was just a small part of the overall benefits received. In Enterprise Linux, Canara Bank has found a secure, reliable platform that has delivered flexibility and choice to its infrastructure. This in turn has empowered the bank to provide affordable services to the common man.”

Canara Bank has also opted for dedicated onsite support services from Red Hat, through a 24×7 help desk manned by Red Hat Engineers. The engineers remotely log on to the IBBS servers in branches across the country and troubleshoot problems directly.

Canara Bank officials add, “The bank has been able to roll out the TBA project at a rapid pace due to the collaborative efforts of Red Hat’s Professional Services team.”

Migration is currently underway at a rapid pace and Canara Bank expects to complete the project three months before the projected date.

Future Plan

Moving from the legacy NetWare platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has opened up significant opportunities for Canara Bank. With networking support now available, Canara Bank is planning to deploy Red Hat Network Satellite to send updates for both IBBS as well as the operating system to all distributed machines across the country. Enterprise Linux has also made Remote Management and health monitoring of remote servers possible.

With the tremendous benefits provided by Enterprise Linux, Canara Bank plans to move its Anywhere Banking and Internet Banking listeners to the Enterprise Linux platform. Enterprise Linux has provided Canara Bank with the freedom and choice to develop a scalable growth plan, which was not possible under NetWare’s closed legacy environment.

The power of Linux is not restricted by hardware limitations, as it can run on different kinds of architectures. Canara Bank has managed to save crores of rupees in new hardware acquisition costs, by using a lightweight customized Linux distribution on its existing hardware.

Conclusion

As part of its vision of using technology to provide affordable banking services to the vast rural population of India, Canara Bank has extended the performance and cost benefits of Enterprise Linux to its customers. With a modernized branch infrastructure, Canara Bank hopes to serve customers in a timely and efficient manner, reinforcing its image of being a customer savvy bank.