2009 RED HAT INNOVATION AWARD WINNER: MANAGEMENT EXCELLENCE AND INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR

COMPANY: Whole Foods Market

CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Consumer

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a cost-effective operating platform and complementary management solution that would scale with the company’s growth while increasing the security, manageability, and availability of business-critical applications

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: 75 HP x86 servers, 16 virtual servers

BENEFITS: Obtained an easy-to-use and reliable systems management solution that enabled increased productivity and reduced costs by increasing system administrator efficiency; Experienced increased performance and internal-user satisfaction of homegrown applications, including order processing applications.

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BACKGROUND
Founded in 1980 in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods Market (www.wholefoodsmarket.com) is a leader in the natural and organic foods industry and was America’s first national certified organic grocer. In fiscal year 2008, the company had sales of $8 billion and currently has more than 275 stores, nine distribution centers, and more than 54,000 team members in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Since opening its first store in 1980, Whole Foods has experienced rapid business growth and success at both the national and international levels driven by the market’s desire for natural and organic products available in a friendly, neighborhood shopping experience. As the business grew and technology advancements were made, Whole Foods IT department began evaluating technology solutions and vendors that would enable cost-effective expansion of its IT infrastructure while simultaneously meeting the performance demands of its internal technology users.

The company needed a stable and reliable operating system to run its business-critical homegrown ordering systems and its middleware environment. The company also realized the need for a reliable management solution that would enable its IT staff to focus on strategic projects.

SOLUTION
After testing and cost evaluations, Whole Foods selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on commodity HP x86 servers to run some of its critical order processing and middleware environment components. It also selected Red Hat Satellite as its Linux systems management solution.

“As a cost-conscious company, our IT department is always looking at ways to cut costs without sacrificing performance. More and more of our leadership team is recognizing that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an easy way to do that. Take for example our other major UNIX platforms. While they are stable environments, the hardware, license, and support costs are prohibitive. With Red Hat on an x86 platform, it is a significant difference. In addition to the direct cost benefits, Red Hat Satellite’s management tools allow us to focus on strategic business initiatives,” said Bryan Pennington, senior systems administrator at Whole Foods.

Currently, with more than 90 servers deployed, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the largest UNIX operating system environment at Whole Foods. As the performance of the order processing applications and middleware are highly important programs to the internal customers, Whole Foods’ Enterprise Linux deployment is considered mission-critical to its business.

“Our order processing applications are critical to our daily business operations, and if these systems are down, orders are not put through, deliveries could be delayed, and products might be unavailable to our customers,” said Pennington. “With Red Hat, we have experienced the stability, reliability, and performance we expected and required, and have not encountered interruptions to our daily business operations.”

Whole Foods used the expertise of Red Hat Consulting to install and deploy Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat systems. Built on open standards, Red Hat Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities such as management, provisioning, and monitoring for large Linux deployments. Pennington, a Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) himself, found great value in the Red Hat Consulting team. “Our Red Hat Consultant worked with us side-by-side during the installation, answered all of our questions, provided best practices, and has checked in with us routinely since the engagement,” said Pennington.

In 2008, Whole Foods began using Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) to further improve system administration through enhanced system backup and failover services.

BENEFITS
Pennington attributes Red Hat Satellite’s reliable and easy-to-use management capabilities with cutting company costs. “Red Hat Satellite has allowed us to reallocate resources,” said Pennington. “We’ve been able to assign new hires in strategic business roles because Red Hat Satellite’s management capabilities allow me to manage all of the systems without the additional help. Help would be nice, but with Red Hat Satellite, it’s not as needed.”

The increased performance of some of the homegrown applications resulted in increased internal user satisfaction and the opportunity to grow the Red Hat technology presence at Whole Foods.

“Our internal applications running Red Hat Enterprise Linux are critical to our business and we have complete trust in Red Hat technology and support,” said Pennington. “Our decision to select Red Hat was the right one, and we have never looked back.”

