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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Tintas Iquine

Industry: Manufacturing: Paint and Tints

Geography: Brazil

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

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

Hardware: Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: India

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

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle DB

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: An aging and costly IT infrastructure was impeding the ability of Union Bank to scale to growth and respond agilely to changing market dynamics

MIGRATION PATH: UNIX™ on high-end RISC machines to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based HP servers; Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux™, Red Hat Network Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform™, JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: More than 150 Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based HP ProLiant servers

BENEFITS: Improve reliability and scalability, cut costs, and deliver new financial services and products to market faster

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Union Bank, N.A., headquartered in San Francisco is a full-service commercial bank providing an array of financial services to individuals, small businesses, middle-market companies, and major corporations. Union Bank is California’s fifth-largest bank by deposits. The bank has 335 banking offices in California, Oregon, and Washington and two international offices. Its holding company, UnionBanCal Corporation, is the 16th largest commercial bank holding company in the U.S. based on assets at March 31, 2009.

Union Bank was selected for its operating platform migration from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Websphere to JBoss to support its mission critical applications at an improved price with greater performance and less up-keep. Union Bank used open source solutions to increase time to market, reliability and return on investment.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
When Mok Choe joined Union Bank in early 2007 as chief technology officer, the Union Bank IT infrastructure faced a host of challenges similar to those of many other companies at the time, mainly increasing costs and resources associated with the maintenance and upkeep of legacy systems.

Over the years, Union Bank’s IT infrastructure had grown increasingly large, cumbersome, and complex. Not only was it costly to operate and maintain, but it couldn’t scale to accommodate the bank’s rapid expansion into new markets. System availability was also a continuing challenge. And as the financial services industry expanded into electronic banking products, Union Bank’s reliance on IT was increasing. The bank thus required an IT infrastructure that could speed new products to market with rock-solid reliability and availability, and which could also scale as needed.

The hardware environment embraced a “big box” approach with a few massive servers at strategic locations that offered little relief when significant impacts occurred. This environment required tremendous overhead with constant monitoring and management of server problems.

The IT department at Union Bank was also under pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its overall IT operations. The solution needed to deliver a robust disaster recovery environment with minimal mean-time-to-restore (MTTR) and maximum mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) times. Finally, the solution needed to better leverage Union Bank’s most highly skilled IT workers. By enabling valued staff workers to reduce the day-to-day support required by overhead-intensive legacy systems, productivity would improve, and the bank’s IT department could move from a reaction to proactive support model.

“First and foremost, we needed to improve system availability,” said Choe. “Secondly, we needed to speed time to market of new financial services products. And at the end of the day, we needed to decrease the cost per transaction of delivering services.”

SOLUTION
Union Bank immediately focused on the task of establishing a new and innovative technology environment. The first decision: to create a new open source-based enterprisewide IT platform to obtain improved availability, agility, scalability and reduced TCO (total cost of ownership), while enabling the support of the bank’s growing IT needs and better alignment with the bank’s overall business plan.

“We did three specific things,” said Choe. “First, we migrated our entire Web-based infrastructure over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so we could go from a scale-up to a scale-out architecture. Next, we ported our teller platform over to JBoss. And third, we wrote a brand new Web-based cash management application built on the entire Red Hat technology stack: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss, Hibernate, and SEAM.”

The strategy started at the operating platform level by replacing the aging UNIX based RISC servers with commodity x86 machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and migrating to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform at the application server level. Union Bank initially utilized Red Hat Network to set up centralized, secure management of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Union Bank took advantage of Red Hat Consulting to assist the IT group with the initial design of the first phases of deploying the new architecture and Web-based applications. The bank’s infrastructure and application development teams attended Red Hat Training to learn valuable tools and lessons on integration and migration issues.

The new strategy also encompassed building a new data center that leveraged virtualization technology on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to dramatically reduce the bank’s hardware footprint. “The bank is very serious about its green initiative, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a key part of that,” said Choe.

One of the most strategic projects was to replace the bank’s operating system environment on branch teller systems with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Within just months, the Union Bank development staff was able to create a “silent” JBoss deployment package and distribute it remotely to over 330 production branch servers.

“The JBoss-based teller application has been running successfully at the 330 branch sites ever since,” said Choe, “The small footprint of JBoss has freed up much needed space on each branch server and has laid the ground work for future expansion. We plan to migrate other customer-facing web applications from Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.”

BENEFITS
Union Bank’s innovative approach to its IT re-architecture has resulted in improvements to system availability, scalability and, resiliency, increased ROI, enhanced security, provisioning, configuration management, and improved time to market.

The most significant benefits have been improved system availability and resiliency. Upon migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there have been improvements of the bank’s hardware infrastructure, as seen by improved mean-time-to restore (MTTR), and mean-time-between-failures (MTBF).

The return on investment (ROI) was also substantial. For example, the large RISC machines were running at less than 50 percent capacity. To ensure redundancy, the bank needed to double its hardware investment to allow for fail over. “With Red Hat’s commodity model, we were able to spread the load over multiple machines and reduce our overall spend by approximately 80 percent,” said Choe. “And these savings don’t take into account the reduced maintenance costs of moving to the Red Hat platform, which is easier – and therefore cheaper – to maintain.”

Additionally, because application performance increased significantly under the new JBoss and Red Hat architecture, the bank was able to reduce the time-to-market of new products. The bank was also able to improve customer service by boosting the performance of its teller application. “The success of that project gives us confidence to tackle the rest of our browser-based Web applications with a JBoss solution,” said Choe.

