FAST FACTS

Company: National City Corporation

Industry: Financial services

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Reengineering the datacenter infrastructure with a cost-effective and scalable platform that provided mission-critical reliability and superior performance to accommodate fast-paced business expansion

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle DB

Hardware: 600 Intel Xeon Processor-based x86-based physical and virtual HP ProLiant DL580 servers

Migration Path: From UNIX systems, including Sun Solaris, running on proprietary RISC machines to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon Processor-based HP ProLiant servers

Benefits: Reduced IT operating costs down to two cents per transaction which has the potential to save millions over the life of the systems, provided the ability to scale for business growth, and reegineered datacenter without unscheduled business interruptions

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“In addition to its ability to scale, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has rock-solid reliability and has been extremely stable. Our decision to standardize on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure was key to enabling rapid business growth while maintaining customer service levels.” – Thomas McGinnis, platform engineer, PNC (formerly National City Corporation)

BACKGROUND
Prior to being acquired by PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (www.pnc.com), National City Corporation was the eighth largest financial holding company in the country, with core businesses of commercial and retail banking, mortgage financing and servicing, consumer finance, and asset management. As a part of PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. one of the nation’s largest diversified financial services organizations – which provides retail and business banking; specialized services for corporations and government entities; wealth management; asset management; and global fund services – PNC will become the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits.

The acquisition of National City is expected to place PNC fourth among U.S. banks based upon number of branches, and will give PNC the No. 1 deposit share position in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky and the No. 2 position in Indiana and Maryland.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Due to increasing business demands, rising costs, and an aging database infrastructure, National City had made the strategic decision to reegineer its datacenter infrastructure.

National City decided that reegineering its datacenter by migrating from costly proprietary RISC machines running Sun Solaris and other UNIX distributions to commodity x86 blade machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux would enable future growth. Two things drove this decision: a directive from senior management to cut costs, and the need to scale capacity quickly to accommodate the rapid growth of the business.

“Our processing needs were going up, and we needed to find a way to meet those needs at the lowest possible cost,” said Thomas McGinnis, a platform engineer at what was then National City, in Cleveland. “Clearly, this pointed to the deployment of Linux on commodity hardware as opposed to building an entirely new datacenter.”

SOLUTION
Reegineering National City’s datacenter infrastructure was vital in enabling the continued growth of the bank’s business. The existing datacenter contained costly systems running UNIX, with no opportunity to scale for growth. The datacenter’s new infrastructure runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a combination of physical and virtual HP ProLiant DL580 servers in a production environment.

In evaluating Linux vendors, it became quickly apparent to National City that the choice was between Novell SUSE or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. National City asked its internal developers and administrators for feedback and their response was quick and decisive: Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Their reasons centered upon the richer functionality and performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided, as well as their familiarity with that particular Linux distribution,” said McGinnis. “For our users, Linux was synonymous with Red Hat, and we were also impressed that we would get superior performance, reliability, and stability at an attractive pricepoint.”

The Intel Xeon Processor-based HP ProLiant servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux support the bank’s most business-critical applications, from Oracle financial software, to JBoss Enterprise Middleware-based applications, online transaction processing (OLTP) systems and customer-facing loan application systems. All are replicated with immediate storage back-up.

National City’s datacenter has deployed 150 HP ProLiant servers running 400 virtualized instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “We did this primarily for cost reasons,” said McGinnis. “We were purchasing increasingly powerful hardware, and needed a way to condense things down. We’re at a point where we can get as many as 1,100 guests running on a single rack of blade servers natively running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

One of the crown jewels of National City’s IT infrastructure was a new high-density facility featuring water-chilled racks, each of which could hold 54 blade servers. “It really improved our ability to provision hardware quickly, as we could pre-deploy the hardware and pre-stage it,” said McGinnis.

A homegrown application allows users to request resources, and the application designs and deploys the servers they need automatically. “Users put requests in and we can satisfy the requests within the day,” said McGinnis.

“In addition to its ability to scale, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers rock solid reliability and has been extremely stable. Our decision to standardize on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure was key to enabling rapid business growth while maintaining customer service levels,” said McGinnis.

BENEFITS
The price-performance of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform has proven exceptional. In 2007, PNC evaluated the best platform to run Oracle Financials Software.

“We tested UNIX running on a variety of machines including a RISC server that cost a quarter of a million dollars and is one of the most powerful boxes you can buy, and compared it to a Intel Xeon processor-based HP Proliant DL580 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said McGinnis, “The Intel Xeon processor-based HP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux combination blew everything away. Given those performance results, we started migrating our Oracle applications over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux immediately.”

“Red Hat is acknowledged by everyone in our organization – from senior management on down — as key to supporting the growth of our business,” said McGinnis. “It has allowed us to scale at a cost we could not have achieved with any other vendor.”

As Red Hat’s reputation within National City grew, the bank’s business divisions began asking for their applications to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today it is the the standard operating system. “The internal performance related adoption made things a lot easier for us, as it allowed us to phase out even more of our UNIX machines in favor of Red Hat,” he said. The bank continues to perform benchmarks to validate that its strategy is on course.

“We were able to improve the price-performance of our financial applications on the Red Hat and Intel processor-based HP ProLiant servers to achieve two cents per transaction, which will translate to millions in savings,” said McGinnis, “and was far lower than what we were able to achieve with the UNIX based systems.”

The large – and growing – community of application vendors that certify their software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux accelerated adoption throughout the bank. “A lot of vendors were initially cautious, but we gradually saw more and more application certifications as more businesses moved to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from proprietary operating systems,” said McGinnis. “This is now one of the major attractions of Red Hat.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also paved the way for other, indirect, cost savings. For example, its ease of use made it possible for the bank’s IT employees to be more productive.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a lot more user-friendly than Solaris, which has a very high learning curve,” said McGinnis. “This allows our team to do more. That, coupled with the fact that Red Hat’s business model provides more for less, gave us the opportunity to achieve even more significant cost savings.”