With the use of Red Hat Satellite and PXE boot, new servers are able to quickly be provisioned, configured, and available for use by application teams.

The knowledge transfer with Red Hat Consulting was valuable to the Whole Foods IT team, as the information gained and best practices put into place have saved time and resources since deployment.

“Simply put, with Red Hat Satellite I am able to manage the provisioning, updates, patching, and maintenance of our entire Red Hat environment myself, which would be very difficult otherwise. A result is in cost benefits and resource efficiency gains due to our high Red Hat administrator-to-system ratio.”

COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a reliable and cost effective solution for its SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning applications that would scale with its growing computing infrastructure

MIGRATION PATH: UNIX-based SMP platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Network Satellite, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle RAC

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

BENEFITS: Reduced costs, improved performance, increased ability to scale and prepared for future growth, increased energy conservation efforts

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BACKGROUND
Verizon Communications Inc., a Dow 30 company, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. With more than 235,000 employees, Verizon was selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for its consolidation and standardization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning applications to reduce costs, increase performance, and allow the ability to scale for growth. The company now runs its servers more efficiently,with minimal need for additional equipment, and Verizon has further bolstered its conservation efforts.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
With a massive global workforce of more than 235,000 employees, Verizon had an increasing need to consolidate and standardize business applications, most notably, its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Due to Verizon’s acquisition business growth and the challenges of implementing disparate systems, and the need to serve its employees, the company needed to migrate its systems to a highly reliable and stable platform that would scale with the growing computing infrastructure while simultaneously reducing costs.

Verizon’s existing UNIX-based IT architecture lacked the ability to cost-effectively scale horizontally with the constant business growth.

SOLUTION
Verizon identified the need to migrate its large proprietary UNIX-based SMP platform to standardize on an open source operating system running on x86 based commodity hardware to achieve the required scalability, reduced costs, and equivalent performance, in regards to all of its business critical PeopleSoft and SAP applications.

After a thorough evaluation period in 2007 of multiple open source vendors, Verizon selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the standard operating system for the mission critical business application migration project.

Verizon decided to deploy the PeopleSoft and SAP project in phases. The first phase began in 2008 and started the financial modules, taking about 6 months to complete before moving to production. The second phase consisted of the HR and Payroll modules and due to the better than expected results, Verizon plans to continue the consolidation with its reporting, warehousing, and credit card processing applications. The PeopleSoft and SAP applications were migrated from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Network Satellite and Proxy for Management, Provisioning, & Monitoring running on over 300 Dell and HP Intel/AMD based servers and Oracle RAC.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard based x86 commodity hardware, we are able to scale our growth horizontally and meet the needs of our employee base,” said Michael Blake, director, systems and architecture implementation, Verizon, “The fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was certified with all of our third-party applications, such as SAP and PeopleSoft, allowed us to make this decision confidently and proceed quickly, as the costs continued to mount with the previous solution.”

BENEFITS
Migrating the systems off the proprietary UNIX based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowed Verizon to reduce costs, increased its ability to scale and prepared its architecture for future growth, while at the same time providing increased performance.

“If migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply allowed us to scale at a fraction of the cost, and provided the same performance, we would have deemed the migration a success,” said Blake, “But, the real impact on the business was the increased performance with the same applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

In addition to the cost savings and performance increase, Verizon also realized a two-thirds reduction in power usage in its data center. “This is a very real and valuable benefit and will have a direct impact on our energy conservation efforts,” said Blake.

Verizon was able to increase capacity, reliability and security, allowing end users to work more efficiently. Blake commented that, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has eliminated performance surges and through the consolidation the company was able to identify 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.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a trusted product with excellent value and allowed us to extract the value of the new HP C-Class hardware,” said Blake, “We also saw Red Hat Network Satellite as a strategic component to our deployment, it enhances patch management, and security, and without Satellite it would be difficult to manage our systems. Satellite simplifies this process and frees up our system administrators for strategic business projects.”