The move from a vertical to a horizontal architecture and process enhancement have improved both system availability and resiliency, which allows the bank to absorb normal glitches without impacting customer transactions. “The reliability of our Web applications has improved to the point where I can go to our business partners and confidently say we have better than ‘four 9s’ availability,” said Choe.

The Red Hat/JBoss solution requires less maintenance and enables Union Bank IT to reduce their efforts on day-to-day support of legacy systems, allowing for better resource utilization. This also helped the IT group move from a reactive to a proactive model more expediently.

Additionally, the bank’s overall cost-per-transaction declined 25 to 40 percent, something that Union Bank’s business centers appreciate. “We have a charge-back system in which our departments pay for the IT resources they consume,” said Choe. “They’ve seen their charges go down month by month.”

“We benefited greatly from Red Hat consulting services as they provided valuable input and assistance in helping us migrate to Red Hat technology and dramatically improved our ability to achieve our goals,” said Choe, “With Red Hat Consulting, we felt there was an immediate knowledge transfer, and we were very satisfied with the level of involvement and quality of knowledge provided to our team.”

And ultimately many of the ongoing benefits that Choe expects to reap in coming years as a result of transforming the bank’s IT operations come from his expanded technology options. “We’ve achieved tremendous cost, reliability, and availability benefits, but in the end it all comes back to the fact that we now have choices when it comes to deploying hardware and software,” he said. “We’re no longer locked into using a particular product or vendor. Open source – and by extension, Red Hat – makes that possible.”

“The high costs and overhead associated with legacy proprietary-software and infrastructure led us to the decision to deploy Red Hat and JBoss open source solutions, and this allowed us to provide core infrastructure and development platforms at a significantly lower cost and at a faster rate,” said Choe, “Our use of Red Hat and JBoss solutions demonstrate creative business innovation through the use of horizontal architecture and the improvements allow Union Bank to continue to increase our customer experiences.”

FAST FACTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Download the case study [PDF]

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.

FAST FACTS

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

Business Challenge: Roll out new, competitively priced educational products and services more swiftly while cutting costs. Build applications upon a base of infrastructure software technology that will position ETS for evolution into cloud models.

Migration Path: Vertically scalable platform to commodity software and hardware platform and proprietary application server technology to Open source technology

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Web Platform, JBoss Developer Studio, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

Benefits: Reduce costs and boost competitiveness by moving to a stable, secure x86-based platform for developing and delivering new assessment products to market more quickly.

With Red Hat products, ETS achieves the following benefits (metrics are based on the current server-hardware and OS support service cost at ETS:

• Cost savings (approximately 40 percent)
• Improved efficiency (approximately 30 percent)
• Improved technology management and standardization
• Improved leverage of development resources
• Better positioned for adoption of cloud computing and virtualization technologies

“We performed extensive in-house performance testing, talked to industry analysts and considered all other aspects of the operating system and application server, including the quality of support, market share and the software and hardware ecosystem. Once we took all these things into consideration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss from Red Hat with support subscription were the obvious choice at that time.”
– Harikumar Rajappan, enterprise IT architect for applications at ETS

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ETS advances quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. The nonprofit organization serves individuals, educational institutions and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English-language learning and elementary, secondary and post-secondary education, as well as conducting education research, analysis and policy studies.

Founded in 1947, ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually — including the TOEFL® and TOEIC® tests, the GRE® test and The Praxis Series ® assessments — in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ETS is widely recognized as the world leader in creating and administering academic assessments that are both rigorous and fair. But in the early 2000s, ETS management realized that limitations in its IT infrastructure were impeding its ability to compete in an increasingly crowded and price-sensitive global educational market. ETS’s dependence on proprietary hardware and software, in particular, was standing in the way of its ability to maintain its position as the premier educational assessment organization.

“A lot of new companies with new technologies have entered the market in recent years, offering solutions that were very aggressively priced against ours,” said Harikumar Rajappan, Enterprise IT Architect for applications at ETS. “We knew we needed to embark upon a different technology strategy to compete effectively.”

ETS had previously used platform were costly and non-portable (the software enabled with vertically scalable features as well as the proprietary hardware required to run them), and also prevented ETS from bringing competitively priced products and services to market in a timely manner.

ETS wanted to heavily move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that would enable it to combine reusable modules of functionality to quickly create new products and services. It also wanted to be able to easily port its applications from one hardware platform to another. “We’re particularly interested in the opportunities offered by cloud computing and virtualization as a way of bringing costs down while improving the scalability, portability, performance, flexibility and reliability of our applications,” Rajappan said.

Additionally, having an utterly stable platform for its mission-critical applications was one of ETS’s top priorities, he added.

“ETS wanted to stay with highest quality and hence design our applications to perform with no error,” Rajappan said. ETS has developed applications that designed to enable instructors to grade tests in a standard manner to ensure fairness. More recently, it has introduced tests that students can take via the Web.

“These applications must be high available due to the nature of ETS services and” Rajappan said.

For example, if a system crashes while a student is taking an online test, the student risks losing all of his or her work. “This would be unacceptable,” he said.

SOLUTION
ETS decided to move from vertically scalable platform to horizontal scalable Linux platform, primarily for reasons of cost, and portability. It chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because the open source operating platform was established as one of the most stable and reliable Linux distributions on the market at that time.

“We performed extensive in-house performance testing, talked to industry analysts and considered all other aspects of the operating system and application server, including the quality of support, market share and the software and hardware ecosystem,” said Rajappan. “Once we took all these things into consideration, Red Hat was the most viable choice.”

