FAST FACTS

Company: Victoria University of Wellington

Industry: Higher Education

Geography New Zealand

Business Challenge: Replacing an end-of-life proprietary system with a stable and reliable platform that would facilitate lower-cost hardware and ongoing savings on platform maintenance

Migration Path: From Sun Solaris SPARC to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon Processor-based Dell servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Banner (student administration application by Sungard Higher Education)

Hardware: 4 x Dell 2850 servers with Intel Xeon processors

Benefits: Reduced annual maintenance fees, realized cost savings of 75 percent related to hardware, increased application performance, improved security, stability, and reliability

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Situated in the 25,000-strong community of Victoria, for over a century the Victoria University of Wellington has developed a tradition of strong international links in teaching and research, and programmes of national significance and international quality.

With more than 21,380 students and some 2,000 full time staff, the University is committed to providing students with opportunities to acquire, understand, and apply disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, as well as related skills and attitudes, and to enhance their personal development.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
or five years, the Victoria University of Wellington had been successfully running its student administration system, including its primary Banner software application, on a Sun Solaris platform. However, as the infrastructure hardware approached its ‘end of life,’ system administrators were becoming concerned about the ongoing operating costs of the existing system, and the hardware replacement costs that were imminent.

According to Andrew Matthews, Applications Development and Support manager for Central Student Administration, Victoria University of Wellington, as the University approached the replacement phase of the hardware lifecycle, it began to seriously investigate alternative options.

“We were conscious of the high costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of our Sun Solaris platform, and like any organisation, we were keen to reduce expenditure on new hardware,” said Matthews.

“In the interest of finding a viable solution and with enterprise-ready open source solutions available, for the first time we really opened our eyes to possibilities beyond the proprietary world,” he said.

The Victoria University of Wellington was also looking for a solution that would enable it to build more redundancy into the system without requiring additional physical boxes, which were simply too expensive.

SOLUTION
The University’s selection process initially focused on the replacement of the expensive proprietary hardware, and once a decision was made to standardise on the server infrastructure on commodity based servers from Dell. The strong relationship between Dell and Red Hat led the university to evaluate and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its critical applications.

In 2002, the University began the process of migrating its student administration systems from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new platform enabled the University to save money by standardising on four Dell 2850 servers, which run the Banner student administration system and a number of bespoke internal applications that the University developed for its enrollment management systems.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the obvious choice when it came to finding a platform that would meet our requirements for immediate hardware savings and long-term maintenance savings,” said Matthews.

“We knew that Red Hat Enterprise Linux could support our core Banner application, but we were also impressed by Red Hat’s security credentials, given that our system handles a high volume of student records and we have strict auditing guidelines, and it had a proven track record when it came to its support capabilities.”

With the initial migration complete, the University will continue to extend Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a further 13 Dell 1850 application and web servers as they approach end of life in 2010.

BENEFITS
Since putting Red Hat Enterprise Linux into production at the University, Matthews and his team have recognised a number of benefits across the board.

The Victoria University of Wellington’s move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Dell servers has saved the University more than NZ$16,000 (approx. USD$10,330) per annum in support costs for student administration systems, alone.

“In addition to the support costs savings year-on-year, we estimate that we saved approximately 75 per cent in upfront hardware costs,” said Matthews.

With these substantial cost savings, the University could also afford to implement the redundancy system it had hoped to create.

Additionally, in the long term the University has peace of mind when it comes to future hardware replacement cycles. With hardware typically becoming redundant every five years, the University can now realistically afford to manage this ideal lifecycle span.

The performance of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform has also impressed the University.

“Our previous Solaris system delivered a high standard of performance, so when it came to evaluating our new platform the bar was set quite high. We’re very pleased that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform has more than proven itself on the performance front,” said Matthews.

“A solid and reliable operating system is like a silent partner – it’s a critical supporting layer of the IT infrastructure that should just do its job without any hiccups or complaints. As a manager of a number of systems, I am very comfortable with how our Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform runs because it performs well and isn’t a burden on me or the University in any way,” said Matthews.

FAST FACTS

Company: CME Group

Industry: Financial Exchange

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To migrate from a cost-inhibitive proprietary UNIX platform to a Linux alternative in order to reduce costs and increase performance, reliability, scalability, and agility of the systems on which its critical trading platforms handle billions of derivatives trades per year, worth more than a quadrillion in notional value

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Training

Hardware: 4,000 x86 quad-core servers

Migration Path: Sun Solaris on SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on x86-based servers

Benefits: Achieved reduced latency, expanded flexibility, heightened performance, ease of migration and management, and increased scalability while providing cost savings for the systems responsible for processing CME Group’s millions of daily transactions

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market. We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience.”
–Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group.

Download case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
CME Group is the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange. Building on the heritage of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, and New York Mercantile Exchange, CME Group serves the risk management needs of customers around the globe. As an international marketplace, CME Group brings buyers and sellers together on the CME Globex electronic trading platform and on trading floors in Chicago and New York.

CME Group provides the widest range of benchmark futures and options products available on any exchange, covering all major asset classes, including interest rates, equities, FX, commodities, and alternative investments such as weather and real estate. CME Group’s vision is one of ongoing global growth, innovative product development, continually enhanced technology, and the highest level of service available on any exchange.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
CME Group processes millions of transactions per day. In 2008, CME Group’s volume totaled 3.3 billion contracts, worth $1.2 quadrillion in notional value. In order to meet the heavy demands placed on its IT systems, CME Group has rigorous requirements that must be met across the performance, scalability, reliability, ease of use, and costs of its IT infrastructure.

CME Group’s IT architecture must also be agile to scale with rapid system changes in demand and volume. It must reduce latency wherever possible to ensure millisecond response times for its customers, and needs the reliability, scalability, and performance of a mission-critical infrastructure.

Since 1997, CME Group has witnessed a migration of trading volume from the trading floors to its Globex electronic trading platform. Today, 80 percent of CME Group’s volume is handled by its electronic trading platform, with 20 percent of volume still handled on the trading floor.

CME Group previously relied on a proprietary UNIX operating platform, but began looking for affordable, high-performance alternatives in 2002. “Our systems were relying on a proprietary UNIX platform,” said Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group. “As the responsibilities of the UNIX servers grew and the number of applications they ran continued to expand, the cost of running those applications grew too.”

CME Group began investigating alternative platforms and placed an emphasis on examining open source Linux options. After rigorous internal testing, CME Group’s IT team decided that a move to Linux would provide cost, performance, and reliability benefits over its previous Solaris platform. To prepare for the migration, the team created an eight-step plan for moving to Linux.

SOLUTIONS
A key factor in CME Group’s plan to move to Linux was to identify a technology vendor that could provide optimized support for its Linux operating systems. “Our systems are too critical to not have someone to turn to in the event that an issue arises,” said Panfil. “We looked at the players, and Red Hat had the best support infrastructure and the most solid product.”

“We saw the performance advantages of Linux and were looking for ways to reduce costs and increase performance for our customers,” said Vinod Kutty, associate director, Distributed Computing at CME Group. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux fit the bill, and we started to gradually test and deploy it internally. Our organization was an early adopter of open source technologies, and we first deployed Linux in 2003.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the primary operating platform for CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform in 2004. The exchange began by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, and has migrated to all of the latest versions of the leading operating platform through today’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. During the first year in production in 2004, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered a twofold increase in performance and reduced costs for CME Group by 50 percent. Today, 99 percent of its distributed platform runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers support both CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform as well as devices on its trading floors. “We still have a huge interest in the trading floor, but the electronic trading platform is very attractive to those who desire the speed it delivers,” said Panfil. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports both the electronic trading platform and the floor through the server floor displays and hand-held trading devices.”

CME Group’s IT architecture is designed so that every application runs on a minimum of two servers and a disaster-recovery server. “We try to design applications so that failover is seamless and customers don’t see interruptions,” said Panfil.

The move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on commodity x86 hardware goes hand-in-hand with CME Group’s horizontal scalability model. “Red Hat helped us achieve the level of horizontal scalability that we needed,” said Kutty. “Our ability to add incremental capacity to the thousands of servers we maintain daily with the reliability to deal with the great demands of day-to-day trading is only capable because of Linux and our work with Red Hat.”