CUSTOMER ADVICE
“For companies in similar situations, the most critical component is to run tests, document, and confirm the expected behavior of your Red Hat certified applications as this will drastically reduce the complexities of the migration project. We knew that with Red Hat, we could worry less about the application certifications, and focus more on proving the business case to secure buy-in from the entire IT organization. By running tests and executing numerous examples for specific teams, we were able to prove to our internal customers, that not only would the solution work, but it will perform better, and at a fraction of the previous costs,” said Blake.

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

COMPANY:Allianz Australia Insurance Limited (Allianz)

CATEGORY: Carved Out Costs

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: Australia

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

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

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

HARDWARE: IBM System z10 mainframe, HP ProLiant servers

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

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

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

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

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANIES: Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Rivet Logic

CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Publishing

GEOGRAPHY: Cambridge, Massachusetts

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: The HBP’s ability to get new products to market and the quality of the customer experience at its e-commerce site were hindered by a proprietary operating system, a difficult-to-use legacy content management system (CMS), and inflexible customer-facing Web applications, which were negatively impacting the HBP’s revenues and limiting growth

MIGRATION PATH: From a proprietary operating system running a proprietary legacy CMS application to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running the Alfresco Content Management System

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Frameworks including JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, jBPM, Oracle Database, and Alfresco’s open source Content Management System

HARDWARE: Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based Dell™ 2950 multicore servers

BENEFITS: Increased employee productivity, lowered IT operational costs, and increased Web site traffic and e-commerce transactions

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University which publishes a range of content – both print and online – bridging the knowledge gap between academic and the corporate world. It serves three primary markets: academic, enterprise, and individual managers. With more than 250 employees, the HBP’s mission is to explore and improve management practices around the world. HBP’s major Web properties include the online version of Harvard Business Review (hbr.org), Harvard Business Digital (harvardbusiness.org), and Higher Education (www.hbsp.harvard.edu). Rivet Logic and HBP were selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for the use open source solutions from Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco that have enabled increased stability and the ability to develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions that help organizations engage with customers, improve collaboration, and streamline operations. The company offers a full suite of JBoss professional services – including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack. With complementary expertise in the Alfresco content management platform, Rivet Logic offers integrated, content-rich, and Web-oriented architecture (WOA)-enabled solutions that power a new generation of interactive Web properties, enterprise intranet applications, and collaborative Web 2.0 communities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
To stay innovative and develop new products faster, HBP’s business users require the ability to easily access and use content from a variety of systems across the range of HBP business units. But the existing aging content management system was limiting access to only a few trained power users, which routinely resulted in productivity bottlenecks across all units.

To further challenge the workflow and production of HBP products, critical content resided on various shared drives across the enterprise or was locked up in the proprietary system, making it increasingly difficult for HBP to repurpose existing content into the kind of new digital media products that the fast-moving business information marketplace was seeking.

“Strategically, HBP knew it needed to transform itself from a print organization – which what it was for the past 10 to 20 years – to a digital media organization,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic Corporation, a professional open source services and solutions firm hired by the HBP to reengineer the core IT platform and mission-critical applications.

The growing array of aging and disparate legacy middleware and operating systems used to run HBP’s Web sites was also proving increasingly unstable. The system routinely caused integration hurdles, IT bottlenecks, and escalating operational costs due to personnel overhead and software licensing fees. The lack of easy-to-use Web publishing tools hindered the editorial staff’s ability to deliver fresh and innovative content and, consequently, limited HBP’s ability to drive site traffic and therefore the ad revenue and e-commerce transactions that contributed directly to the firm’s bottom line.

In addition to the financial overhead due to high software licensing and maintenance costs, a large percentage of IT operational costs and human resources were spent just keeping the old systems running, leaving little time and resources for developing innovative new products. The proprietary legacy systems were difficult to customize and integrate, and could not scale to keep pace with HBP’s expanding business.