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FAST FACTS

Industry: Airlines/Travel

Geography: The Netherlands

Business Challenge: Renew, update, and unify the heterogeneous IT infrastructure created by the merger of Air France and KLM to create an affordable and scalable platform

Migration Path: IBM AIX and Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5; IBM WebSphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, SAP, KARMA, (KLM-Air France Revenue Management Application), Alfresco Document Management System, TIBCO, Oracle

Benefits: Delivered reduced costs expected to amount to approximately 11 million Euros by the end of 2011; a homogeneous, universal platform; an open architecture with impressive performance and reliable support

Download the case study [PDF]

“There is no internal discussion. The best product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux: End of story. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we work more effectively and productively and we save significantly on manpower and continuity.”
— Rene Matla, ICT production manager Linux at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

BACKGROUND
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is a worldwide company based in the Netherlands. It encompasses the core of the KLM Group, including KLM Cityhopper and Transavia airlines. In 2004, KLM and Air France merged to create the Air France-KLM holding company, creating the second largest airline partnership in the world in transported passengers. It is also the world’s second-largest cargo transporter.

KLM’s core businesses are passenger transport, cargo shipment, and aircraft maintenance. Its cargo activities have been fully integrated with those of Air France since 2007. The two transfer airports are Air France’s home base, Paris Charles de Gaulle, and KLM’s home base, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

In the fiscal year 2007-2008, running from April 1 to March 31, the KLM Group transported approximately 23.4 million passengers and 657,022 tons of Air France- KLM cargo. Today, the KLM Group has a modern fleet of 203 aircrafts, and employs 33,002 staff (FTEs). With more than 1,000 business applications, the company supports more than one million customers and 50,000 desktops. It maintains three datacenters located in Valbonne and Toulouse, France and Schiphol, the Netherlands.

CHALLENGE
When Air France and KLM merged in 2004, the unified company faced a heterogeneous IT infrastructure that presented a complex cost burden. Both of the airlines used a different operating system for their midrange systems. KLM was utilizing IBM AIX, while Air France was deploying Sun Solaris. Because of the tremendous prior investment by the respective companies in these IT systems, cost considerations made it difficult for the unified company to migrate completely to either Solaris or AIX.

In the face of its IT challenge, Air France-KLM chose to focus on a joint IT future. It decided to phase out Solaris and AIX and migrate the IT systems of both Air France and KLM to a Linux alternative. The organization wanted a more universal and flexible solution that could reduce costs without compromising on performance. It established the internal project BLUEhat with the goal of UNIX-to-Linux migration, including a middleware solution shift from WebSphere to JBoss.

“Linux is made for and by a large open source community. It is a proven platform that offers reduced costs in comparison to AIX and Solaris and allows us to purchase, deploy, and manage many Linux servers at a fraction of the cost of our previous solution,” said Rene Matla, ICT production manager, Linux at KLM.

SOLUTION
To gain synergy between Air France and KLM, the unified airlines began planning for a UNIX-to-Linux migration. “As there was no flexibility in our legacy solutions, we decided to open up our systems. The step toward open source was logical, and our selection of Linux was a very important move. Open source offered us the possibility to innovate from the bottom up with no vendor lock-in and significantly reduced costs thanks to less-expensive hardware and no licensing costs associated with Linux,” said Matla.

The airlines considered open source vendors SUSE and Red Hat during its evaluation of open source operating systems. The choice to deploy Red Hat was obvious.

“Red Hat is one of the biggest players in the open source industry and is a great innovator in the community. It has a worldwide network and a big user base. And its work, such as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, is a very important and transparent part of the innovative open source model. Red Hat has a strong product portfolio, including both Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions,” said Matla. “The support we’ve received from Red Hat has also been irreplaceable. “To us, Red Hat is a trustworthy partner. We chose a supplier who can cover as much of our portfolio as possible.”

KLM also selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware for both its mid-level and low-level web environments. KLM has one million bookings and 40 million customer check-ins per year, and 50 million hits per day on our systems. With more than 350 web applications covering everything from booking to check-in, including luggage handling, marketing, and customer relations programs, the KLM web environment is critical.

The migration is not focused on speed, but rather on steady replacement of aging systems as they approach the end of their lifecycles. “We just turn off something if it is at the end of its lifecycle, and then make the move to Red Hat. Our plan is to migrate slowly, and with each new release, we’re one step closer to homogeneity,” said Matla.

Currently, the airlines run a combination of three systems for its web applications, including AIX/WebSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/WebSphere, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, with the goal of standardizing on the Red Hat and JBoss combination.

“During the past years, Red Hat and KLM have created a strong relationship and partnership that has resulted in the creation of the first Red Hat Enterprise User Group. This group allows companies like KLM to share experience, knowledge, and best practices. Discussions focus on technology and future needs to share with Red Hat, but also includes a focus on the procedures and organisational changes needed to best work with open source. KLM truly understands the value of open source,” said Robert Molijn, key account manager at Red Hat.

BENEFITS
By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, KLM has significantly reduced IT costs.

In terms of manpower, the new team is 60 percent of its original size. Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, have delivered heightened performance and the Linux environment has given the IT team more flexibility and more effective performance results.

“Also, we are extremely happy with Red Hat’s support and responsiveness to our specific needs. If we have problems, we discuss them directly with knowledgeable Red Hat experts. In a complex environment with a great number of suppliers, is it great that Red Hat is also able to help us with problems that can fall between two suppliers. To have a company on whom we can rely reduces the amount of complexity we must deal with. The process is smooth and gives us a reliable platform to build up our Linux infrastructure to its current state,” said Matla.

To gain further Linux knowledge, KLM’s IT teams have also invested in Red Hat Global Learning Services. “The excellence of the Red Hat Training program is that it is practice-based. As far as I know, it is the only certificate program that is so thorough. Somebody who is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) actually knows how to run a Linux environment. He is able to solve certain problems in the specified amount of time. You also see this excellence in the quality of people who have gained the certification,” said Matla.

Red Hat customers also have access to the open source user and developers community, which is a valuable resource that helps drive quality products that are delivered rapidly to customers. “This could be the model of the future. You make it open to the community and you become less dependent on one solution provider. With Red Hat, we trust in this model and its reliable products and support,” said Matla.

Oil and Gas Leader Reduced Costs and Increased Performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Integrated Virtualization on Intel® Xeon® processor-based Servers

FAST FACTS

Company: YPF SA

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Argentina

Business Challenge: Renovate proprietary infrastructure with the goal of reducing costs and boosting performance with open source solutions

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Network, SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), 10g DB, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Intel Xeon Processor-based IBM System x 346, 366, 3650, 3850 servers

Migration Path: From SUN Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization on Intel Xeon Processor-based IBM System x servers

Benefits: Reduced capital and operational costs, boosted performance and efficiency of administrators, increased internal customer satisfaction by reducing implementation time, increased scalability and agility, and expanded flexibility

“Now, more than 80 percent of our Oracle databases and 90 percent of our SAP applications run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization on Intel Xeon Processor-based servers and is the choice for our SAP and Oracle implementations.”
–Adriana Marisa Vázquez, responsible for the UNIX administration group at YPF.