Given the history and partnering with Red Hat, CME is considering extending that partnership to JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology. “We’ve worked with JBoss architects on solutions in the past and are now determining if JBoss can help us drive the open source software community in the same manner Red Hat has driven the operating system,” said Joel Tosi, lead applications architect for Front-End Systems at CME Group.

Relying on one vendor for support for both its operating system and middleware layers has proved valuable to CME Group. “The coordination between Red Hat and CME Group has been great,” said Tosi. “We knew we wanted to grow the partnership with Red Hat that we had already established and grown for more than six years. With Red Hat, we also knew we’d get the high visibility we wanted for both our operating system and middleware projects.”

BENEFITS
Performance is a key metric by which CME Group is judged by its customers. Many of CME Group’s customers’ highest priorities are reduced latency and speed. “We need a good balance of performance and reliability,” said Kutty. “We need to be able to react very quickly to changes in business. We don’t want fluctuations in performance and cannot have any downtime.”

“One thing we found was that Linux was faster, and speed in this industry is really important,” said Panfil. “We want customers to get as fast a response time as possible, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux we gained speed and reduced costs.”

The reduced costs associated with Linux were an attractive factor to CME Group’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Cost savings was something we were targeting, but we didn’t know how dramatic the cost savings would be,” said Kutty. “We saved during the initial switch from the support perspective, but over time, a combination of Linux and commodity hardware has continued to deliver reduced costs.”

The IT team expects to gain continued cost savings from elimination of licensing with both its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform solutions and through resource reallocation. “We see cost savings not only from both the operating system and middleware infrastructures, but from the productivity of staff too,” said Tosi. “We see productivity gains when our staff has the ability to see into the code and also through the ease of management of the systems.”

CME Group also reduced costs by gaining flexibility with its systems. CME Group strategically executes a multi-vendor strategy in order to avoid vendor lock-in. With Red Hat, it achieved a platform with great flexibility through a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software vendors.

CME Group was quickly able to transition its administrators’ UNIX expertise to its new systems. The team leveraged hands-on Red Hat Training courses to ease the shift of both skills and systems, which resulted in a seamless migration. CME Group also benefited from the skills of its dedicated Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), who offers additional, ongoing Red Hat expertise to the exchange’s IT team. Its TAM is the first line of support and provides one point of contact through which CME Group can collaborate with Red Hat on new technologies and support needs.

“The practical, hands-on nature of Red Hat Training courses provided real value to the transition of our team’s skills to Linux,” said Kutty. “All of our system administrators are Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE).”

CME Group today works closely with Red Hat’s performance teams to demonstrate workloads and tune systems for the great performance and reliability demands it mandates for its mission-critical systems. It builds synthetic workloads that replicate the demands of its systems in order to collaborate with Red Hat for future developments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other products. Together, Red Hat and CME Group form a technology partnership that benefits the entire open source community as well as the vast community of Red Hat customers.

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market,” said Panfil. “We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience. To be competitive in this industry, we have to use the best possible applications, operating systems, and servers. For our mission-critical systems, we leverage Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

FAST FACTS

Company: National City Corporation

Industry: Financial services

Geography: North America

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Red Hat Sales

Download the PDF case study

FAST FACTS

Industry: Airlines/Travel

Geography: The Netherlands

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Healthplan Services (HPS)

Geography: North America

Industry: Healthcare

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

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

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer: Aviza Technology

Industry: Electronics

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning

Business Partner: IBM

Migration Path: Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun SPARC to IBM System x

Business Need: When end-of-life issues on the company’s existing Sun hardware began impacting the availability of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), Aviza sought a cost-effective systems solution from IBM.

Solution: Aviza implemented a two-tier Oracle configuration, with Oracle EBS v11.5.10 on one IBM System x3850 4-socket server and Oracle Database 10g on one IBM System x3950 16-socket server—both running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. IBM System Storage N5200 provides 2.4 TB of data storage. The development environment has six test instances running on five x3850 servers, with a second N5200 providing 7.2 TB of data storage.

Benefits: Aviza Technology achieved a multifold increase in solution performance, enabled new levels of systems scalability and flexibility across the company’s global IT infrastructure, and better positioned the company to meet unforeseen IT system challenges.

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview
Aviza Technology designs, manufactures, sells and supports advanced semiconductor equipment and technologies for the global semiconductor industry. The headquarters office in Scotts Valley, CA, provides IT services to approximately 700 employees in the U.S. and in 9 counties across Europe and Asia.

Running a global business is no small feat in today’s competitive environment. But Aviza Technology has been rising to the challenge since its founding in 2003. With approximately 700 employees worldwide, Aviza designs, manufactures, sells and supports advanced semiconductor equipment and technologies for the global semiconductor industry.

“Our biggest challenge is serving the world 24×7 with reliable hardware and software,” says Dale Spencer, vice president of information technology and corporate services at Aviza. From the company’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, CA, Aviza provides IT services to offices in 9 countries across Europe and Asia.

Aviza had been running Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) on Sun Solaris-based systems, but end-of-life issues began affecting the company’s ability to meet its service and availability goals. “We started having some errors and unexpected failures that resulted in downtime,” Spencer explains. “When you have a worldwide business, you have to resolve these issues around the clock.”

A cost-effective solution
Aviza was looking for a cost-effective solution that would resolve the reliability issues, provide better performance and enable new levels of flexibility across the company’s global IT infrastructure. To meet those goals, the company chose an IBM solution that includes IBM System x3850 and System x3950 servers with the high-end IBM X3 chipset, and IBM System Storage N5200.

“We evaluated a number of other vendors, but we were concerned about uptime, maintenance and the need for specialized skills,” Spencer says. “We were comfortable working with IBM. They were very informed, and they did a good job of laying out the options for us.”

Aviza has a two-tier Oracle configuration, with the production application running on one x3850 4-socket server and the database running on one x3950 with 16-sockets—both driven by Intel® Xeon® dual-core processors. An N5200 provides 2.4 TB of data storage. The development environment has six test instances running on five x3850 servers, with a second N5200 providing 7.2 TB of data storage. IBM Premier Business Partner Sycomp provided installation and support services.

Exceeding expectations
Aviza saw immediate benefits from the solution; in fact, Spencer reports, “IBM System x has exceeded our expectations around reliability and performance.” Spencer and his team are also pleased with the scalability that the System x technology enables. “We may end up with three or four tiers at some point,” he explains, “and this equipment lends itself to that.”

Spencer says the migration from Sun to IBM System x went extremely well. In addition to migrating from Sun to IBM and from Solaris 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Aviza upgraded from Oracle EBS 11.0.3 to 11.5.10 and from Oracle Database 8i to 10g. Aviza runs a full complement of EBS components, including all financials, manufacturing, order management and service modules.

Although the reliability and performance improvements are felt across the company, Aviza’s finance group in particular appreciates the new systems. The department’s monthly cost roll-ups used to take anywhere from eight to 18 hours to run, and now they take less than four.

“We’re getting positive comments from everyone,” Spencer says. “And with the IBM solution, we’re a lot more flexible than we were before.”

For more information about Aviza Technology, visit: www.aviza.com

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: Wall Street Systems

Industry: Financial Services – Software

Geography: Global

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

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

Hardware: Intel® Xeon® based x86 servers

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Partner: Tapasol Solutions

Customer: ServusNet Informatics

Industry: Technology

Geography: Cork, Ireland

Business Challenge: Simplify the deployment of ServusNet Informatics’ Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Process Driven Operations & Maintenance solution at remote customer sites using Tapasol’s provisioning engine based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Migration Path: Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization on Dell x86 servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with built-in virtualization, JBoss Application Server, Liferay Portal, Oracle DB

Hardware: Dell x86 servers

Benefits: Increased deployment speed of ServusNet Informatics’ Process Driven Operations & Maintenance solution; reduced costs of implementing virtualization technology; continuing enhancement to the productivity of developers working on leading-edge Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based software products

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated virtualization capabilities was easy and more cost-effective to implement than other solutions on the market. We reduced the effort it took to provision a server by 92 percent. As the engine underlying both our and Tapasol’s solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is making a significant contribution to our ability to offer a competitive product.””
-Sean Condon, Director of Product Development, ServusNet Informatics

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ServusNet Informatics is an innovative Irish company delivering a Process Driven Operations & Maintenance solutions for the Distributed Generation industry. ServusNet believes that a tipping point has been reached for a broad range of enabling technologies for management solutions. This will allow more sophisticated, targeted, and cost-effective solutions to be delivered to a wide range of customers. ServusNet’s flagship product applies a process-driven approach to operations and maintenance, giving companies a way to improve operational efficiency of Renewable Energy and Distributed Generation assets as well as diagnose and identify bottlenecks and inconsistencies in their existing processes.