SOLUTION
HBP recognized it needed to replace its proprietary content management system with a robust, yet easy-to-use enterprise-grade content management system that would facilitate access to its high-value content to its business users and integrate seamlessly with existing systems such as enterprise content repositories, search and merchandising tools, e-commerce systems, ad networks, Web analytics, and community-building applications such as blogs.

HBP required a solution that provided increased flexibility around page design and messaging, easy access to digital products, a uniform user experience, easy-to-use e-commerce experience, and improved visitor experience for user registration and session management. HBP also sought a higher level of performance, scalability, and rock-solid stability.

One absolutely non-negotiable requirement: the new solution needed to be built with open source software and an open architecture with an enterprise Java foundation at the core. It also needed to support rapid, lightweight development at the upper layers of the application stack – most notably at the user interface layer and presentation tier. This requirement would focus on HBP’s business goals and on leveraging HBP’s very high-value content and core capabilities to enable future innovation.

This is where Rivet Logic came in. Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions and offers a full suite of JBoss professional services including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack.

Rivet Logic implemented an end-to-end open source solution that delivered on all of HBP’s requirements. HBP’s production ecosystem was built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell 2950 servers with dual and quad core CPUs, running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Apache, Oracle Database, and the Alfresco Content Management System.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was used as a core component for the dynamic content delivery system and e-commerce experience. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the basis for a WOA that enabled straightforward integration with numerous enterprise back-end systems and third-party Web services, including enterprise resource management (ERP), ad servers, XML repositories, taxonomy management, third-party search, Web analytics, and a user ID management system.

In addition, JBoss Seam served as the rich user interface (UI) framework for an intranet application for enterprise content management, and the public-facing Web applications for the online versions of Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, HBP’s e-commerce site at harvardbusiness.org, and HBP’s Higher Education site at www.hbsp.harvard.edu. In all cases, the JBoss Seam applications were integrated with Alfresco for back-end content management. The intranet application utilized Alfresco’s document management (DM) repository, whereas the Web site applications utilized Alfresco’s Web content management (WCM) repository.

JBoss Hibernate provided the persistence layer for all application logic and user-generated content, and jBPM governed workflow for editorial content and publishing processes. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the foundation necessary for HBP’s mission-critical applications that required high performance and scalability. Rivet Logic used a WOA approach for the need for single-sign-on support, while also enabling integration with a variety of systems, including a blogging platform (blogs.harvardbusiness.org), e-commerce, an XML repository (for HBR article content), and community platforms. Integration with a third-party search engine offered powerful faceted search and navigation functionalities. This content delivery approach also met standards-compliant XHTML/CSS requirements, maintained SEO-friendly URLs, and allowed for straightforward integration of Web analytics. Integration between JBoss and Alfresco was streamlined by using free and open source software from Rivet Logic, including the Remote Alfresco API rivet for Alfresco DM integration and the Crafter rivet for Alfresco.

The JBoss Seam intranet application allows enterprise users to:

- Navigate, search, find and retrieve relevant content quickly through a combination of full-text search, metadata search, and content relationship browsing

- Create and enter new content and associate metadata and relationships

- Manage digital rights of product-related media

- Restrict access to certain types of content through role-based user authorization

“The new JBoss and Alfresco based intranet provides an easy way for end-users to search and find content, as the search results deliver detailed content, such as individual chapters, images, author bios and the public-facing HBP site provides visitors a rich experience for navigating and consuming HBP’s digital content,” said Vertal, “The JBoss and Alfresco based Web content delivery system provides the dynamic and feature-rich functionalities HBP needed in a simplified manner by seamlessly connecting the presentation, application and content repository layers.”

BENEFITS
By using Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco open source solutions, HBP has gained platform agility that enables brand management, broader community functionality, and increased site traffic. The JBoss and Alfresco integrated solution has enabled HBP to gain the stability and ease of use it required to empower business end users and integrate with a host of critical applications and systems. With the new system in place, HBP can now develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

From a developer perspective, HBP’s IT department can now focus on value-added development of new application and site features given the open source architecture and the modern WOA infrastructure. Dramatically less time and resources are now spent on maintaining rigid, legacy systems that carried expensive maintenance and software licensing costs.