Although ETS initially tested the open source waters using the JBoss.org community version, the company today mandates that all developers use JBoss Enterprise Middleware to gain access to Red Hat’s stellar support resources.

ETS is in the process of migrating a majority of its applications from vertically scalable platform and proprietary technologies to Intel x86 boxes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

ETS has also migrated J2EE applications to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform. In addition, the company plans to pilot JBoss Operations Network (JON) as a monitoring and administering tool for J2EE application servers to improve real-time monitoring and proactive resolution capabilities.

BENEFITS
Thanks to its new Red Hat-based strategy, ETS is positioned to compete aggressively in the rapidly evolving educational assessment marketplace. In addition to dramatically reducing its upfront investment in hardware and software, ETS is in process of using the Red Hat products to construct an SOA that will speed time to market of new products and services.

ETS has also achieved its performance goals with Red Hat products. When benchmarking Oracle databases running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and x86 machines compared to Oracle databases on SPARC stations running Solaris [Sun SPARC(4 CPU , 1.2 GHz) to Intel (2 CPU Dual Core, 3.2 GHz)‏], “we found that Oracle running under Linux on Intel machines delivered required performance and that the cost was substantially lower based on the support service cost at ETS,” Rajappan said.

Thus far, ETS’s management has been very happy with the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to the fault tolerance capabilities of the platform. “When you are running your application on a single 8-CPU Sun machine and it fails, you are in trouble,” he continued. “But if you are running it on four Intel x86 machines, even if one crashes, your application stays up.”

And given ETS’s interest in virtualization and cloud computing, Red Hat was the optimal solution. “It would be very difficult to move vertically scalable systems into the cloud, or into virtual machines,” Rajappan said.

Since ETS standardized its J2EE application development IDE to JBoss Developer Studio, the company has experienced improved resource management, application portability, security monitoring and patch updates. Since ETS migrated its J2EE applications to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform, it has also found it much easier to manage application configurations, application deployments and changes in technology lifecycles.

“We have potential opportunities to increase our capacity with the same resources necessary to support deployment and production environments,” Rajappan said. “Now we can better leverage our existing development teams as the applications are becoming more portable within different development teams.”

ETS has also experienced improved technical support and cost savings through Red Hat Global Support Services and Red Hat Consulting, and is very pleased that Red Hat treats it like a true collaborator. “Red Hat representatives have briefed us on upcoming solutions, allowed us to tour their facilities, and provided insight into their product roadmap,” Rajappan said.

This knowledge makes Rajappan feel confident that ETS’s J2EE application architecture vision is aligned with Red Hat’s strategic direction. “Thanks to Red Hat, we feel we are on the right path to the future,” he said.

Copyright © 2009 by Educational Testing Service. All rights reserved. ETS, GRE, TOEFL and TOEIC are registered trademarks of Educational Testing Service (ETS). THE PRAXIS SERIES is a trademark of ETS.

FAST FACTS

Company: Sherwin-Williams Company

Industry: Paint and Coatings

Geography: Global

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware

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

Hardware: x86 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Wall Street Systems

Industry: Financial Services – Software

Geography: Global

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

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

Hardware: Intel® Xeon® based x86 servers

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australian University Carves out Costs and Improves Stability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that CQUniversity, an Australian university with ten campuses and more than 21,00 students and staff, has migrated its critical IT systems to Red Hat solutions. CQUniversity implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite and has since realized significant cost savings, increased performance, ease of management and reliable, ongoing support.

CQUniversity offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on-campus and through distance education. The University relies heavily on the reliability and stability of its IT environment on a daily basis. Its technology powers critical finance, human resources and student-administration systems. With campuses and students located across various time zones, CQUniversity requires an infrastructure that supports standard operation at all hours of the day.

For a number of years, the University serviced its student body and faculty with an extensive HP Tru64 UNIX deployment. As the University continued to expand and demand more from its technology infrastructure, its IT department knew it was quickly outgrowing its existing IT system and needed a reliable alternative.

“We knew the time was coming for a change, particularly when we knew we would need more than eight CPUs for a single database server,” said Bruce Young, PeopleSoft systems engineer at CQUniversity. “HP Tru64 UNIX was a discontinued product, and we didn’t have unlimited funds to throw at the problem, so we were forced to look at more cost-effective alternatives for expanding our capacity.”

In late 2006, CQUniversity’s IT team decided that from both a hardware and software perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its operating system of choice. “We looked at a few different configurations, including Solaris on Sun T2000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell, but it was quite obvious that the HP Blade Servers together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided a winning combination that met our needs,” said Young.

Today, CQUniversity runs 12 HP Blade Servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its databases. Ten additional Blades run CQUniversity’s middleware solutions to support its applications. “Already, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be a fundamental component of our infrastructure, and while we’re running more environments than before, we’re running them a lot faster,” said Young.

The University has also extended Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its research students and staff, using Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat’s reliable systems management solution, to efficiently manage its IT deployment and keep it updated without additional, costly resources. RHN Satellite offers a centralized management tool that enables users to manage server systems more efficiently. With RHN Satellite, CQUniversity has been able to reallocate resources to focus on proactive, high-value roles, instead of reactively maintaining complex systems and lifecycles.

Since putting its production systems into operation in April 2007, CQUniversity has completed the initial stage of its migration. To date, the University has realized immediate savings of approximately $100,000 when compared to Solaris on Sun T2000 servers. In addition to carving out costs, CQUniversity has experienced a boost in server performance, which has increased by between 20 and 30 percent, and enjoyed an easy-to-deploy solution.