Tapasol is a Red Hat ISV partner and leading provider of automated software provisioning solutions, for both the Solaris and Linux server markets. Created in 2007, specifically with the goal of helping customers reduce their costs when deploying software solutions on Solaris and Linux servers, Tapasol’s innovative provisioning framework enables customers to build and provision servers with software – including operating systems, databases, and other third-party products – from a single media source, with minimal operator interaction.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ServusNet Informatics was founded with the belief that huge productivity gains are possible by guiding Operations & Maintenance tasks with well-defined processes, and ensuring that those processes are consistently followed by all stakeholders. In late 2008, the company planned to release its first product – a Linux- and J2EE-based process management system – but senior managers became concerned about the complexity of installing the application at remote customer sites.

“We have to balance the technical support team between building servers out and further development of the support services,” said Sean Condon, director of product development for ServusNet Informatics. The company had two basic choices: either send highly technical personnel out to client sites to install the software – a costly proposition – or hope that customers could do it themselves if guided by comprehensive documentation. “Neither solution was optimal,” said Condon.

SOLUTION
Hoping to automate the deployment process, ServusNet Informatics examined the market for available third-party provisioning solutions. “We’re a software development house, and we did not want to invest resources in configuring boxes,” said Condon. “Our talent and skills are best served concentrating on our core business.”

Given that ServusNet Informatics had built its software using JBoss Application Server, Liferay Portal and Oracle DB running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the Tapasol solution was the perfect match.

Tapasol soon discovered that demand for its Linux-based product was much stronger than for its Solaris one, and “of all the Linux distributions out there, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is by far the most popular,” said Brendan Fidgeon, chief technology officer at Tapasol. “At least 70 percent of our Linux customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he said.

For ServusNet Informatics, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux was not a choice, but an imperative given technological as well as market conditions. “Coming from the telecom world, most of our experience and previous work had been on Solaris,” said Condon. “But after thinking about it long and hard, we realized that in our market there was greater recognition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux than other UNIX systems, like Solaris.”

What clinched the Red Hat decision: the fact that it supported so many third-party products. “When we started building our software, we knew we would use three major components: the Liferay Web-based portal; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and a mediation framework that we’d brought over from the telecom world,” said Condon.

“Liferay supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux; all the scripts in the mediation framework ran on Red Hat Enterprise Linux; and of course JBoss is a division of Red Hat, and so there was a synergy there, that we hope to capitalize on too,” said Condon, “A nice side effect is that Dell Open Manage application which we use for monitoring the Dell servers we recommend is fully supported on Red Hat. We just put everything on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the decision, in retrospect, has worked out well.”

Another of ServusNet Informatics’ requirements was support for virtualized hosting of their product – and Tapasol was able to support this need. “Since so many of our customers possess virtualized servers, we needed to be able to set up our product on both bare metal and on virtualized systems,” said Fidgeon. Because the Tapasol solution leverages the para-virtualization capabilities available with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, this was a major selling point for that product from ServusNet Informatics’ perspective.

BENEFITS
Both ServusNet Informatics and Tapasol reaped significant benefits from building their products using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For ServusNet, the benefits came down to ease of use and cost. “Running our Solaris solution on the SPARC architecture is complex, and support of Solaris on the Dell x86 systems we use is sometimes less than 100 percent,” said Condon. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs flawlessly on these Dell x86 servers, and the support is excellent.” One of the reasons most of its customers had standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was that more hardware and software vendors supported it, and the development environment itself was so rich that they didn’t have buy supplemental compilers and other tools to make it work. Plus, “our people found the Red Hat professionals very easy to get along with – it is a very compatible culture to ours,” he said.

According to Tapasol, one of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that it delivers a completely integrated virtualized environment, including features like Live Migration and Resource Management, at no added cost. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization capabilities was much easier and more cost-effective to implement than the other virtualization solutions on the market,” said Fidgeon.

ServusNet Informatics, which had itself considered using VMware to host its virtualized solution in its own labs, estimated that it reduced virtualization costs by 75 percent by selecting with Red Hat’s leading open virtualization solution. “We’re talking significant savings for the same or even better functionality and performance,” said Condon.

By utilizing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Tapasol provisioning engine, ServusNet Informatics no longer needs to worry about sending engineers onsite, or about customers’ technical capabilities.

“We reduced the effort it took to provision a server by 92 percent,” said Condon. “This is a real advantage, because we need to get machines up and running very quickly when we sign on a new customer. As the engine underlying both our and Tapasol’s solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is making a significant contribution to our ability to offer a competitive product.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Technology

Geography: Headquartered in Seoul, Korea

Challenge: Replace former centralized system with a flexible and affordable solution that enables the ability to scale with website traffic spikes

Migration Path: Sun servers and EMC storage to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PowerEdge servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle databases

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge servers

Benefits: Experienced reduced costs, enhanced performance, and greatly expanded scalability that enables easy deployment of additional servers to handle heightened website capacity

“We’ve really benefited from our new Linux-based system – the solution is less expensive, but displays the same high levels of performance. We have added more effort around IT management, but we’re also able to provide more quality services to our users with the enhanced speed and scalability that we now have access to.” — Pyon Dae-bum, Deputy Manager at Chosun.com

Download [PDF]

Background
Chosun.com is the online version of Korea’s widest-reaching newspaper that reports worldwide news to local citizens. Recently, Chosun.com renewed its main website and began providing blog services to online members. It also opened a 100-word comment section to enable a more interactive site for readers.

Challenge
Chosun.com’s priority is to maintain IT system stability in order to provide continuous, uninterrupted services on its website 24 hours per day so that published news reaches its readers promptly and accurately.

“We formerly deployed a centralized system with Sun’s UNIX server and EMC storage that was focused on stability, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy unpredictable system capacity with a centralized server system, so it was hardly possible to provide flexible services,” said Pyon Dae-bum, Deputy Manager at Chosun.com.

To address these issues, Chosun.com reorganized its former centralized system deployed with UNIX servers into IA server clustering based on a dispersed server system. This solution needed to guarantee not only expanded stability, but also compelling opportunities for cost, performance, flexibility, and scalability benefits.

Solution
Because Chosun.com’s online services, like its 100-word comment section, experience waves of heavy traffic, the system needed to be configured to appropriately scale with demand. To address this, Chosun.com built its system with several 2-way or lower-level servers in order to provide flawless services to users.

After assessing varied solutions, Chosun.com decided to implement its dispersed cluster system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell’s Intel Processor-based IA servers, and Oracle DB Clustering solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was selected for its performance and cost-effectiveness, while Dell hardware was chosen for its stability.

“We felt that the stability of multiple IA servers would provide greater benefits than that offered by the single UNIX server that we were leveraging before,” said Dae-bum. “We were able to deploy a more flexible and stable system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Dell hardware in a clustering environment.”

Benefits
After migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Dell solutions to form an IA server system, Chosun.com was presented with many advantages, including reduced costs, system scalability, and heightened performance. The solution offers a dispersed system environment and allows for enhanced scalability when building additional systems. Now, Chosun.com can deploy additional servers according to increases in traffic with ease of implementation due to the system’s parallel formation.

“We’ve really benefited from our new Linux-based system – the solution is less expensive, but displays the same high levels of performance. We have added more effort around IT management, but we’re also able to provide more quality services to our users with the enhanced speed and scalability that we now have access to,” said Dae-bum.