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BACKGROUND
YPF S.A., the largest company in Argentina, is an energy company, operating a leading integrated oil and gas business across the domestic upstream and downstream segments. The upstream operations consist of the exploration, development and production of crude oil, natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas. The downstream operations include the refining, marketing, transportation and distribution of oil and a range of petroleum derivatives, petrochemicals, liquid petroleum gas and biofuels.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 1999, YPF embarked on the task of renovating its proprietary infrastructure for the solution of its YPF Gas business unit with the goal of reducing its costs and to boost the performance of its critical business applications.

YPF determined that migrating its infrastructure off legacy RISC/UNIX and proprietary software and deploying open source solutions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, would allow it to manage operations more efficiently and drastically reduce the cost of IT operations.

At the time of the decision, YPF had to overcome internal hesitation about open source platforms, as Linux was just beginning to emerge as a viable enterprise operating platform, and had not yet gained the widespread adoption prevalent in today’s industry.

“At YPF, decisions are made only after thorough testing and research, and the IT team had proven that migrating from the RISC/UNIX and proprietary servers to open and flexible platforms would pose no risk to the reliability, availability, and performance of the systems,” said Adriana Marisa Vázquez, responsible for the UNIX administration group at YPF. “We also had to ensure that our SAP and Oracle solutions were fully supported and certified on the selected platform.”

SOLUTION
After research and testing, YPF selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon Processor-based hardware and started incorporating the solution on small Informix systems to renew the database servers distributed among the company’s 29 gas plants around Argentina.

The company saw an immediate positive impact on cost and performance. The significant reduction in costs, especially when compared with the license cost of RISC-based platforms, and the increased performance and availability, drove the decision to scale with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon Processor-based IBM System x servers.

“We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a number of reasons, the most basic being the lower costs, simplified management with Red Hat Network, and the compatibility and performance with our SAP and Oracle solutions,” said Vázquez. “After the initial success, we began to include other platforms. Now, more than 80 percent of our Oracle databases and 90 percent of our SAP applications run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization on Intel Xeon Processor-based servers and is the choice for our SAP and Oracle implementations.”

There are 117 Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel Xeon Processor-based servers, 83 percent of which are allocated to SAP and Oracle applications supporting different company processes such as:
- Serviclub
- YPF Boxes
- Internal Service Stations network
- Service Station Stores
- Well information for extraction and maintenance
- Retail
- 90 percent of the dialog steps processed at YPF run on the Red Hat and Intel

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization enables YPF to quickly virtualize servers for testing and development, and arranging configurations to try new features in-house before offering them to the public. YPF can rapidly push servers live into productions, effectively increasing the utilization of servers without server sprawl in data centers.

“The virtual machines we built were very expansive, and we’ve achieved truly outstanding performance with Red Hat. Without the help of Red Hat Consulting, we would not have been able to have the virtual servers providing the SAP and Oracle application services as we have today,” said Vázquez. “With Red Hat’s virtualization technology, we can maintain the hardware without affecting the performance by moving virtual machines on the fly,” she added.

YPF relied on Red Hat Consulting to contribute expertise during the deployment and ongoing improvement, and the Red Hat Consultants still provides expert product knowledge to increase internal capabilities. With demanding day-to-day activities at YPF, deploying new technology solutions generally takes significant time and resources, Red Hat Consulting has been able to speed up implementation projects, helping to free up internal YPF resources to work on strategic projects.

“Over the years, Red Hat Consultants have gained considerable knowledge of our business and we consider them technological partners rather than a consultant or a vendor,” said Vázquez.

The implementation of Red Hat Network, a centralized systems management platform, heavily involved Red Hat Consulting. “Red Hat Network has allowed us to administer the platform in a centralized manner, which has helped us save considerable time and enabled our administrators to become far more efficient,” said Vázquez.

BENEFITS
The success of YPF’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization deployment has allowed the company to roll out Red Hat as the standard solution of choice across its organization. Through the combination of Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities and Intel processor-based servers, YPF achieved cost savings, heightened performance, simplification and ease of management, and expanded scalability.

Through Red Hat’s advanced virtualization capabilities, the organization was able to free up internal hardware and technical expert resources for reallocation in alignment with business goals. With its virtualization technology integrated with the operating platform, and at no extra cost, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided YPF with added flexibility and reduced costs and complexity for its critical systems.

“Our systems have become more agile and flexible with the combination of Red Hat’s virtualization technology on Intel’s reliable platforms,” said Vázquez. “Our systems are now more operationally efficient, and we still have the high performance our business demands, coupled with decreased costs” she added.

“With Red Hat Network, our work has been simplified by means of set-up and configuration standards. With Red Hat virtualization technology, deployment times are drastically reduced, and a Linux server only takes a few minutes, compared to hours, to configure,” said Vázquez.

The reduced delivery times of an installed server have increased YPF’s internal customer’s satisfaction too.

Currently, YPF is analyzing the addition of the Red Hat Network Satellite option, in order to leverage high-end management, provisioning, and monitoring. It is also evaluating the implementation of Red Hat Cluster Suite for high-availability solutions.

“Red Hat is based on the subscription model, which has provided us freedom from vendor lock-in,” said Vázquez. “We trust Red Hat as a technology partner for the solid expertise of its IT professionals, its knowledge of our business-critical concerns, and its commitment to high-quality support and services. We look forward to growing together with Red Hat in the future,” she concluded.

Bank PHB improves flexibility, reliability and performance with Red Hat solutions

Dubai, GITEX – October 23, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Bank PHB, one of Nigeria’s top ten banks, has migrated its core mission-critical banking applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. Bank PHB migrated to Red Hat’s open source solutions to achieve the next step in scalability, performance and the ability to handle heavy workloads and achieve cost reduction more effectively than with other proprietary software platforms.

Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with 1.8 million customers, making it the eighth largest bank in the country by both profitability and size. The bank has one of the most innovative financial product portfolios in the region and with its recent acquisition of Gambia’s International Bank for Commerce (IBC) it has even more plans to grow. To facilitate this growth successfully, Bank PHB required an IT solution that is based on open and flexible architecture, with higher performance and manageable total cost of ownership. It also desired a solution with no proprietary lock-in in order to allow the bank to integrate all of the different banking applications and products from its varied acquisitions.

Bank PHB, with the assistance of Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, Qrios, has migrated to a cluster of commodity hardware, including 23 IBM x86 X3850 multi-core servers. The servers are now equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which replaced the previous IBM eServer pSeries servers that ran Unix AIX. The full solution incorporates IBM Intel servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, built using the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on the web front end to provide a highly-available client by implementing the clustering, caching and fail-over capabilities of JBoss. Bank PHB also uses Red Hat Network Satellite and JBoss Operations Network to monitor and manage updates. The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers all run the Temenos T24-core banking application that is built on an open architecture and uses established standards such as HTTP, XML and J2EE for a variety of banking modules including retail, private banking, treasury and Islamic banking.

“Migrating our systems to Red Hat and JBoss solutions was a strategic choice for us,” said Henry Okoede, chief technology officer at Bank PHB. “Cost saving was not the only reason we went with open source, though it was certainly icing on the cake. Our decision was driven by the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform provide constant innovation and the flexibility that enables us to develop products that we can launch to market faster, while making sure that all our systems are fully integrated and optimized to communicate with each other flawlessly. We have also felt that the service provided by Red Hat professional support was also one of the best we have ever experienced with a vendor.”

“The communication and middleware tier had to be able to support the total bank community with acceptable response times and guaranteed delivery of messages to the Temenos T24-core banking application,” said Mosh Adetoro, director at Qrios. “Bank PHB chose JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, including JBoss Messaging, a Java Message Server (JMS), to ensure delivery of the messages to the core application.”

“Bank PHB Bank is another great example of how open source provides real value for our financial services customers,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president of the EMEA region at Red Hat. “JBoss technology, combined with professional support from Red Hat, has enabled PHB Bank to deploy an enterprise-ready robust platform that meets both the performance and reliability demanded by the financial sector, with the major advantage of flexibility provided by open source.”

For more information on Red Hat, please visit www.europe.redhat.com. For more information about JBoss solutions, visit www.jboss.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com .

About Bank PHB

Bank PHB, a leading financial services institution is Nigeria’s emerging icon for banking excellence. Our strategic intent is to build a national and diversified franchise by creating superior value for all our stakeholders through unrivaled customer service experience, superior shareholder value, a conducive workplace, and commitment to corporate citizenship.

Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with profit before tax of N10.28 billion, total assets and contingents of N480 billion as at June 2007 making it Nigeria’s eighth biggest bank in profitability and size, and seventh biggest bank in deposits. It is significant that Bank PHB since its merger in December 2005 has maintained an average growth rate that is about three times the banking industry average growth rate.
http://www.bankphb.com/live/general/index.php

About Qrios

Founded in 1998, Qrios is West Africa’s major Linux and open source service provider. As a Red Hat Advance Partner, it provides support for the most recognized open source brand in the world. Through its consulting practice, it has consistently used open source Infrastructure, Integration and Innovation to deliver measurable business value to its enterprise customers; its focus being on the major players in the financial services, telecoms and Oil and gas sectors of the region.

Leveraging on Red Hat’s professional services and a budding local team Qrios has successfully delivered projects based on almost every Red Hat solution from the operating system, database availability to SOA and middleware solutions.

Qrios is a regional Red Hat Certified Training Partner.
http://www.qrios.com/

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 60 offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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

FAST FACTS

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

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

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:Local government

Geography: Florida

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

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

Software: SAP running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: HP Superdome and HP BL460s and BL860s

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World’s leading exchange group experiences flexibility, reliability and performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Raleigh, NC – May 14, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced that NYSE Euronext utilizes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network to maintain the reliability, high performance and security of its mission-critical financial trading platform. With Red Hat solutions, NYSE Euronext has realized greater flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, cost savings and the ability to handle heavy workloads while producing rapid performance results.

NYSE Euronext (NYX) operates the world’s leading and most liquid exchange group, and seeks to provide the highest levels of market quality, customer choice and innovation. Its family of exchanges, located in six countries in the U.S. and Europe, include the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext, Liffe, Alternext and NYSE Arca Options. It offers a diverse array of financial products and services for issuers, investors and financial institutions in cash equities, options and derivatives, ETFs, bonds, market data and commercial technology solutions. NYSE Euronext’s nearly 4,000 listed companies represent a combined $27.3 / €17.3 trillion in total global market capitalization as of March 31, 2008, more than four times that of any other exchange group.

NYSE’s goal to cement its position as the world’s preeminent marketplace by diversifying its product base and developing a global platform for trading led to the merger with Archipelago in 2006 and Euronext in 2007. Facing the challenge of integrating its varied trading platforms to produce a simplified and optimized technology architecture, NYSE Euronext was seeking a platform that could deliver today and for years to come. A platform delivering value, reliability and flexibility became necessary to produce the fast-paced performance results demanded by the industry.

NYSE Euronext investigated two competing Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compared the solutions based purely on technology and related support. When support was considered, it was quickly clear that the leading choice was Red Hat. NYSE Euronext decided to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run its mission-critical electronic trading platform.

“Linux gave us the flexibility that we desired, and we felt that this was right for our environment. We decided to pursue it full speed ahead. We needed a good partner and found one in Red Hat. We were looking for a partner that was offering reliable software and one that would help and advise on architecture while providing the value of trusted support services. Red Hat satisfied our objectives,” said Steve Rubinow, Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext.

Today, key components of NYSE Euronext’s high-speed trading environments rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are managed by Red Hat Network. Rubinow added, “The pace of electronic trading has picked up dramatically, and across the enterprise, the 6.5 hours that comprise the main part of our trading day includes the processing of billions of messages. With the combination of speed, cost, reliability and functionality pushed to the limit, we have to out perform the competition in each category.”

“Linux as an operating system has been the fastest growing with respect to these requirements, and we’re not limited by what’s in front of us. The quality of the Linux platform is greatly important to us and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has exceeded our expectations. Red Hat is almost like water, it’s pervasive within our architecture. Red Hat is extremely strategic and without it, most of our computers wouldn’t be running,” said Rubinow.