The new implementation has enabled HBP to better leverage the value of its branded content, including articles, books and book chapters, blogs, podcasts, and videos – easily, quickly and securely.

“Uniting all content across the enterprise led to the rapid development of new digital media products and richer content on HBP’s revenue-generating Web properties,” said Vertal, “With Red Hat, JBoss and Alfresco, HBP has enhanced the visitor experience with improved navigation, along with much faster Web site performance. By offering fresher and more dynamic content and increasing site traffic, HBP has started to expand its revenue opportunities.”

“This project was as mission-critical as they come,” said Vertal. “It encompassed the back-end repository, the front-end application that internal users deployed to create new content and products, and a customer-facing Web application that delivered those products to customers through a variety of channels. Red Hat Enterprise Linux coupled with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform drove a total transformation of the way that HPB approached product development and delivery.”

Business agility has also increased by orders of magnitude, said Vertal. “Because we were on the new platform, in a matter of months we were able to replace the entire e-commerce front end with a much better user experience and more manageable applications.”

The stability of the system has also proven itself. And, looking forward, HBP has plans to begin incorporating social media into the site using collaborative tools and community applications that will enable its employees to become better engaged with customers. “This will allow HBP to build and maintain better customer loyalty across its entire customer base,” said Vertal.

“We utilized leading edge, open source platforms from Red Hat, Alfresco, and Rivet Logic to implement a large-scale, high-value, business-critical solution that spans internal enterprise collaboration applications, public-facing Web properties and communities, and business-critical e-commerce applications,” said Vertal, “We believe this project demonstrates the powerful benefits that commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss and the open source ecosystem is ready to deliver to major enterprises for the converged world of content, community, collaboration, and commerce.”
CUSTOMER ADVICE

“Any enterprise or government agency that is looking to increase employee productivity and/or improve relationships with customers should seek to leverage next-generation solutions that expand their use of content, community, collaboration, and community. And just as the consumer Web 2.0 was built on open source software, these next generation Enterprise 2.0 solutions are being built on enterprise-grade, commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss, Alfresco, and others. All organizations should seek to leverage commercial open source software as much as possible for any and all future enterprise software initiatives,” said Vertal.

“Businesses should remember that software is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Companies should first focus on business requirements and desired results, and leverage the best-of-breed software technologies that will help them get there. And whether the business needs better internal-facing, content-enabled enterprise applications, improved external-facing Web properties, or e-commerce platforms, JBoss software has proven it can help deliver tremendous bottom- line results,” said Vertal.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Construction & Engineering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Discount Tire Company

Industry: Consumer – Automotive Retail

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

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

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

Hardware: 50 Dell x86 servers

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimized Systems

Winner: Infoplex

Submitted by: Sean Kaye

Vertical: Information Technology

Geography: Australia

Website: www.infoplex.com.au

Company Background

Infoplex is one of Australia’s fastest growing and most dynamic IT managed service providers. Based in St. Leonards, Australia, it specializes in delivering an innovative and diversified range of services to both private and public sector clients. Offerings include on-demand storage, disaster recovery, and collocation services as well as software as a service (SaaS). Currently, the Infoplex Group has 55 employees in the firm’s three functional divisions: Infoplex Managed Services, Infoplex Procurement Services, and ThinkSecure Security Consulting. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Leighton Holdings Limited, the publicly listed parent company of Australia’s largest project development and contracting group.

Download [PDF]

Business and/or Technical Challenge

A top business priority for Infoplex has always been effectively managing and storing the data files entrusted to it for safekeeping by its SaaS customers. But the rapid growth of Infoplex’s business caused the size and number of such files to increase to the point where Infoplex’s IT infrastructure was pushed to its limits. It was clear the company needed a more robust and scalable infrastructure to handle its success.