Because of the affordability and scalability of its new system, Chosun.com plans to incorporate more user-friendly services on its website. It plans to migrate its servers used for advertisements, log analysis, and other internal tasks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well. “There is a great possibility that we’ll consider migrating more and more of our foundational systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux soon,” said Dae-bum.

Airport migrates servers and desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network

Raleigh, NC – August 6, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Munich Airport, recognized for three consecutive years as Europe’s “Airport of the Year” by air transport research company Skytrax, has migrated a large portion of its UNIX servers and desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Airport has since realized heightened performance, cost savings and reliable support.

After experiencing consistent performance issues, Munich Airport conducted detailed cost-analysis research on alternative technology solutions that could boost performance for its IT systems. Results revealed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, already in small use in the Airport’s IT systems, could provide both the savings and performance benefits desired. In 2005, Munich Airport migrated a portion of its servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and in March 2006, it also migrated most of its desktop workstations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. Since September 2006, Munich Airport has equipped more than 30 servers and 40 desktops to run using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat-based systems are also used by Airport’s external mail gateways providing anti-virus and anti-spam functionality.

Munich Airport’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop solution plays an important role in airport operations, providing the control tower with technology to ensure smooth, automated aircraft dispatch and passenger-handling sequences. The system coordinates aircraft parking spaces, taking raw data from the radar system as input, and using this data to calculate aircraft arrival times and coordinate logistical activities on the ground.

For server and desktop administration, Munich Airport also uses Red Hat Network in conjunction with Red Hat Satellite Server. “Red Hat was also able to score with Red Hat Network against other Linux vendors, who had nothing comparable to offer at the time when the decision to select Red Hat was made,” said Hubert Bosl, Unix system administrator at Munich Airport and a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). “In the mid-run, we will also use Red Hat Network to manage the systems which still run on proprietary Unix. Moreover, this management tool was extremely important for our ISO 20000 certification.”

In 2007, Munich Airport served 34 million passengers and was ranked the 28th busiest airport worldwide. It aims to become the most efficient and attractive European airport hub by 2010 and expects that the implementation of Red Hat solutions will help expedite this goal. Currently, Munich Airport is also running another large-scale project together with Red Hat solutions. The main components of the Universal Display System in the Airport’s Terminal 1 has more than 1,400 display devices providing passengers with up-to-date information on arrivals and departures, and these servers are now running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Munich Airport is a worldwide market leader in many respects. We are therefore especially delighted that it deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly on its traffic-critical systems,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president, EMEA at Red Hat. “We are proud that the reliability, manageability and security of our operating system have contributed to the airport’s top rank for service and customer satisfaction.”

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

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

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at 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.

Fast Facts:

Sector: Public Administration

Geographic location: Spain

Opportunity: Replace mixed proprietary IT environment to simplify management and improve system performance and availability

Migration Path: Sun Solaris and IBM z/OS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Tomcat

Hardware: HP, Dell, and Fujitsu Siemens servers

Benefits: Achieved simplified system management and improved system availability, performance, reliability, stability, and platform flexibility

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

BACKGROUND
The Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) is responsible for education – including mandatory basic, secondary, and university education – and also controls science and innovation in Spain. The organization’s main responsibilities include managing the Spanish-grant, student-aid, competitive-examination, teacher-transfer, and research project-grant systems. It is required to provide the back-office systems with the capability to deliver a fast response to a large volume of users, including university students, lecturers, and researchers to companies participating in scientific projects.
“It took one-and-a-half days to resolve a lecture-transfer process with the proprietary system. It now takes five hours with Linux. After moving MEC’s IT systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, performance has increased five-fold in comparison with our previous solution,” said Africa Cabañas, Head of IT for the Ministry of Education and Science.

OPPORTUNITY
After 2004 government elections a number of changes that affected the MEC IT structure were implemented. As part of these changes, the culture area was separated from the department of Education while that Ministry of Science and Technology was dissolved. As a result, a new Ministry, called Ministry of Education and Science, was created, assuming the responsibilities of the former department.

The Ministry, which already had highly heterogeneous environments, assumed 400 new users and 60 new applications after the new structure took affect. The integration with the rest of the systems was completed within a six-month period. Additionally, by assuming responsibility for innovation and with the increase in importance of electronic administration, the department was required to provide a greater number of IT services, requiring more servers. This presented the Ministry with an opportunity to renew hardware and software solutions for its IT systems.

SOLUTION
The IT department began the project to renew its hardware and software solutions by virtualizing a large number of machines and executing a project to consolidate various operating systems into a single platform. The department made the decision to replace its existing Sun Solaris and IBM z/OS proprietary operating systems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 “. We were already using Red Hat solutions in network-service areas, such as perimeter security. It was this positive experience with Red Hat, combined with the knowledge of the operating system within the department, that made us select it as our operating system of choice across the Ministry,” said Africa Cabañas, Head of IT for the Ministry of Education and Science.
The compatibility between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the EMC Storage Area Network (SAN), assured by Red Hat certification, was an important factor in the Ministry’s decision. “All storage-cabin manufacturers certify against certain operating systems and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is normally one of the first. We could not choose just any Linux distribution; it had to be certified, because the SAN is of core importance to our IT infrastructure,” said Cabañas.

The project involved all three architectural levels of MEC’s IT system: database servers, application servers, and web servers. “All systems were built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization. In cooperation with development areas, we migrated everything that could be moved from proprietary environments to Red Hat solutions,” continued Cabañas.

In addition to implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and virtualization, MEC also migrated its application servers to Tomcat and JBoss solutions to benefit from the solution’s superior technology and to extend the freedom of open source to its middleware layer.

The project was executed in two phases. The application servers were migrated to Tomcat and JBoss solutions during 2006. At this point, the Ministry chose 5 JBoss Application Servers as well as solutions from other providers. In June 2007, the Ministry completed the migration of its corporate Oracle database servers.
In addition to its internal data centre, the Ministry had a number of applications and a large database which were located at an outsourced hosting service. During the migration, the ministry found that the hosted service did not provide the performance required, and decided to also move these services to the new Red Hat servers.

BENEFITS
With server consolidation and 24×7 support provided by Red Hat, the Ministry of Education and Science has resolved its previous performance problems and has successfully reduced system-response times.
“We have objective details. It took one-and-a-half days to resolve a lecture-transfer process with the proprietary system. It now takes five hours with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5,” said Cabañas. “After moving MEC’s IT systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization, performance has increased five-fold in comparison with our previous solution.”

For the Ministry of Education and Science, changing from Solaris and z/OS proprietary platforms z/OS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization has resulted in cost reduction, which has enabled increased investment in hardware renewal. Moreover, the administration’s IT system has been simplified after system consolidation.

In terms of citizen services, the new platform is especially beneficial for grant requesters, who can now connect at any time of the day. The virtualization capabilities have enabled increased platform availability, which is clustered and migrated automatically in the event of system failure.

The Ministry’s migration to an open source environment is ongoing. The organization is looking to remove its existing Windows platforms and has plans to test new functionalities on Red Hat solution, including virtualization, GFS, and desktop Linux.

The Ministry’s IT department is satisfied with the results of its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Application Platform. “As the migration only affects the back-end systems, the only difference that end users see is faster response times. Acceptance has been good. Changing from a proprietary platform to Red Hat solutions enables us to guarantee the future agility of the platform,” concluded Cabañas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.specsavers.co.uk

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

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

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

Download this video: [Ogg Theora]

Industry: Financial Trading

Geography: Global

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

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network

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

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

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

Download [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry: e-commerce

Geography: Seattle, Washington

Website:: www.go2marine.com

Opportunity: Determine a reliable, high-performing, and affordable platform on which to base its e-commerce website

Migration Path: Sun Solaris to Red Hat Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network
Hardware: Dell 1950 servers, Web/application servers quad core single CPU, Database servers dual core single CPU

Benefits: Realized reliability, high performance, cost savings, ease of installation and configuration, and enhanced security.

Opportunity
Mariner Supply first launched its e-commerce website on Sun Solaris servers in early 2001, but within one year, it experienced performance issues that affected the uptime of its website. Keith Fetterman, CTO at Mariner Supply, had experience employing open source solutions at three previous companies and recommended that Mariner Supply search for an affordable open source solution that could provide the necessary performance capabilities.