“We’re definitely impressed with the initial cost savings and the boost to server performance, and we also expect further long-term savings on licensing costs,” said Young. “The reality is that for our budget, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to do what we set out to complete. With Red Hat solutions, we didn’t have to resort to a poor band-aid job, as would have happened if we had chosen a proprietary solution.”

For the future, CQUniversity has plans to transition additional systems to its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

To read the full CQUniversity case study, visit www.customers.press.redhat.com.

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

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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 and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; 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.

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

FAST FACTS

Company: CQUniversity Australia (Central Queensland University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: Australia

Opportunity: To migrate from an HP Tru64 Unix environment to a cost-effective and performance-boosting platform within Central Queensland University’s budget

Migration Path: HP Tru64 Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite Server on HP 7000c Blade and BL460c Blade Servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle 10g RAC, PeopleSoft Enterprise Applications (Finance & Student Administration), Talent2 Works (HR)

Hardware: HP 7000c Blade System and BL460c Blade Servers

Benefits: Experienced increased cost savings, performance, ease of management, and reliable ongoing support

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
CQUniveristy Australia (Central Queensland University) was founded in 1967 as the Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia). It became the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education in 1971 before a transition phase as the University College of Central Queensland in 1990. It achieved University status in January 1992 and today offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on-campus and through distance education.

CQUniversity has campuses and learning sites in Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Mackay, Emerald and Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast and operates international campuses in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast. Some of the Univeristy’s programs are also delivered in Singapore.

With about 20,000 students and approximately 1,200 staff, the daily functioning of the University relies heavily on the reliability and stability of its IT environment, which powers critical finance, human resources, and student-administration systems. With campuses located across various time zones, CQUniversity requires an infrastructure that supports standard operation for at least 13 hours per day.

OPPORTUNITY
For a number of years, CQUniversity serviced its student body and faculty with an extensive HP Tru64 UNIX deployment. As the University continued to expand and demand more from its technology infrastructure, CQUniversity’s IT department knew it was quickly outgrowing its existing IT system, consisting of a four-node cluster for production with two additional web servers, and a six-node cluster with another three web servers for test development, and needed a reliable alternative.

“We knew the time was coming for a change, particularly when we knew we would need more than eight CPUs for a single database server,” said Bruce Young, Peoplesoft Systems Engineer, CQUniversity. “HP Tru64 UNIX was a discontinued product, and we didn’t have unlimited funds to throw at the problem, so we were forced to look at more cost-effective alternatives for expanding our capacity.”

CQUniversity searched for an updated, scalable, and performance-boosting solution that could fit inside its limited IT budget.

SOLUTION
In late 2006, CQUniversity’s IT team decided that from both a hardware and software perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its operating system of choice. “We looked at a few different configurations, including Solaris on Sun T2000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell, but it was quite obvious that the HP Blade Servers together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided a winning combination that met our needs,” said Young.

Today, CQUniversity runs 12 HP Blade Servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its databases. Ten additional Blades run CQUniversity’s middleware solutions to support its applications.

“Already, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be a fundamental component of our infrastructure, and while we’re running more environments than before, we’re running them a lot faster,” said Young.

The University has also extended Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its research students and staff, using Red Hat Network Satellite (RHN), Red Hat’s reliable systems management solution, to efficiently manage the deployment and keep it updated without additional, costly resources. Red Hat Satellite Server offers a centralised management tool that enables users to manage server systems more efficiently. With RHN Satellite, CQUniversity has been able to reallocate resources to focus on proactive, high-value roles, instead of reactively maintaining complex systems and lifecycles.

BENEFITS
Since putting its production systems into operation in April 2007, CQUniversity has completed the initial stage of its migration. To date, the University has realised immediate savings of approximately $100,000 when compared to Solaris on Sun T2000 servers.

“We’re definitely impressed with the initial cost savings and the boost to server performance, and we also expect further long-term savings on licensing costs,” said Young. “The reality is that for our budget, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to do what what we set out to complete. With Red Hat solutions, we didn’t have to resort to a poor band-aid job, as would have happened if we had chosen a proprietary solution.”

In addition to carving out costs, CQUniversity has experienced a boost in server performance, which has increased by between 20 and 30 percent, and enjoyed an easy-to-deploy solution. “In terms of ease of management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the best choice, and the closest fit to what we were familiar with when using Tru64,” said Young.

For the future, CQUniversity has plans to transition additional systems to its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

FAST FACTS

Company: Salt River Project

Industry: Utilities, Government

Geography: Arizona

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

Migration Path: HPUX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite

Hardware: IBM System z mainframe servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry: Higher Education

Challenge: Quick deployment of servers in an ever-growing network

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Edition with Red Hat Network; Hardware: IBM xSeries servers; Software: Oracle 9i Enterprise Database central administrative computing conversion in the university’s history. Closely tied to the Oracle installation, Program Link is the cornerstone of the University’s initiative for a totally integrated digital campus, so it was imperative that Wake Forest find an operating system that integrated cleanly with Oracle’s total product line.

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Why Red Hat?

The Wake Forest team spent months evaluating different alternatives based on cost, performance, support, manageability, and security. They considered other operating systems, but according to Miller, “In the end, Red Hat proved to be the better option in terms of all our needs.”