“Our customers need to concentrate on their own core businesses, so it’s up to us to ensure their information systems operate effectively with minimal downtime” said Sean Kaye, managing director of Infoplex. “We needed a platform that could scale as our business continued to grow.”

The particular project that Infoplex needed help with involved building the system to support its largest SaaS offering a leading document management and collaboration system for the Asia-Pacific region’s booming construction industry, and demand for its services was rapidly outstripping Infoplex’s system capacity.

In addition to needing better scalability, there was also a significant cost issue related to reliability. “It got to the point where we had nearly 75 projects running on our system, and some of those projects valued downtime at around $1 million per hour,” said Kaye. “Any system downtime on our part would have a significant financial impact on our customer’s organization.”

Vendor Selection Process

Infoplex’s single most important criteria for selecting a vendor was the quality of support. “We needed the highest quality available – 24 x 7 x 365,” said Kaye. The SaaS application Infoplex was responsible for featured one of the largest Postgres databases in the world, and supported some of Asia-Pacific’s largest construction and engineering enterprises – none of which could afford any downtime. If anything went wrong, Infoplex needed to know that its vendor would respond immediately. “We reviewed a number of alternative Linux distributions but ultimately we kept coming back to Red Hat,” said Kaye. He was particularly impressed with the fact that Red Hat was able to quickly get up to speed on the complex, multi-vendor Infoplex environment, and to provide around-the-clock access to “exceptional” people whenever Infoplex needed them. “We specifically wanted a Tier 1 player, and we got one who exceeded all of our expectations,” said Kaye.

Solution

Red Hat was an integral and essential part of Infoplex’s final solution. The system was ultimately based upon the Dell 6850 Pulsar chipset with a number of Dell 2950 Woodcrest servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and an EMC Symmetrix storage array that supported a massive Postgres database. The application leveraged Infoplex’s existing Cisco network, and Red Hat Network Satellite was installed to manage, deploy and update the system. Looking forward to future growth, Infoplex also intends to investigate a number of technology paths, including that of virtualization. As part of this, the company is currently testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with a view to a potential upgrade in the near future.

Benefits

The benefits of deploying the Red Hat products were substantial. Thanks to RHN Satellite , Infoplex was able to migrate from the old architecture to the new within five days. Additionally, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based system allowed Infoplex to double its system capacity. Today, the increased scalability of the system provides Infoplex with the ability to host more than 300 projects supporting 30,000 users, and almost half a billion documents amounting to 20TB of data. Moreover, the size of the database is doubling every six months, and revenue derived from it has quadrupled since the implementation 12 months ago. “The support and guidance Red Hat gave us meant we could build on a solid foundation from which we could confidently move ahead,” said Kaye. “Prior to implementing the new system, every time a new customer was brought on board, there was considerable concern that it would push the application over the edge,” but “the new environment removed that deep-seated concern entirely,” said Kaye. “Red Hat enabled us to do all that.”

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

The exceptional caliber of Red Hat’s consultants and support personnel is unmatched in the industry, and “allowed us to deploy systems quickly and with the confidence of knowing we’re adhering to industry best practices,” said Kaye. Infoplex has extended its technical skills through Red Hat’s training and certification programs and now has two Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE) on staff. “These very professional people ensure we can offer premium services to customers who require us to host and manage open source applications,” he said. Additionally, Infoplex had a Red Hat consultant on-site for the first eight months of the project, and when the system was complete, “we experienced the best hand-off to our staff I’ve ever experienced,” he said.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Kaye advises picking Tier 1 vendors and ensuring the products selected are certified to work on all of the vendor support lists. “The most painful thing in the world in a project like this is finding out that a network interface isn’t supported by one of your vendors or a driver you’re using doesn’t work with product X,” he said. Another piece of advice; Create a virtual team that includes your vendor partners. “Once you select your vendors, you need to make them part of your team,” said Kaye. “Bring them to all meetings and if possible, give them space in your team’s work environment, and put them on your organizational chart. You get the most out of people when they own the success and failure of a project.” Today, whenever there’s a problem with the environment, Red Hat is the first vendor Infoplex contacts. “They are so knowledgeable across so many vendors and products, that picking up the phone and calling them is the quickest and best way of solving any problem,” he said. “We trust Red Hat’s expertise completely.”