Solution
Mariner Supply quickly decided that Red Hat solutions would fit the performance and budget requirements for its IT infrastructure and in late 2001 rolled out Red Hat Linux 7. “We selected Red Hat software because I really trusted Linux in a space where computers are out on the Internet. Red Hat was one of the leading Linux providers at the time and it provided the necessary power and low cost,” said Fetterman.

In 2004, Mariner Supply decided to move office locations and purchase new, consolidated servers because it was rapidly running out of space for its hardware. “Our rack systems were going into a co-location center and we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 for our Web servers. Our Oracle database servers consisted of Sun’s second-generation Intel servers and we switched those to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 as well,” said Fetterman.

Most recently, Mariner Supply has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on its Dell 1950 servers.

Benefits
Mariner Supply selected Red Hat solutions for a variety of benefits, including reliability, cost savings, ease of support, and security. “We wouldn’t even be here today without open source solutions,” said Fetterman. “We need to rely on the open source service business, like Red Hat, to make our business possible. We need the security of reliable support and can’t afford to keep up with a free Linux flavor, or, if we had choosen a non-Linux platform, we would have had to purchase much more expensive licenses, more servers, and fail over hardware with the proprietary options on the market.”

Additionally, Mariner Supply has enjoyed the reliability and security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network. With Red Hat Network, the company receives timely patch updates and has the security of back ported editions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Red Hat solutions have allowed us to run a very efficient machine. We’ve never have to reboot our machines because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely reliable – I can count on it working all of the time. Even though we have backup servers in case of hardware failure, we have not had to add real-time fail over because Red Hat is reliable and provides incredible uptime.”

For the future, Mariner Supply plans to continue its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “We will always keep Red Hat solutions on our front-line tier. As we grow, Red Hat will grow with us, and as we get more and more orders coming in, we will need to build up our support,” said Fetterman.

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

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

Download [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the desired solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category: Increased Return on Investment
Submitted by: Andrea Zissler: Director, Information Technology
Industry: Education and Information Technology
Geography: Ann Arbor, MI
Website: http://www.proquest.com

Overview

An innovative approach to drive out cost and achieve measurable ROI as a result of implementing a Red Hat solution. Results could include financial return or percentage increase in productivity, yield, efficiency, quality, or uptime performance.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

With approximately 1,240 employees, ProQuest CSA combines the strengths of two leading and historic information technology firms: ProQuest CSA Information and Learning and CSA. As ProQuest CSA, the company provides seamless access to and navigation of more than 125 billion digital pages of the world’s scholarship, delivering it to the desktop and into the workflow of serious researchers in multiple fields, from arts and literature to science, technology and medicine. ProQuest CSA is part of Cambridge Information Group.

ProQuest CSA’s vast content pools are available to researchers through libraries of all types and include the world’s largest digital newspaper archive, periodical databases comprising the output of more than 9,000 titles and spanning more than 500 years, the preeminent dissertation collection, and various other scholarly collections. Users access the information through the ProQuest® Web-based online information system, Chadwyck-Healey™ electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print resources, eLibrary® and SIRS® educational resources, Ulrich’s Serials Analysis System™, COS Scholar Universe, and Serials Solutions resource management tools. Through the expertise of business units Serials Solutions and COS, ProQuest CSA provides technological tools that allow researchers and libraries to better manage and use their information resources.

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

Up until 2000, ProQuest CSA was running on a combination of large, expensive SGI boxes and EMC storage. The company was experiencing exponential growth with additions of 1,000 to 1,500 users per year. With this growth came extremely large jumps in cost for the company’s systems, challenging its bottom line. Additionally, ProQuest CSA began to notice a combination of technical and business challenges in terms of capacity. As soon as the company was able to get one customer past ProQuest CSA’s capacity limits, it had to buy two more boxes and an additional EMC unit, costing the company millions of dollars. Challenged to find a more cost-effective, but still high-functioning solution, ProQuest CSA investigated Linux solutions and chose to migrate to Red Hat Linux 7.2 and eventually Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

The project began in 2000 when ProQuest CSA migrated its large mid-size servers to Red Hat Linux 7.2. The company migrated from a handful of big iron boxes to a number of smaller Intel boxes from HP. The migration included shifting from a few hundred machines to an environment of thousands of machines, bringing up initial worries about how this would change the company’s support model, operations, etc. Having made the decision to shift to Red Hat solutions, migration was a success and ProQuest CSA saw an increase in performance with higher uptime and improved availability. It also enjoyed incremental cost reductions, saved millions and consequently was able to keep costs lower for their customers. Consequently, the company was able to purchase a few additional HP Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and simply add the additional capacity to augment the architecture. With its migration, ProQuest CSA was able to scale horizontally rather than vertically, giving it increased reliability.

What was the desired solution?

ProQuest CSA desired a platform that could provide a low-cost, fast-deploying, performance-boosting and capacity-building opportunity for its digital library archiving products.

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

In choosing to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, third party vendor support was incredibly important. ProQuest CSA’s backup software was unsupported by others and the company wanted the stability of knowing there was support available if necessary. The company considered using SUSE, but chose Red Hat because its solutions were more dependably supported and ProQuest CSA’s System Engineering team had a greater familiarity and trust in these solutions.

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

In recent years ProQuest CSA has experienced great growth and with it, a migration from a mixed SGI Irix and Sun Solaris based infrastructure to one that primarily based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux across multiple product lines. Migration to Red Hat solutions began in 2000 and has continued into the present, providing increased performance and significant cost savings to the company and its customers. With this migration, ProQuest CSA has incorporated Red Hat solutions into every company product line. ProQuest has also used JBoss (currently using JBoss 3.2.7) as the application server for the Middleware component of its online system. JBoss provided an application server that faithfully implemented the J2EE specification along with a modular architecture that allowed us to install and configure only those components that were needed. In addition, JBoss provides additional capabilities, such as Intercepter stacks and Service Archives, that our development staff was able to take advantage of. As a result, the application provides more functionality and monitoring capabilities than would have been available with other non-Open Source application servers. JBoss also provided superior performance in a highly distributed environment.

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

With ProQuest CSA’s original SGI and EMC solutions, the cost to support the company’s 91 million documents was over three million dollars. After migrating to Red Hat solutions on HP hardware, the cost for the same 91 million documents was lowered to just $250,000. After savings millions of dollars migrating to Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA was able to expand its infrastructure to initially include 21 DLs running Red Hat 7.2, allowing the company to support an additional 47 million documents. This initial SGI/EMC to HP/Red Hat migration allowed for a linear growth as capacity warrants. Previously, 45 million documents required an overhaul and roughly $1.5 million to maintain. With Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA was able to become more granular in it’s spending of a mere $15,000 for every seven million additional documents.

Additionally, ProQuest CSA saw a significant reduction in support costs and maintenance contracts for hardware with Red Hat/HP solutions. Instead of spending money on hardware maintenance contracts, the company established a self support model in which it bought extra pieces of the necessary hardware and merely switched the pieces out as failures occurred. This allowed for rapid recovery in an environment with real redundancy at the system level, available to ProQuest CAS for the first time. For previous installations redundancy was out of reach financially. This “parts depot” mindset allowed ProQuest CSA the ability to save capital and enjoy greater flexibility.

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

With its cost savings in the millions, ProQuest CSA was able to gain significant value in allocating this money to other areas of development. Since migrating to Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA can now buy N+1 boxes for a particular product, allowing for a scaling approach that reduces outages. With this approach, if an application goes down, end user capacity is still maintained. Maintenance can be completed on the problem box with only the loss of a node in the grid. Previously ProQuest CSA would have had to buy two big iron boxes to fix such problems. With Red Hat solutions, availability to all of ProQuest CSA’s products was dramatically increased.

ProQuest CSA also saw value in its increased capacity. The company put out a product based on Solaris and discovered that it was unable to perform to capacity. Unfortunately, buying additional Sun boxes to boost capacity was too expensive. With the switch to a Red Hat and HP solution, ProQuest CSA saw a 3 -to-1 CPU increase that allowed the company to launch the same product without the outages experienced with Solaris. Where weeks of outages had occurred with the Sun platform, capacity and performance were perfectly maintained after migrating to Red Hat.