Security

Security was top priority for both the DEAC computer cluster and Program Link. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux, combined with Red Hat Network Satellite Server, allowed us to readily secure our systems,” said Seth Stein, Systems Analyst for the Wake Forest UNIX/Linux team. “It is essential that we get updates in place quickly and efficiently to keep the systems and users secure. If we had to compile everything from source, it would be a major drain on our time. With RHN we have all the updates we need. It saves us time because the packages have been compiled and tested. As a result, we can provision a server in 30 minutes.”

Vendor support

Wake Forest gained more confidence when they saw that industry-leading vendors backed Red Hat. “The relationship between Red Hat and Oracle is very important to us,” Stein said. “With Oracle’s total product offering supporting Linux, we can make the case to our managers for deploying the entire Oracle environment on a more easily maintained and secured operating system. In the end, that means we save money by reducing administrative time and maintaining longer uptimes for university business. This produces a major benefit in that the students, who access services and data from those databases, have a much better user experience.”

On the cluster side, research revealed that many cluster vendors actually developed their software on Red Hat products, which created additional stability for the environment. Miller said, “Since the DEAC cluster supports multiple research groups, we use a wide range of software: Gaussian, CHARMM, VMD, NAMD, MEAD, Matlab, BLAST, and ClustalW. Some groups maintain their own software analysis packages and utilize freely available libraries, such as ATLAS, BLAS/LAPACK, MPICH and GSL.”

Cost

The final compelling reason in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux versus another Linux distribution was cost. “The new licensing costs for many of Red Hat’s competitors were more than we wanted to spend,” Miller said.

Impressive results

“The University has an extensive collection of computing facilities that serve both academic and business needs,” said Jay Dominick, Assistant Vice President for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer. “Red Hat has played a critical role in the upgrade of our information infrastructure from proprietary Unix-based servers to open source-based computing and the deployment of a cluster-based supercomputing facility. It has also allowed us to standardize our computing support-both scientific and business computing-around one operating system. The advantages for us in terms of support, availability and disaster recovery are substantial.”

Use of Linux and other open source solutions have grown rapidly across Wake Forest as the choice for not only high-performance computing and enterprise infrastructure, like Blackboard, Banner, and Oracle, but also for online and network services like email, DNS, LDAP, and library search engines.

In production now for two years, DEAC serves as the primary research computing resource for Wake Forest’s main campus, heavily utilized by the Biophysics, Physics, Computational Chemistry, and Biomedical Engineering departments. Researchers from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine also rely on DEAC.

And through their Red Hat academic site subscription, Wake Forest students and faculty have unlimited access to the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family, including client, workstation, and server products.

Advice for getting started

Miller offered this advice for companies contemplating a migration to Linux: “Make sure you attack the problem in a structured manner. Plan your deployment and realize the full potential in Linux as it tends to really outperform in areas you least expect. Start with an architectural approach and test your replication plan to make sure it really works. You’ll save yourself a headache later on.”

“Keep an open mind. The perception that open source is not supported, not ready for mission-critical applications is not accurate,” advised Richard Ray, Systems Analyst for the WFU IS UNIX/Linux team. “The community model is much better. Open source has so many eyes looking at it that it is pretty solid. It just grows and evolves over time.”

The future is open

In regards to future plans with Linux, Miller has at least three upcoming projects that will be based on open source solutions. The first will be a grid-based, web infrastructure compatible with the MCNC statewide efforts (http://mcnc.org) using the Globus Toolkit (v4) and various web technologies including Tomcat, XML, and SOAP. “The second project is to evaluate the Red Hat Global File system (GFS) as a potential GPFS replacement,” he said, “and the third is to convert our custom, home-grown post-imaging environment to cfengine.”

“Our experience with open source and Linux has been extremely positive,” adds Dominick. “Because of the support from Red Hat, we will continue to always consider it as a viable option for our infrastructure. We consider Linux as our primary option for our computing resources. The support from Red Hat makes this an easy decision.”

Industry: Government

Geography: Sweden

Opportunity: To replace costly proprietary software with reliable open source solutions to reduce acquisition and ongoing costs for the organization’s IT department.

Migration Path: Proprietary software and hardware, including Hewlett Packard PA-RISC chip-architecture, HP-UX Unix operating system, Oracle database and BEA WebLogic Server, to open source solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Solution:

Hardware: HP Blade System C-class servers with 300 AMD Opteron Dual Core CPUs

Operating System Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

Application Server: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2

Database: MySQL Enterprise Server 5

Benefits: Experienced reduced TCO, increased reliability, enhanced performance, freedom from vendor lock-in, and expects estimated cost savings of approximately €20 million Euros over the next five years

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

BACKGROUND

Swedish National Police Board (SNPB) is the law enforcement agency for the country of Sweden. The Police Board consists of the 21 Police authorities in Sweden, in addition to the National Laboratory of Forensic Science. The Police Board employees 25,000 staff, including 16,900 policemen and 535 IT department workers.

OPPORTUNITY

The Police Board uses approximately 500 separate IT applications, 70 percent of which are developed in-house by the SNPB IT department. The applications are used to support the functions of the Police force, covering a wide range of activities, including incident reporting, investigations, traffic surveillance, forensics, human resources, and accounting.

The IT department at SNPB has historically used a number of propriety solutions to provide the required services for the organisation’s underlying IT infrastructure. Faced with the large costs associated with licensing, support, and maintenance for its proprietary solutions, the Police Board searched for ways to reduce acquisition and ongoing costs for its IT department.

The long-term goal of the Police Board is to replace all the proprietary software running on its servers with open source solutions. In addition to cost savings on licenses, support, and maintenance, the Police Board would benefit from the open standards, freedom of choice, increased competition between vendors, minimized vendor lock-in, reduced TCO, and increased ROI that is associated with open source solutions.