With continued growth, new development and ongoing conversion activities, NYSE Euronext will add several hundred more Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions in the coming 18 months. Red Hat solutions are expected to play a pivotal role in NYSE Euronext’s next-generation global trading platform.

To read the full NYSE Euronext case study, visit www.customers.press.redhat.com. For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

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

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

Hospital utilizes Red Hat and JBoss technology to maintain disaster-recovery systems

Raleigh NC – March 10, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Florida Hospital, the largest hospital in the state of Florida, providing care to over one million patients per year, relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network to maintain reliable disaster-recovery systems that protect and maintain critical patient information.

Florida Hospital, ranked in US News and World Report magazine as one of America’s Best Hospitals for the past six consecutive years, has seven facilities totalling 2,300 beds throughout Central Florida and is part of the Adventist Healthcare system, the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in the nation. The hospital’s MIS Department manages one centralized datacenter for all seven facilities and includes approximately 100 developers. Florida Hospital’s IT systems needed a cost-effective solution that could replace its expensive proprietary operating system, and a solution that could improve the reliability of its disaster-recovery systems.

Initially, Florida Hospital turned to Red Hat because it provided cost efficiencies for its Web initiative, but found many more advantages for its disaster-recovery project. The hospital soon realized that Red Hat solutions could offer additional benefits, such as greater reliability and increased hardware and software compatibility. Florida Hospital now runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 70 HP and IBM servers, and also incorporates JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The hospital’s proprietary applications, including those for patient care, financial and data-management solutions, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In order to protect its critical information, the hospital created a unique disaster-recovery solution that utilizes Red Hat Global File System running on the SAN and Red Hat Cluster Suite with a six-node cluster. To facilitate infrastructure management, security compliance and new-system deployment, Florida Hospitals also implemented Red Hat Network.

“Red Hat enabled us to create a highly efficient disaster-recovery system that expedited restoration time from days to minutes. This means we make patient data readily available and provide the highest level of care at all times” said Jack Velazquez, senior systems engineer at Florida Hospital. “With 100 developers on our team, we rely on Red Hat to save us time on everyday management issues so we can focus on creating new solutions. Our parent company has been impressed by our efficiency, ROI and performance gains from using Red Hat solutions.”

Florida Hospital is looking forward to expanding Red Hat usage. In the near future, the hospital’s Open Systems Team will be implementing Red Hat virtualization capabilities for some of their projects.

“When it comes time to upgrade again, we intend to move more of our mid-range systems to Linux. We’d love to experience Red Hat performance and reliability throughout the entire hospital,” said Velazquez.

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

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

EsSalud utilizes virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Raleigh NC – November 28, 2007 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that EsSalud, a state-owned insurance and service provider in Peru offering medical and economic benefits that cover eight million regularly insured parties and successors, has experienced success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. With the solution’s virtualization capabilities, the company has stabilized its organization-wide systems through a swift, transparent and cost-effective implementation project.

EsSalud was faced with challenges resulting from its aging information systems, which consisted of outdated, non-integrated technology that caused trouble with monitoring and control across its 362 National Assurance Centers. With a wide array of operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Novell, AIX and others, spread across its centers, the company could no longer maintain the mutli-platform support for its main system. The system’s disconnectedness led to a weak administration and sluggish monitoring.

To reliably and cost-effectively centralize the information of its National Assistance Centers, EsSalud turned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on HP hardware. Because EsSalud’s Health Benefits Core System was developed on Foxpro 2.6, it required two virtualized versions of the operating system. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization, the two versions were converged within 30 days to support Foxpro. Ultimately, EsSalud was able to change the overall administration and distribution scheme of its National Assurance Centers’ IT infrastructure.

“The virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 were a decisive factor in our company’s resolve to adopt this platform. In addition, we looked to Red Hat solutions for platform stability and security,” said Luis Martín Jiménez Chirinos, systems developer manager at EsSalud. “Other alternatives initially considered included Novell, SCO and Microsoft products. Each had strengths, but in the case of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, we found all the strengths we sought converged in the same product.”

Today, EsSalud enjoys a centralized administration of its servers installed across the company’s Assistance Centers. It has also experienced stability in its organization-wide systems, effective and stable communication capabilities and access security for system management, all for costs lower than originally budgeted.

“The experience was transcendent. We’ve seen large benefits at a low cost, with low implementation time,” said Chirinos. “For the future, we have plans to use Red Hat solutions for our inventory and terminal control solutions.”

About Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Company benefits from central, secure management through Red Hat Network and plans to expand open source deployment with JBoss.
RALEIGH, NC – January 29, 2007 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Union Bank of California, one of the 25 largest banks in the United States, will standardize its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Company migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from AIX to realize significant performance gains as well as centralized, secure management through Red Hat Network. Union Bank is also piloting JBoss as well as MySQL and plans to make Red Hat’s complete solution stack part of its core technology direction.

Union Bank is more than 130 years old and one of the 25 largest commercial banks in the nation based on assets. The bank has 320 branch offices in California, Washington and Oregon. “Our mission is to provide the best customer experience. Open source technology plays a major role in the customer-facing sales and service product line,” said Mok Choe, CTO, Union Bank of California. “We are constantly looking for opportunities to offer higher reliability and speed in a cost-effective manner. We are re-architecting our web environment to scale horizontally using the commodity hardware and open source tools.”

The criteria for Union Bank’s platform selection included cost, reliability, scalability, security, provisioning, configuration management, the available talent pool and what the it believed to be the future direction of the software space. Red Hat was able to meet all of the requirements, and in just nine months UBOC built solutions running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite and MySQL.

“We believe we will significantly reduce the cost per transaction by utilizing the commodity hardware and open source tools, which will finance further customer experience improvement,” said Choe.

For more information on Red Hat and JBoss solutions, please visit www.redhat.com. For more information on Union Bank, please http://www.unionbank.com.

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

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

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

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Industry: Financial Trading

Geography: Global

Challenge: To integrate varied trading platforms to produce a high-speed, low-cost platform that offers the reliability and flexibility necessary to produce the rapid performance results demanded by the expanding financial trading industry

Migration Path: HP UX, IBM AIX, and SUN Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network

Hardware: 200 HP ProLiant DL585 four-processor servers, 400 ProLiant BL 685c blades, AMD dual-core Opteron processors

Benefits: Implemented a reliable, secure, and cost-effective solution that provided flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, and the ability to handle heavy workloads while producing fast-paced performance results

“Red Hat is extremely strategic and without it, most of our computers wouldn’t be running,” said Steve Rubinow, Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext.