Similarly, ProQuest CSA saw value in terms of its flagship product, ProQuest for Smart Search. The product was migrated to Red Hat solutions in under a year and displayed the features that product management needed. Without Red Hat solutions and a java implementation, it would have been 2-3 years for the same cycle. Even with the greatly reduced time spent on the product, the product launch was a critical success. Eventually ProQuest CSA Smart Search was voted by librarians as the “Best Specialist Search Product” by the International Information Industry Awards, an award given to the most innovative product that best helps a user through the search experience.

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

In 2000 ProQuest CSA replaced its six SGI Origin 2000’s and EMC Sym Storage with 39 HP DL360 (DLs) G-2’s running Red Hat Linux 7.2. Next, ProQuest CSA added additional DLs to support additional documents: in 2003 60 DLs, in 2004 56 DLs and in 2005 51 DLs, all on Red Hat Linux 7.2. In 2006 SSS (Search Sub System) was migrated from DLs to Blades running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Here, 75 Blades replaced 167 product SSS DL servers providing additional capacity, a smaller footprint and a cleaner install.

Additionally, in 2004 ProQuest CSA began testing for a “core” ProQuest migration to Linux. In 2005, 49 SGI servers were replaced by 87 DLs at a fraction of the cost, providing a more realistic environment in comparison to product and a smoother and easier addition of addition resources as capacity warranted it. In 2006 ProQuest CSA replaced 527 DLs with 322 Blades and 28 virtual hosts, all running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

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

ProQuest CSA uses Red Hat support services for limited support engagements, as the company follows more of a self-support model. The ProQuest CSA staff is highly knowledgeable in Linux and while it realizes that sources are readily available, the company has a resilient horizontal layout that allows for ample time to correct outages or other problems internally.

ProQuest CSA has engaged Red Hat support from a sales perspective, looking for guidance on particular smaller projects. When the company rolled out Red Hat years ago, it patched in an XFS kernel before the code became part of the standard kernel. Initially, the base 2.4.x kernel was 20 percent slower than the XFS patch. The application specific performance that ProQuest CSA was accustomed to achieving with the XFS patch was surpassed with the 2.6.9-22 and later kernel. With continued innovation, ProQuest CSA was able to upgrade and match the speeds of the kernel and the XFS patch. Throughout this implementation, ProQuest CSA consulted and received guidance through varied conversations with Red Hat experts. Later in the process, Red Hat traveled to ProQuest CSA offices and conducted Oracle testing and installation and gave guidance on managing Oracle systems. This project was successful, with the help of Red Hat support, and provided a sustainable opportunity to use the platform with cheaper Oracle support.

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

ProQuest CSA did not jump into its Red Hat migration and associated projects lightly and encourages other companies to research potential solutions heavily. The company notes that Linux is very stable, very scalable and provides great performance results. With the company’s initial conversations about expanding from hundreds to thousands of machines, there were concerns of how the company and its IT department would be changed. After investing in Red Hat solutions, ProQuest CSA has seen excellent results and benefits including cost savings and more with the same staffing levels. The company’s only regret is that it didn’t invest in Linux and Red Hat sooner. Their advice? Just do it.

Industry: Digital advertising
Challenge: DoubleClick faced the challenge of developing an infrastructure that is reliable, cost-effective, and most importantly, flexible, in providing choice with hardware vendors in order to avoid vendor lock-in.
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, Red Hat Network, Acronis True Image Server for Linux, Solaris, Windows, Red Hat Global Learning Services – Red Hat Certified Engineer training
Hardware: AMD, Intel, HP
Benefits:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided DoubleClick with flexibility and power of choice in selecting a hardware vendor to avoid lock-in.
• Using Red Hat solutions helped DoubleClick save over $500,000 in hardware costs. DoubleClick now has the ability to handle more work load with fewer CPUs, as it ported 112 CPUs to 64 CPUs.
• With the help of Acronis solutions, DoubleClick enjoyed an easy and quick migration from RHEL 3 to RHEL 4 in one hour.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

Background
DoubleClick is a provider of digital marketing technology and services. Many of the world’s top marketers, publishers and agencies utilize DoubleClick’s expertise in ad serving, rich media, video, search and affiliate marketing to help them make the most of the digital medium. From its position at the nerve center of digital marketing, DoubleClick provides superior insights and insider knowledge to its customers. Headquartered in New York, and with 17 offices and development hubs and 15 data centers worldwide, the company employs more than 1200 people and delivers billions of digital communications every day. Learn more at www.doubleclick.com.Recently, DoubleClick partnered with Acronis, a leading storage management solution provider, to aid in its migration to Red Hat solutions. DoubleClick deployed Acronis’ Linux data migration solution on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one of the first examples of imaging solutions based on Linux. Together, Red Hat and Acronis made DoubleClick’s migration from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 seamless

Challenge
DoubleClick offers a suite of products to meet customer’s digital marketing needs. Serving customers ranging from agencies, advertisers and marketers to web publishers, networks and media websites, DoubleClick is responsible for delivering advertisements and providing management technology that measures the effectiveness of online campaigns.

With the need to consistently serve ads and provide data access, downtime is not an option for DoubleClick. “Uptime is based on millisecond delay and if a server is lost, it must be replaced within an hour,” said Derrick Colon, director of Assistance Infrastructure at DoubleClick. “If we don’t deliver the reports we promise on time each day, our customers will be rightfully upset. That’s why our solutions must be up and available at all times.”

Solution
In the face of these high client expectations, DoubleClick needed an infrastructure that would be reliable, cost-effective and – most importantly – flexible. The company was interested in high-level support for its solutions and the ability to choose and easily switch hardware vendors in order to avoid lock-in. With Red Hat, DoubleClick found the flexibility it was looking for, and an opportunity for high-quality support.

Until 2004, DoubleClick ran an ETL-based application on a Sun Solaris platform. Realizing that the platform offered limited vendor choices, the company decided to investigate alternative platforms that would offer greater flexibility in vendors. As DoubleClick explored potential operating systems for their infrastructure, support also became a large factor in the selection process. DoubleClick did not want to be forced into large modifications, but wanted a functional system, an easy migration and a comfortable support service in which they could have confidence.

DoubleClick narrowed its options to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, both open source solutions. Ultimately, DoubleClick chose the industry leader, Red Hat. “We decided Red Hat was the best way to go because of its strong position in the United States and the fact that it is well supported by HP, IBM and other major players,” said Colon. “We were also very impressed by their flexibility and the big company support that came with the Red Hat solution.”

By choosing Red Hat, DoubleClick was able to work with the hardware vendor and support provider of their choice, Hewlett Packard, which offered DoubleClick the opportunity for cost-savings through hardware.

After choosing Red Hat, DoubleClick ported an equivalent of 112 CPUs on Sun servers running Solaris to 64 Intel and AMD CPUs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, cutting the hardware cost more than half. The current environment is a mix of Red Hat, Solaris and Windows, with Red Hat playing a significant role. Originally running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, DoubleClick upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise 3 and most recently Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 with the help of Acronis True Image Server for Linux.

Acronis, the only company with a cloning method certified to work on Linux, uses its solutions to create an exact copy of a company’s hard disk that allows for an instant restoration of the entire machine including operating system, applications and all data in the event of a fatal system crash, virus attack or other problem. DoubleClick chose Acronis for its cloning ability to aid its migration from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 to 4. By cloning the image of one upgrade and using it for other server migrations, the process is considerably expedited. As a result, DoubleClick was able to migrate its servers from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 seamlessly.

While preparing for the upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, DoubleClick wanted to ensure that should any problems arise, it could revert back to its earlier version of the operating system within two hours. Although the operating system upgrades were executed without a hitch, DoubleClick was protected against unforeseen circumstances. Had there been any unanticipated problems, DoubleClick could have reverted to the old operating system within its required timeframe. This added protection made it easier for the company to decide to upgrade.