SOLUTION

As it explored open source solution alternatives to its costly proprietary software, the SNPB IT department embarked on a pilot proof-of-concept project to test the viability of using open source solutions within its organization. Looking to replace its existing BEA WebLogic application server with an open source alternative, the SNPB saw only one realistic option, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

“The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was able to deliver the performance that was required and had the professional support necessary to enable us to confidently deploy the software in a production environment,” said Per-Ola
Sjöswärd, Executive IT Strategist at the Swedish National Police Board. “The IT department required very little convincing to its suitability as it is well known in the industry as the leading open source application server. Additionally, training was not an issue, as many of the in-house developers had been using JBoss technology before. From a development perspective, JBoss fit well into our existing setup, as all of its in-house development is done in Java.”

The pilot scheme for SNPB’s open source architecture was the migration of the Police photo database, named “PICTURE.” The PICTURE database fulfills three roles at the Police Board. First, it is used to store and search for passport photos — all citizens applying for a passport in Sweden must have their photo taken in a police station, which is then stored on the central database. Second, the PICTURE database is used to store and archive photos taken by police officers with digital cameras. Finally, the database is used as a common service for any other police application which requires access to photographs. As the system uses web services, the application can potentially be accessed by a large range of devices, such as mobile devices. In the near future, police officers will be able to use smartphones and PDAs to access the photo database to verify identification while they are out on duty.

The existing PICTURE system was built using entirely proprietary software and hardware, including Hewlett Packard PA-RISC chip-architecture, HP-UX Unix operating system, Oracle database and BEA WebLogic Server. The SNPB’s pilot was built by replacing all of these proprietary solutions with open source alternatives. The new architecture utilizes commodity x86-architecture, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, MySQL and the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which replaced the BEA WebLogic server. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform performs a vital role in the new infrastructure, running the PICTURE application, handling user requests, and accessing the picture database.

System integrator Red Pill provided assistance for the project, with integration and training services. Additionally, the Police Board relies on JBoss for ongoing support and updates through a subscription to JBoss Operations Network.

BENEFITS
During its evaluation of the potential benefits of open source alternatives for the PICTURE system, the Police Board calculated the costs associated with the potential solutions for its IT system. Taking into consideration cost savings from volume discounts, the TCO of the proprietary solution for three years was estimated at €260,000. The team similarly calculated the cost of its proposed open source and commodity x86-architecture solution. At full list price, without allowances for volume discounts for the open source products, the TCO for the open source alternative over three years was valued at €70,300 — a massive 73 percent cost savings when compared to its current proprietary solution.

The SNPB has estimated that by switching to open source solutions and commodity x86-architecture for all new IT-systems, will save approximately €20 million Euros in IT costs over the next five years. With its IT cost savings, the SNPB now has the opportunity to purchase 400 new police cars or hire 70 new system developers during the same five-year time frame.

In addition to costs savings, SNPB’s new open source system has also delivered performance advantages over its former proprietary solution. The average load for the PICTURE system is 3,500 new passport images per day.

Industry: Research
Geography: Arkansas, Tennessee, New York
Opportunity: Replace outdated IT solutions with an affordable, reliable, and performance-boosting solution for mission-critical applications
Migration Path: HP 3000 series to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server on HP Xenon dual-processors
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server
Hardware: HP Xenon 380 dual-processors
Benefits: Reduced IT costs by approximately one-third, experienced high performance, enjoyed ease of installation

Flake Wilkerson operates a number of different survey sites in West Little Rock, AR, North Little Rock, AR, Nashville, TN, and Clifton Park, NY. It is an active member of The Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO), is certified by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), and recently merged with Market Strategies International based in Livonia, MI. Flake-Wilkerson’s clients range in size and function, and it conducts research for one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States.

Opportunity
Flake-Wilkerson’s IT infrastructure was originally based on the HP 3000 series platform, which is no longer sold and for which support is currently being phased out. The research company was also utilizing CfMC, a one-stop research software and services provider, which began developing on Linux solutions. Flake-Wilkerson searched for a reliable, cost-effective solution to host its mission-critical data-collection system and web-based portal system, both of which require constant high-availability.

Solution
Because Flake-Wilkerson’s software provider CfMC was running on Red Hat solutions, the research company began investigating Linux for its mission-critical systems and explored a number of Linux distribution options. To the research firm, reliable support and affordable costs were extremely important considerations. Ultimately, Flake-Wilkerson selected Red Hat solutions for its reputation of impressive support. With Flake-Wilkerson’s multi-system IT infrastructure, Red Hat’s licensing would additionally save the company and its clients from high costs.

“Our data-collection system must be up and running smoothly for business from 8a.m to 11p.m., plus jobs that function overnight. Additionally, our web-based portal system that our clients use to see their research statistics must be up 24×7,” said Gordon Gidluck, Data Collection Manager at Flake-Wilkerson in North Little Rock, AR. “We’ve purchased support agreements from Red Hat to ensure that these mission-critical applications are up and running at all times because we can’t run our business without support for our systems. Red Hat provides the support that we need so that we know if something goes wrong, there are expert resources available that know a lot more about the software than us.”