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With the acquisition of Archipelago and Euronext complete, NYSE Euronext faced the ongoing challenge of integrating its varied trading platforms to produce a simplified and optimized technology architecture. During this integration, NYSE Euronext sought to enhance the effectiveness of its technology through the incorporation of features needed to remain competitive in the current market. It needed a high-speed, low-cost platform that offered the reliability and flexibility necessary to produce the fast-paced performance results demanded by the industry.

“We’re working on integrating all the pieces of our business together and making the result better than any of the systems that comprised it in the first place. From a system architecture standpoint, we need to be very flexible. We must have the latest and greatest technology without painting ourselves into a corner and without finding out that we are out-running the capabilities of our solutions. Technology is in every corner of what we do, and the software that sits on our technology is key to being us remaining a viable competitor today,” said Steve Rubinow, Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext.

SOLUTION
When assessing the right technology solution to help enable the optimized processing of the hundreds of thousands of messages per second and the billions of messages per day that are processed by the NYSE Euronext electronic trading platform, three considerations were made. The cost of starting, the cost of support, and the cost of potentially leaving the technology solution in the future were all considered.

“Too many people forget that the cost of leaving a technology can be substantial. We didn’t want to get locked into any certain technologies, and desired the flexibility to jump to a different hardware platform if necessary,” said Rubinow. “Linux gives us that flexibility. We felt that Linux was right for our environment, so we decided to pursue it full speed ahead.”

NYSE Euronext investigated two competing Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compared the solutions based purely on the offered technology and related support. When support was considered, it was quickly clear that the leading choice was Red Hat. So, NYSE Euronext decided to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run its mission-critical electronic trading platform.

“We needed a good partner and found one in Red Hat. We were looking for a partner that was offering reliable software and one that would help and advice on its use while providing the value of trusted support services. Red Hat satisfied our objectives,” said Rubinow.

Today, much of NYSE Euronext’s high-speed trading environments rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “The pace of electronic trading has picked up dramatically, and across the enterprise, the main part of our 6.5-hour trading day includes the processing of billions of messages,” said Rubinow.

To maintain its several hundred servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, NYSE Euronext employs Red Hat Network. With Red Hat Network Update and Management solutions, NYSE Euronext has been able to effectively manage its complex, mission-critical systems.

NYSE Euronext also relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its included Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality to preserve the security of its platform. With trillions of dollars flowing through the exchange each month, security is a large and very important organizational focus. “We are very security conscious because we have to be. The operating system is a key part of every server that we operate and each server must be secure at all times. We maintain the security of our systems by relying on the SELinux features within Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Rubinow.

BENEFITS
Of the very elite competition in the marketplace, NYSE Euronext must compete with other top players in size and in features, but also in the demand to be the fastest and the most reliable at the lowest cost. Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers on these requirements, in addition to providing flexibility, high levels of security, and a unique customer feedback loop.

“With the combination of speed, cost, reliability, and functionality pushed to the limit, we have to out perform the competition in each category, and our competition is getting better all the time. Linux as an operating system has been the fastest growing with respect to these requirements, and we’re not limited by what’s in front of us. The quality of the Linux platform is greatly important to us and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has exceeded our expectations,” said Rubinow.

In addition, NYSE Euronext benefits from the unmatched value Red Hat places on customer feedback. Important to the open source model is the constant feedback loop between users and customers and the engineers and developers behind the software. Through Red Hat’s Global Support Services, there is constant feedback and development between Red Hat and its customers. “When we have mundane questions, they’re answered quickly. When we have larger technical questions, we put our best minds and Red Hat’s best minds together and have these smart people work in collaboration to solve the problem,” said Rubinow.

With continued growth, new development, and ongoing conversion activities, NYSE Euronext will add several hundred more subscriptions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the coming 18 months. In addition, Red Hat solutions are slated to play a pivotal role in NYSE Euronext’s next-generation trading platform, the Universal Trading Platform. Currently, the first phase of the project is planned for completion by the end of 2008.

“Red Hat is almost like water, it’s pervasive within our architecture. Red Hat is extremely strategic and without it, most of our computers wouldn’t be running,” said Rubinow.

FAST FACTS

Company: Florida Hospital

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Orlando, Fla.

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

Migration Path: IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

Hardware: HP and IBM servers

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

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

Download the case study[PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Hat Provides Cost-Effective Solution for Record Management

Customer: Highmark Healthcare

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: US: Pennsylvania

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

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

Hardware: JuTzu, Race servers, HPDL rat mouse server

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

Download the Case Study: PDF

BACKGROUND

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

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

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

CHALLENGE

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

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

SOLUTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BENEFITS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAA saves $15 million by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Government

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Hardware: HP and Dell

Benefits: Executed a major system modernization in one-third the original scheduled time. Achieved tenfold increase in processing capacity and 30 percent more in operational efficiency. Cut IT costs by 50 percent, saving the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

As the government agency responsible for regulating and overseeing all aspects of civil aviation within the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) accomodates more than two million passengers on domestic airlines every day. With roughly 8,000 airplanes in the air at any given time, the successful execution of the FAA’s mission largely depends on the highly complex Traffic Flow Management (TFM) infrastructure and its real-time Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS).

“The Traffic Flow Management enables us to provide the tools that air traffic managers need to deal with the tough issues they face every day,” said Joshua Gustin, TFM-Modernization Program Manager.

“The Enhanced Traffic Management System integrates weather and flight data from multiple sources and presents the information in a graphical way, allowing the FAA to anticipate and balance air traffic flow across the national airspace. Getting thousands of flights to their destinations with a weather front coming in or during a special event like the Indianapolis 500 or Super Bowl exemplify some of the challenges when trying to maintain air traffic flow. Airline passengers, like you and I, just want to get from here to there. TFM and ETMS help us to fulfill more than two million passengers’ expectations of timely flights each day,” explained Gustin.

The Challenge

The FAA maintains a complex three-tiered system architecture for ETMS. The central processing facility, located at the Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center, is responsible for the core processing and distribution of data to a number of servers and more than 700 workstations located in sites across the U.S. With over 100 sites using the FAA’s system for air traffic management, including military facilities and international sites, the real-time demand for the data provided by the system is critical.