Also aiding in the ease of migration were the Red Hat certifications that the DoubleClick team obtained during the original Red Hat implementation. The Red Hat Certified Engineer certification proves an individual’s ability to configure networking services and security on servers running a Red Hat operating system. “When we first migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, we taught ourselves from the ground up,” said Colon. “The existing team went through Red Hat certification training, and today we have about five Red Hat Certified Engineers on our staff who facilitated our migration.”

Benefits

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been an integral part of DoubleClick’s infrastructure for three years. From the start, Red Hat has provided DoubleClick with a reliable and dynamic solution that keeps its technology performing in line with demand. With Red Hat and its partners, the company exercised the power of choice, achieved over half a million dollars worth of cost-savings through commodity hardware, enjoyed reliable support and experienced a scalable solution.

“The flexibility in deciding which hardware vendor I want to work with gives me more choices and more control,” said Colon.

Additionally, DoubleClick has benefited from the scalability that Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided DoubleClick with a scalable solution. “Essentially, this solution has enabled me to do more with less,” said Colon. “Thanks to the tools at our disposal, we are more than able to handle the needs of the company, while enhancing efficiency and productivity.”

“The combination of Red Hat, HP and Acronis is a strong one,” said Colon. “All three organizations bring valuable expertise and resources to the table – HP from a hardware perspective, Acronis in terms of the ease of getting systems up quickly with the option to roll out or back, and Red Hat for maintaining an environment without having to buy thousands of servers with reporting structure.”

Looking forward, DoubleClick plans to upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and is anticipating working with the virtualization features that were incorporated in the latest release. Virtualization, via Xen, enables customers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to run multiple operating system instances on a single physical system and isolate the application stack from the hardware.

Industry: Telecommunications

Challenge: Increase performance and reliability of billing system to ensure timely payments from growing customer base.

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
Software: Oracle Database
Hardware: HP

Benefits: Increased processing speed by 400% over legacy Sun Solaris environment. Cut costs by nearly 50%. Met TransACT’s ‘zero fault tolerance’ policy.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

TransACT Communications, based in Canberra, Australia, specialises in building and operating a fibre optic broadband network. It is capable of delivering a full range of communication services, including video on demand, pay TV, permanent high-speed-internet, and various mobile and fixed line telephone services.

TransACT operates a network reaching over 60,000 homes and 5,000 businesses and has announced plans to extend its network beyond the Australian Capital Territory.

The System

TransACT’s billing data system is linked with the company’s telephony switch. The system transfers data from the switch to the database. This information is then tested for accuracy and completeness before going to accounts payable. The information is critical as telephony accounts for a large portion of the company’s revenue. If the system is inaccurate or down—TransACT doesn’t get paid!

The Challenge

TransACT needed to increase the processing environment and data recovery platform for its billing data system because of a growing customer base and needed a reliable replacement system that could grow with the needs of the business.

The company’s telephony system runs an Oracle Database, so it was important that TransACT chose a platform that was certified to run with the existing system.

“Reliability and capacity are key virtues of the Oracle Database,” said Stephen Supple, Senior Oracle Analyst/Programmer, TransACT Communications. “The database processes hundreds of thousands of records a day very quickly and reliably with no margin for error. We needed to be certain that the underlying operating system could support this heavy work load.”

TransACT chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a number of reasons. “I had seen Red Hat in operation for a number of years and have a greater comfort level working with a Unix/Linux type system. In addition, the Oracle Linux certification meant we wouldn’t have database conflicts and the bottom line cost savings were impressive,” said Mr Supple.

The Solution

TransACT chose to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS on a HP Server in tandem with its previous billing data system.

The billing data system is fairly robust and has fail over systems, but processing lag can have a negative eff ect on billing cycles, revenue and cash fl ow. This system is absolutely critical to the bottom line of the business; as such TransACT has a zero fault tolerance.

For this reason, TransACT conducted extensive testing over a three-month period. The performance of its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers was a dramatic improvement over the older system.

“The processing time was cut down by 400%, so something that previously took us 20 minutes now only takes 5,” said Mr Supple. “That combined with the accuracy of the data – the system was audited by PWC and found to be correct– meant that our choice to move to full production with Red Hat was an obvious one.”

“Our decision to go with Red Hat as the Linux vendor was largely because they are a well-known brand and I am certain that they are a long-term enterprise player.”

The Benefits

Along with increased speed and accuracy, TransACT found the new system to be cost effective.

“We were at a point where we had to migrate the system. With our previous system we would have had to spend approximately $140,000 for one server and one terabyte of storage. With the Red Hat solution, we paid around $80,000 for two servers and 1.5 terabytes. It’s not hard to see why we went with Red Hat,” said Supple.

TransACT not only saved approximately $60,000 in set-up costs, but also will enjoy ongoing savings because the annual subscription for Red Hat Enterprise Linux license is less expensive than Solaris support annually. “The way I see it is we have a better system taking care of our billing data, more scope for growth and all for less cost,” Mr Supple concluded.

Results in better service for Ikea, Hornbach and H&M customers

Installation:

• Two Clusters: Oracle9i RAC each on four Dell PowerEdge 2650’s with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3
• Integration into EMC Storage Area Network
• Red Hat Network Proxy Server for central system management and automatic updates
• Production database on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in virtual machine

Principal results:

• 30% reduction in total operating expenses
• High platform availability for critical business applications
• Not dependent on a single-source manufacturer
• High scalability
• Greater availability allows better service

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

PLUS Finanzservice GmbH in Wiesbaden, Germany is a subsidiary of Scandinavian giants IKEA and IKANO that specialise in customised concepts in consumer loans and credit cards for retailers and mail order businesses. In Germany alone, more than 10 partners including IKEA and Hornbach, rely on PLUS Finanzservice. When you include their European sister companies, more than 40 retailers use their services.

Some of Plus' customers

Critical systems have high requirements

The IT core of PLUS Finanzservice is the Card Management System that displays all business processes. For example, the private and business customer advisers at any IKEA outlet can access the application directly via a Web front-end, while other partners, such as Hornbach, have access via the PLUS staff. Without the Card Management System nothing moves at PLUS or its partners.

Given the critical nature of this system, it’s no wonder that Gerrit-Leonhard Stein, IT Manager at PLUS, was looking for the most efficient and reliable solution when his previous software and hardware contract with Sun expired. The new system would have to offer both high scalability and a substantial cost reduction. Ultimately PLUS decided to switch from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS on Dell hardware. They installed a completely new total cluster solution in August 2004.

Red Hat, Dell, and Oracle exceed expectations

Four Dell 2-processor systems work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, accessing a Storage Area Network (SAN) from EMC. Oracle9i Real Application Clusters(9i RAC) handles the clustering. Red Hat and Dell worked closely together to develop the 9i RAC solution . Under heavy loads the complete system performs extremely well and has achieved performance records. It demonstrated capability in the test phase at PLUS, when compared with new Sun hardware.

Diagram of the PLUS solution

The new cluster system is highly fail-safe. The production environment is mirrored at an external computer centre on the same architecture and synchronized online with the production system. The cluster software handles the failover automatically in the production system. The switch to the mirror system would be made manually if ever necessary.

In addition to the clusters used for critical card applications, PLUS deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux on two test machines. There is also a back-up server based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux that controls the tape library.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux even works in a virtual infrastructure. A production database for communication with a partner works productively in a virtual machine on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. PLUS uses a virtual infrastructure based on the VMware ESX Server for server consolidation. At present about 27 virtual machines are running on eight physical servers.

Continued value through RHN

One element of this Linux deployment is the Red Hat Network (RHN) Proxy Server. The Proxy Server connects PLUS to RHN delivering updates, patches, and errata to customers. With the RHN Proxy Server, PLUScan centrally update and maintain its entire Linux infrastructure. This simplifies administration and ensures that the system is always up-to date and secure.Access to Red Hat Network is included with all Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions.Updates are pushed through RHN as they become available, so PLUS can take immediate advantage of new technologies without waiting for a major release to be able to use them.

We didn’t just want to replace the old systems—we wanted to build a completely new infrastructure with high performance and scalability.

– Gerrit-Leonhard Stein,
IT Manager

Why migrate?