Benefits
Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Flake-Wilkerson has experienced significant cost savings amounting to approximately one-third of the research company’s original IT costs. “We’ve been able to reduce operating costs and save our clients money because of Red Hat solutions. In addition to cost savings, we have a newer, faster operating system,” said Gidluck.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Flake-Wilkerson is also able to complete enhanced tasks. For example, with its previous HP3000 solution there was a concept of jobs, but after migrating to Red Hat solutions, Flake-Wilkerson replaced the jobs with csh scripts. In many respects, the scripts offer greater functionality. Red Hat solutions have additionally offered Flake-Wilkerson the benefits of ease of installation and peace of mind. “I’ve been very pleased with our Red Hat solution. The operating system worked right out of the box and included everything we needed. Our experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been very positive,” said Gidluck.

For the future, Flake-Wilkerson plans to continue to implement Red Hat solutions throughout its growing IT architecture. Additionally, the Flake-Wilkerson programming team is researching the potential use of JBoss Seam.

Category: Joint Red Hat / JBoss Deployment

Winner: DST Health Solutions

Submitted by: Gary Krasovic

Industry: Health Information Systems

Geography: Birmingham, Alabama

Overview

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

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

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

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

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

3. What was the desired solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry: Healthcare Geography: Boston, MA

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

Migration Path: HP Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

Hardware: HP DL385 with AMD dual-core processors

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

Challenge

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

Solution

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

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

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

Benefits

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

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

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

Everything to gain and little to lose with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Higher Education

Challenge: Regain top notch performance

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Edition with Red Hat Network

Hardware: HP DL-series servers

Software: Oracle 9i Enterprise Database Server, Oracle 9i RAC, Oracle 10g RAC, Oracle 9i AS (J2EE), Blackboard Course Management System 6.1, Several custom-developed applications

Benefits: 60% cost savings over comprable HP-UX solution. Higher performance to keep pace with data storage needs increasing by 1000% annually. Easy transfer of strong Unix skills.

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Technology and the Hallowed Halls

Ranked consistently in the top tier of U.S. colleges and universities, Vanderbilt University is internationally known for its cutting edge technology and research programs coupled with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University is not only central to the city it calls home; it is also central to the economy and cultural development of the entire state. This independent, privately-supported university of just over 11,000 students is the second largest private employer based in the state.

For any world-class research institution, the need to stay at the leading edge of current technologies is paramount. At Vanderbilt, technology leadership permeates every business decision. Because open source technology is built with best practices of software development, it’s appealing to the University. A central MIS staff supports the University and Medical Center, so high levels of performance and reliability are critical to their continued leadership and long term success. That’s why Vanderbilt is migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Departing the 20th Century

Historically an HP-UX and HP3000 shop, Vanderbilt’s MIS department relied heavily on Unix and Oracle for its computing environment. Beginning in 2002, however, it became evident that their HP-UX systems were reaching the end of life in terms of maintenance and performance. The University’s needs for data storage alone were increasing by 1,000 percent each year, and the HP mainframe environment wasn’t keeping pace. In weighing the options, it was important that any new solution be compatible with the Oracle environment which had become a core competency of the MIS team. At the same time, Vanderbilt’s loyalty to HP prompted them to ask HP for pricing on two potential solutions for replacing their aging infrastructure: a newer HP-UX solution, and an equivalent 32-bit platform. The proposal for an Intel and Linux solution came in at more than 60 percent less!

Testing for Success

While Vanderbilt was looking to replace five HP-UX boxes, Oracle was making a big push toward Linux. “That was a factor,” according to Kevin McDonald, Program Manager for System Administration, “that really opened our eyes.” After attending a seminar with Oracle on their Linux-based offerings, “we immediately got four test boxes: three for data warehousing, and one for On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP),” says McDonald. Assistant Director for Architecture and Operations Darryl Boone adds, “One of our OLTP applications is a Java-based product called People Finder, which is becoming integral to the duties of a significant population among our user base. We put the OLTP database on a dedicated Enterprise Linux box running Oracle9i RAC, because high availability was crucial. Our testing went very well, showing us that we could get three times the server power and performance for the dollar, plus greater system availability.”

As McDonald puts it, “The cost advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Editions with Red Hat Network (RHN) are just too attractive to turn down. It’s a huge bargain, and when we considered the added benefits of Red Hat’s support assistance with patching, security, and the RHN GUI console, we felt we had everything to gain, and very little to lose.”

Building on Experience

As Vanderbilt researched alternate solutions, they found the skillsets of their IT staff securely entrenched in the Unix camp, another reason that a broad migration to Linux made perfect sense. “Following our successful tests, we made the decision to implement a broader migration. Looking back, it was a pretty simple task for our experienced Unix administrators,” McDonald remarks. “We took the Red Hat Certified Engineer Rapid Track course, and as soon as we returned to campus, we were able to hit the ground running.”

Since then, Vanderbilt has undergone a steady transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They now have over 30 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.2.1 servers supporting the University’s Finance and Human Resources applications, student applications, and alumni development infrastructure. Recently, a plan was put in place to migrate the Medical Center, which sees 300,000 patients per year, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux too.

The first to make the migration was a data warehousing system in the Alumni Development area. Then, finding Red Hat Enterprise Linux particularly well suited to J2EE applications, they also moved some Web applications from proprietary Sun hardware. More recently, Vanderbilt began implementing Blackboard, an application used to encourage online collaboration in teaching and learning, into their Enterprise Linux environment. It had previously been powered by Windows servers. Looking ahead, Vanderbilt has solid plans to transition it’s “bread-and-butter” PeopleSoft ERP system from the legacy Unix system over to Enterprise Linux.