“The FAA is on the cutting edge. We’re constantly enhancing and growing the system,” said Gustin. “Driving down cost while being able to maintain and continue building on the system is key. At the same time, there is no room for error or down time in our computer systems.”

In 2002, when the administration embarked on a technical refresh effort for ETMS, the FAA faced significant implementation time and a high price tag.

“When we first considered refreshing the entire system, we were looking at $25 million in costs and 18 months to full deployment for the hardware upgrade alone,” explained Gustin.

International sites also posed a challenge for the FAA. The agency keeps a close eye on domestic flights, in addition to those originating as far out as Guam, Puerto Rico, and Chile. The agency’s system also ties into London, Mexico, and Canada, allowing international sites to make use of the FAA’s tools for common awareness and information exchange.

“While we planned the refresh, we also considered ways to keep the system affordable for countries internationally. However, communication equipment and hardware were very expensive, as well as the operating system rolled into the hardware. With our existing architecture, we didn’t have any options that would solve all of the end-of-life issues with our time and budget constraints,” said Gustin.

The Solution

In a typical technical refresh, the focus is on replacing the hardware. The software is not part of the equation.

“During the refresh in 2004 and 2005 we replaced the entire system, both hardware and software,” said Gustin. The team ported 1.5 million lines of proprietary code to Linux and replaced about 1000 systems. In fact, by choosing industry standard hardware and open source software, the cost of replacing each computer dropped from $25,000 to $3,000.

Cost savings were significant, but not at the sacrifice of reliability.

“We have to guarantee that the system will deliver the data reliably. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for problems to be reported and then tweaking something. Reliability is a necessity to minimize our risk,” explained Gustin. “We liked the Red Hat Enterprise model because it gives us the support we require to reduce our risk. We made the huge decision to move forward with the technical refresh on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the entire system architecture.”

The FAA first deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux in their remote computing locations and later moved it to their Volpe processing center.

The FAA used Red Hat’s onsite training during the modernization project to effectively transition their engineers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux through the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) program.

“For training, we decided that more was better, particularly with the developers. As a result, we made training for our developers and core administrators a priority, and it has really paid off,” said Gustin.

Benefits

By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on their workstations, servers, and at the Volpe Center, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment.

“We found that when we deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the system ran at less than 10 percent CPU. It was much faster and more efficient. We got the power back and the ability to scale, even in regard to sheer physical space. We squeezed all of our servers into six racks, and, at the same time, increased from 700 to roughly 1000 workstations in the field, aligning all of our products on a single, open platform,” explained Gustin.

Most impressively, the FAA was able to achieve these increased efficiencies at a significantly lower cost and extend the system’s life long enough for the Traffic Flow Management Modernization scheduled for 2008. TFM Modernization will re-architect the entire ETMS, software and all, bringing the system to new, state-of-the-art techniques.

“By switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and off-the-shelf hardware, we were able to spend less than $10 million on a project that cost $25 million in 1998. Red Hat Enterprise Linux fixed our problems of reliability and scalability, and allowed us to achieve 30 percent more in operational efficiency for 50 percent less cost,” noted Gustin.

For Gustin, he is proud of the achievements with the FAA’s technical refresh effort.

“I was in a sustainment manager position, but I’m a technical person at heart and like the challenge of solving these problems,” said Gustin. “Bringing in the refresh project for under $10 million and having the added benefit of many improvements was our business case. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we proved we could do both for so much less.”

• Read the press release
• Learn more about Red Hat and Government deployments

IT management simplified at Polish coal mines

Industry: Technology, specializing in mining
companies

Geography: Poland

Challenge: Outdated and disjointed IT infrastructure created performance and maintenance issues for Polish coal mines. COIG needed to renew the aging IT infrastructure based on SCO Unix across 50 remote locations, while increasing functionality and reducing maintenance downtime.

Solution: Centralized server, hosted at single location and containing shared database.
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Applications: Oracle database, SZYK and SAP ERP applications, Apache Web server and Zope application server

Benefits: The move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered reduced maintenance and purchase costs, greater functionality, simpler system management, and increased and faster performance.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ] 

Background

COIG is a major outsourcing company and independent software vendor (ISV) in Poland, responsible for managing several major IT contracts. Among these contracts, COIG maintains the IT infrastructure for Poland’s entire coal mine network. The company is based in Katowice and operates with 500 employees as a limited company and with majority ownership by the government. In addition to providing IT consultancy and administration services, COIG is also an ISV developing its own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.

There are approximately 50 coal mines in Poland administered by COIG. This includes Kompania Weglowa, Poland’s largest mining holding and the biggest mine in Eastern Europe.

Opportunity

For the last ten years, each coal mine has had its own separate network with individual IBM servers running SCO Unix, IBM AIX and Informix databases. In the past couple of years, the mines have experienced serious stability issues, making the application servers extremely unreliable.

The infrastructure also required that all IT administration, including system updates, maintenance, and support, had to be done locally at the coal mines. With servers in remote locations, any maintenance problems required an engineer to travel between the sites, resulting in long downtime and costly repairs.

The mines were dependent on an outdated and disjointed IT infrastructure that created performance and maintenance issues. The situation degenerated to the point that the coal mines had no choice but to increase functionality and reliability by upgrading their systems. They needed to renew the ageing IT infrastructure based on SCO Unix across 50 remote locations, while increasing functionality and reducing maintenance downtime and costs.

Solution

VDEL Ltd., based in Vienna, Austria, is a Red Hat dedicated channel partner serving customers throughout Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia (CER). Since April 2005, the master distributor has supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions with services and training. VDEL has been working with COIG for a number of years, and was in a position to advise them about the lower cost, scalability, and reliability benefits of deploying an open source solution instead of Unix. VDEL’s technology understanding and experience, coupled with a strong understanding of the local market, enabled the outsourcing company to take full advantage of the opportunities created by the implementation of a new infrastructure based on open source technology.

After looking at all the major Linux distributions and an holding an intensive evaluation session, COIG opted for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Having evaluated other Linux distributions, it was clear that Red Hat provides extensive and probably the best support to its customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a proven track record with stability. Red Hat also has an established ecosystem in terms of partner support, which is very important for us,” said Piotr Kral, IT Manager, COIG.

To simplify the maintenance of differing IT systems, COIG chose to host a central data center for the entire coal mine network at its head office in Katowice. The central server system runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a combination of 20 IBM xSeries and BladeCenter servers, and will soon be extended to include an additional five IBM Open Power blades. The deployment is managed by the Red Hat Network, currently running as a hosted service with the Management Module enabled.