PLUS Finanzservice was pursuing a number of objectives with their Linux migration. The immediate cause was that contract renewal with Sun was imminent. In view of the high ongoing expenses for salaries infrastructure Stein needed to research cost-effective alternatives,particularly because he wished to build a mirrored cluster to replace the old backup solution. “We didn’t just want to replace the old systems, we wanted to build a completely new infrastructure with high performance and scalability. Our goal was to implement an already highly reliable system with an additional disaster recovery option we needed to create an external standby computer centre as a back-up. Production and back-up systems had to have a unified but flexible architecture.”

Why Linux?

Stein wanted both cost reduction and independence from manufacturers. They did, not wanting to be tied to a single hardware supplier, and favored Intel-compatible machines.In addition to Linux, Stein also considered Microsoft in the operating layer.However, he felt that a Microsoft environment represented too high a security risk for such a centralized system that could invite hacker attacks.

Why Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

First of all, PLUS already had positive experience sin other fields with Red Hat; a server that ran so reliably and problem-free that its existence had almost been forgotten. Secondly, Dell recommended the widest possible use of Red Hat software, including certification already obtained by Red Hat for use in a SAN.

Because the new systems have a high level of availability, we can give our customers better service. That is the only difference they would have noticed. You can’t pay a new system a greater compliment than that.

Tests showed that a Linux system would offer improved performance at a significantly lower cost than a comparable system on an updated Sun platform. In all, PLUS Finanzservice was able to reduce costs by nearly 30% over three years for a much more efficient IT infrastructure. Stein put forward another argument for switching from Solaris to Linux: “It is easier to find good administrators for Linux than for Solaris.”

The Red Hat Professional Services team was responsible for installing the production environment. They also installed the operating system platform,installed Oracle RAC, and handled the system tuning. The test system was complete within three weeks. Once testing was complete, Stein’s team and Red Hat only needed four weeks to optimize the entire system.

The system has been in operation since August 2004 and has more than fulfilled expectations: “During installation and the first phase of the production system, the support from Red Hat was everything that could be hoped for in collaboration with a technology supplier: fast, extremely competent, and uncomplicated,” explains Stein. “We now have a system that is not only very reliable and inexpensive but also offers the high scalability that we need to continue growing. The switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel-compatible hardware was a major turning point for us and I am happy that we were able to complete the project with great success. Now we can start thinking about how we are going to expand our use of Red Hat products and services in our business.”

In conclusion Stein said, “Because the new systems have a high level of availability, we can give our customers better service. That is the only difference they would have noticed. You can’t pay a new system a greater compliment than that.”

Leading Italian bank chooses Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Desktop

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Italy

Challenge: Cut costs and grow revenue. Create a cohesive IT infrastructure following massive merger.

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Desktop

Benefits: Escape from vendor lock-in. Lower costs with high reliability and performance. Simplified systems management.

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

The Banche Popolari Unite Group (BPU) is the seventh largest banking group in Italy and the largest co-operative credit bank. With over 2.7 million customers, BPU has a broad, diversified, and complementary customer base. They focus strongly on the retail market, small and medium companies, and the private sector.

It was founded in July 2003 through a merger of two leading banking groups and is now composed of a listed operational parent company, six network banks (BPCI, BPB, Banca Popolare di Ancona, Banca Carime, BP Todi, and Carifano), a network of financial advisers (BPU SIM), and a variety of product companies operating principally in the asset management, bancassurance, leasing, and investment banking sectors.

Following the merger, each individual bank assumed responsibility for two goals that seemed to conflict: to maintain local roots, a characteristic of the co-operative credit banks, and to act on the global market, which is essential in the current economic environment. Integrating the IT infrastructure of the different banking groups was imperative in reaching these goals, and responsibility for this challenge fell to BPU Banca, the operating parent company of the Banche Popolari Unite Group. Ultimately, BPU chose Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® and Red Hat Desktop as the standard platform that would allow the entire group to meet their goals.

When we choose a partner we expect a truly hands-on approach. We don’t have to spend time on activities that Red Hat already offers and can provide us with such as product guarantees, assistance and new releases.

– Gianfranco Lorusso, CIO

History of Linux at BPU

Prior to the merger, Banca Popolare di Bergamo was an early adopter of open source technology, beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They initially migrated to UNIX, making them one of the first banking groups in Europe to use an open source system. Their choices became the basis for IT policy at the current BPU. Several years later, Banca Popolare di Bergamo migrated to Sun Solaris and employed a distributed computing model, which worked perfectly with the model of having each individual branch be the point of contact for customers. Therefore, by the late 1990s, each branch had a Solaris server and a number of UNIX workstations.

Then in 2001, BPU Banca began introducing Linux on the standard client. “It seemed like a natural evolution: the main reason we decided to migrate to Linux is because we wanted to continue with open source but wanted to use a more competitive market platform. And Solaris was a proprietary platform,” said Gianfranco Lorusso, CIO of Banche Popolari Unite.

Within a few months, the Linux and Solaris systems were operating side-by-side. To protect the investments they had already made and to amortise existing hardware, they only substituted Linux for Solaris when the systems would normally have been replaced. As a bonus, Linux allowed them to utilize a less expensive hardware platform with more advanced technological capabilities.

Loft goals following merger

Following the merger in 2003, BPU had four main goals for their technology systems, and they quickly determined that the best way to meet these goals was to learn from the success that Banca Popolare di Bergamo had seen with Linux and other open source systems. Their goals were:

To cut costs

“The main objective of banks in Italy at the moment is to reduce spending and improve balance sheets,” said Lorusso. “After a period with a great focus on ICT investments—remember the year 2000 and the introduction of the Euro—the global situation and the state of the Italian economy over the last few years have forced banking groups to review spending.”

To increase revenue among all branches

“In recent years all companies have focussed on automating processes in order to reduce costs, and since we have now achieved significant levels of excellence it is unlikely that further investments would provide significant returns,” said Lorusso. “However, investments in CRM, Business Intelligence, and other similar applications still increase the effectiveness of business activities and provide excellent results, including increased revenue.”

To avoid vendor lock-in

“A non-competitive environment leads to spiralling costs, not just in an absolute sense but also as a long-term trend because the situation inevitably becomes out of control,” explained Lorusso.

To maintain top-level support and service expected of a world-class financial institution

“A bank like ours works with an IT system that operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and this means that robustness, security, efficiency, and high performance are absolutely essential,” Lorusso said.

Why Red Hat?

BPU Banca is known in the market for its capacity for innovation and its expertise with IT systems. And at least one of the companies had a rich history with Linux and open source systems, so it’s probable that they would have been able to install and manage the entire IT system independently. However, Lorusso says there are two factors that led BPU to turn to Red Hat.

Linux has been very successful at the branches, so we’ve decided to bring forward the timetable for substitution, which we expect to complete by the end of 2005.

“As a bank, it is not the BPU Group’s core business to build and manage operating platforms. We believe certain operations should be handled by specialized companies. Since we are a banking group and there are considerable demands on our time, we would not have been able to devote the necessary time to research, weigh all the options, and take advantage of existing opportunities,” said Lorusso. “What’s more, open source technology is extremely interesting, but in certain areas such as banking, where security and safekeeping are absolutely essential, we felt it was important to be able to count on guaranteed reliability, robustness, and efficiency.”

A fundamental area for BPU Banca in terms of efficiency is competition between suppliers, which has become a high return factor. “A multi-vendor environment that meets market standards makes it possible to compare proposals from different suppliers. It means using standard, open source products that can work with each other and guarantee competitiveness and cost reductions without being tied to any single supplier,” said Lorusso. Red Hat does not restrict or modify the initial open source principles but rather confirms and reinforces them.

Moving forward

“When we choose a partner we expect a truly hands-on approach. We don’t have to spend time on activities that Red Hat already offers and can provide us with such as product guarantees, assistance, and new releases. And they also have the capacity to provide support for staff training and in the subjects and problems that we will face with the operating system,” said Lorusso. “Linux has been very successful at the branches, so we’ve decided to bring forward the timetable for substitution, which we expect to complete by the end of 2005.”

Industry: Manufacturing

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

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

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

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

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

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

Introduction

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

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

Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Roadmap

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

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

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

Conclusion

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