“Ultimately it’s about performance and TCO. The performance is definitely there with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” explained McDonald. “We saw lower TCO in three areas: initial acquisition of hardware, software purchasing (which is usually priced according to platform), and system administration because our skills easily transferred. And with Red Hat’s Academic offering, we see a big future for Linux at Vanderbilt.”

Industry: Financial Services

Challenges: Handle highly volatile user traffic and accomodate rapid growth. Seamlessly migrate from legacy UNIX-RISC environment. Improve network performance, while simultaneously reducing costs. Eliminate downtime

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle 9i Database & Order Routing System

Benefits: Enterprise Linux on x86 servers generate 10 times more performance than the earlier UNIX-RISC infrastructure. Linux’ inherent security provides a hassle free solution.

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Introduction

Indiabulls is India’s leading retail financial services company with a network of 135 outlets spread across 95 cities. Indiabulls offers a complete range of financial services and products, including equities, insurance and personal loans. The company has a vision of using technology to create a world of smart investors. Indiabulls offers real-time electronic trading capabilities to over 1,30,000 investors across the country, generating a total turnover of Rs 10,000 million daily in cash and derivatives.

Challenges

Indiabulls offers investors across the country a secure, reliable way to carry out their transactions remotely. Using an installable client application provided by Indiabulls, investors can log in to the Indiabulls Professional Network from a remote PC. After their identity has been verified, investors can proceed to send transaction data to the Stock Exchange. A confirmation receipt is returned to the investors after the data has been transmitted. The application server runs an Order Routing System, which manages the transaction lifecycle.

“This end-to-end transaction round trip take place in approximately two seconds; and it’s the Internet that takes up a bulk of the delay,” says Tejinderpal Singh Miglani, CTO, Indiabulls Group.

With approximately 8,000 concurrent investors logged on to the Indiabulls Professional Network at any given time, there is absolutely no room for error. During peak loads, investors generate up to 2,000 requests per minute for which 4,000 responses are triggered in return. This puts the total peak volume of online transactions at 6,000 per minute. The database server logs the entire length of the transaction, handling an average of 25 queries per transaction. Under a peak load of 6,000 online transactions, this translates to approximately 1,50,000 queries per minute.

During volatile market days, there are sudden spikes in usage, which adds a further strain to the database and application server. “We needed a high performance platform that could match our demanding, continuous availability needs,” explains Miglani.

Approximately 45-50 percent of Indiabulls’ total revenue is generated online, which totals to about Rs 1 crore daily. A downtime of a single minute could generate a loss of Rs 50,000 for the company. “Our database and application servers are the lifelines of our online share trading business. Even a performance delay of a few seconds translates into lost revenue for us,” adds Miglani.

Originally, both the Oracle 9i Database and Order Routing System were hosted on HP Tru64 Alpha. As the UNIX platform headed towards uncertainty, Indiabulls decided to migrate to the latest platform available.

As the number of investors grew, Indiabulls was expecting the workload to increase significantly. Indiabulls was also keen to introduce redundancy into its infrastructure to provide reliable services to its customers. The enterprise had an option of continuing with proprietary UNIX-RISC machines, which presented an expensive proposition and an uncertain future. Indiabulls wanted a low cost platform that could run on commodity hardware without any compromise in performance or reliability. “A non-proprietary platform running on x86 servers would give us complete freedom from vendor lock-ins and eliminate the expensive operating costs that proprietary UNIX-RISC machines command – i.e. expensive upgrades, updates, patches and maintenance,” says Miglani.

Solution

After an extensive evaluation phase, Indiabulls found Enterprise Linux to be the perfect choice. “The performance of Enterprise Linux overshadows Windows under benchmark results. Enterprise Linux offers a reliable, robust architecture for which support is easily available. Also, since we were planning to implement Oracle RAC in future, Red Hat was the perfect platform, as it offers the maximum pre-certified configurations for RAC technology,” says Miglani.

On the hardware front, as the 64-bit RISC technology faced limited and extremely slow development over the years, Indiabulls found high-speed, 32-bit x86 servers an attractive proposition to invest in. “Migrating away from the proprietary RISC-UNIX bundle to Red Hat running on inexpensive x86 servers provided the best value proposition for us,” says Miglani.

The backend infrastructure consisting of an Oracle 9i database and an Order Routing System are both powered by Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. The personal loans system which falls under Indiabulls Credit Services has also been hosted on Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. As the Internet Share Trading and personal loans applications were developed in Java, porting to Enterprise Linux was virtually seamless.

Benefits

By using Enterprise Linux, Indiabulls could extract high performance from low cost, 32-bit x86 servers, which were available at less than half the price of their 64-bit UNIX-RISC counterparts. Enterprise Linux running on the x86 architecture has empowered Indiabulls to purchase more servers and generate 10 times more performance than its earlier UNIX-RISC infrastructure.

“Linux’ inherent security and lower vulnerability to viruses has delivered a hassle free solution,” claims Miglani. With absolutely no downtime or performance delays, Enterprise Linux ensures that daily revenues remain intact at Indiabulls.

Future Roadmap

Indiabulls is now looking at standardizing on Linux and is also considering migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 to further increase performance. With growing popularity of Linux on the desktop, Indiabulls is considering to port its client application to Linux. In doing so, it hopes to meet the needs of investors who prefer to use Linux desktops from their home or office in connecting to their services network.

Conclusion

Indiabulls has found a robust and reliable solution by banking its entire online Share Trading platform on Enterprise Linux. With its mission critical needs satisfied by Enterprise Linux running on low cost servers, Indiabulls has managed to procure a cost effective alternative to proprietary technologies.