Benefits

The Red Hat Network Management Module supports the enterprise administration of the whole Linux infrastructure at COIG. It features highly scalable system grouping facilities for management tasks, and role-based administration for policies and permissions. It also features scheduling of actions, such as software and security updates for specific time windows, for easy manageability as the organization grows. The Management Module provides the functionality needed to help COIG lower costs and increase productivity immediately.

The new servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux are able to host a range of business applications, including SAP, Oracle, Apache web server, Zope application server, and SZYK. SYZK is an ERP application developed by COIG and used by the coal mines for a number of operations, including stock control, accounting, sales support and purchasing.

The users at the coal mines connect to the centralized server to access these shared applications and databases. Having a centralized server enables COIG to administer its Red Hat deployment easily and reduces time spent on system maintenance. Tracking stock in the databases created an unexpected cost saving. The new system more accurately tracks and accounts for coal, significantly reducing theft and loss.

COIG is looking to further expand its Red Hat deployment by upgrading its Red Hat Network subscription to the Satellite Server, which will provide even greater functionality and customisation. COIG also plans on expanding its SAP deployment by installing the SAP portal.

“We had major stability issues before, and the application server was not functioning properly at all,” said Kral. “We have experienced significant improvement in the performance at our new centralised data center. The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux went very smoothly, and when we realized that the Linux systems reached an excellent response time, we just had to match that with low-cost hardware.”

City of Vienna deploys Red Hat

Industry: City administration

Geography: Austria

Opportunity: Cost-effective server operating system with high stability and performance, integrated system administration, deployment and supervision, that’s flexible and independent of manufacturers, with a wide selection of certified software and hardware. This coupled with reasonably-priced and high-performance industry standard hardware.

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and AS
Applications: Red Hat Satellite Server with Provisioning Module (Upgrade to monitoring module planned)
Hardware: HP Proliant Servers and Blade Servers

Benefits: Subscription model provides maximum freedom, simple system administration and provisioning with Red Hat Network, extremely reliable, high security due to Satellite Server.

Background

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

Linux has a strong reputation within Magisterial Department 14 in the city of Vienna. In many ways, its use of open source is exemplary of other public institutions and enterprises. From the early 1990s, the city of Vienna has been running Linux servers. At the start, these were mainly systems with FreeBSD. However, as the City of Vienna looked to the future and the migration of mission-critical systems to Linux, a reliable Linux platform, developed and supported by a professional vendor, was needed.

Opportunity

As the capital city of Austria, Vienna serves in many ways as a role-model for local councils throughout the country. The IT organization of the capital city has always promoted the use of the most reliable and effective technologies. The fact that the city is also called upon to invite tenders for all major projects that extend across the European Union points to a cost-effective IT infrastructure. Costly experiments with underdeveloped or expensive software are therefore out of the question. Overall, the City of Vienna has made the decision to use open source technology in as many areas as possible. In terms of server operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was chosen.

After the introduction of Linux with Free BSD, the City of Vienna sought for a reliable Linux distribution, to be developed and supported by a professional company. Before Red Hat had developed its Enterprise product Vienna used Red Hat Linux 7.2. “Red Hat has always had a rigorous focus on the stability of its Linux platform, a commitment that has been apparent and appreciated by us since we began deploying Red Hat,” explains Franz Brauneder, server management at the City of Vienna. “In addition, Red Hat could always provide the largest partner network and the most certifications from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and IHVs. Not only was this a key factor in our choice of an operating system, but it is reflected in our experience of the outstanding quality of Red Hat software. Since the start of our use of Red Hat, we have never had a critical problem connected with the operating system.”

Solution

After the early stages, when Linux was used almost exclusively for file servers, the City of Vienna worked with Linux to create systems that were increasingly at the core of its IT infrastructure. In the meantime, more than 100 servers run Linux, with the majority using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Red Hat’s introduction of Enterprise was extremely timely for us,” said Brauneder. “The emphasis placed on functions that are essential for professional use is a definite advantage, and the longer development cycles in close consultation with the hardware manufacturers also enable more effective planning and stable systems. The subscription model is also ideal for our needs as we pay for a specific service level. Which version of the operating system we install and when we run an upgrade is decided exclusively by internal factors on our end and not by the product policy of a manufacturer. Additionally, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux we also gain a high degree of independence from manufacturers, because Red Hat does not use code that is unsupported by the community. This prevents us from ending up in a technical blind alley.”

Benefits

The City of Vienna uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and AS on HP hardware. The IT department operates both “classic” HP Proliant servers of the ML and DL series and HP BL 10 and HP BL 20 blades. Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES is predominantly used by the City of Vienna. Applications used include Samba File Server, Apache Server, and applications developed by the City of Vienna itself. For applications that place high demands on resources, such as database servers, which must also be available at all times, the IT managers of the City of Vienna use Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS. For example, Oracle databases run on this top-of-the-range platform from Red Hat, and future expansion will continue to focus on this type of installation. The use of PostgreSQL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS is imminent, along with the migration from AIX-Unix databases to Red Hat’s flagship product.
We have many years experience using Linux. Over the years we have become especially convinced of the outstanding quality of Red Hat software. Since we’ve been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there has never been a critical problem at any point.

We have many years experience using Linux. Over the years we have become especially convinced of the outstanding quality of Red Hat software. Since we’ve been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there has never been a critical problem at any point.

– Franz Brauneder, Server Manager

In order to manage a continuously growing Linux infrastructure effectively, the City of Vienna uses the Red Hat Satellite Server with the provisioning module. All Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems are integrated into the management console of the satellite server and can be administered from a central location. If required, remote access can also be made available easily and the provisioning module also allows the IT managers of the City of Vienna to add new computers via the network. Due to its architecture, the Red Hat Satellite Server can also be operated independently of the Internet, so it provides a particularly high degree of security from attacks from hackers. “With the Red Hat Satellite Server we have an ideal solution for all management tasks,” said Brauneder. “The larger our Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure grows, the more important the satellite server becomes for us. In the future, we are also planning to use the monitoring module, in order to have centralised control of system monitoring.”

In conclusion, Brauneder commented on the support provided by Red Hat: “In most cases the web-based support works extremely well. However, we have not yet been in a position of having to resolve a critical problem. That says a great deal about the reliability of the Red Hat solution.”