Superior Alternatives

Winner: Booz Allen Hamilton

Submitted by: Christopher Dale

Vertical: Government

Geography: US

Website: www.boozallen.com

Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm with more than 18,000 employees serving government clients from more than 80 offices and has been recognized by major publications as a best place to work. Integrating the full range of consulting capabilities, Booz Allen is the one firm that helps government clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology. Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton was asked by a federal government agency to develop a Microsoft Windows-based proof of concept for a document management system. The initial prototype consisted of both hardware infrastructure design and software development, but as the system’s user community grew, the newly promoted operational proof of concept quickly proved inadequate for handling the increasing volumes of data. After a budget for a “technology refresh” was approved, the Booz Allen Hamilton team decided to redesign the software architecture using JBoss Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Oracle 10G Real Application Clusters (RAC), and enterprise integration best practices. The system was transformed from a two-tier architecture to an event-driven Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) approach, but although the software redesign greatly improved the system’s ability to handle the increasing volumes of data, the physical infrastructure was still a bottleneck that prevented the system to scale as needed. Simply adding servers was not a viable solution because of space and energy constraints. The solution needed to be exceptionally efficient in terms of floor space, power, cooling and total cost. It also had to be easily leveraged for use in other Booz Hamilton consulting engagements.

“It wouldn’t be enough to just show that we had high server utilization,” said Christopher Dale, an associate at Booz Allen. “We had to get a ton of work out of our investment, with enough spare resources to be able to respond to new mission demands at a moments notice.” To do this, Booz Allen Hamilton needed a solution that would allow it to scale its CPU and memory resources independently of its network resources. In turn, network resources would have to scale independently of system storage capacity and throughput. “Finally, we needed to be able to dynamically allocate all available resources to the task du jour without jeopardizing the ongoing mission,” said Dale.

Vendor Selection Process

For the proof of concept, Booz Allen Hamilton needed to configure both an Oracle 9i meta data database and an Oracle 9i Text Index database. As it turned out, the federal agency client already possessed an Oracle site license. Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to “harvest” several Red Hat Enterprise Linux entitlements from a previous client project. “The icing on the cake was that I had experience installing Oracle on Red Hat Linux as a hobby,” said Dale. Once Red Hat Enterprise Linux passed security tests, it was viewed as the clear first choice for the project.

Solution

The solution consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network Satellite and soon Red Hat Directory Server, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, JBoss Operations Network, and, most recently, Metamatrix. The deployed environment consist of a seven-node Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) grid (five Dell 2950s and two Dell 6850s all with maxed-out memory running Red Hat Enterprise Linux housing multiple Oracle RAC databases that performed data warehousing functions, online transaction processing (OLTP) functions and multi-language text indexing functions. There also is an eight-node (Dell 2950s with varying amounts of memory) services grid that acts as a clustered Xen host. The Xen machines on the services grid include a clustered JBoss application server, a Metamatrix node, and many other Xen machines that perform various mission-specific tasks. Both the database grid and the services grid can leverage the storage on the Fiber Channel fabric backed with multiple storage area networks (SANs).

Benefits

By implementing the new hardware and software architecture, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to transition its client from the initial proof of concept system-which had grown to a five-lab, two-building deployment that housed a single system, to an ultra-compact, highly available, high performance environment that enables three complete systems to reside in 1.5 labs. “We now have the capability to use spare capacity for the evaluation and hosting of new commercial off-the-shelf software, government off-the-shelf software, or custom software that previously would have been too expensive to implement even if the software was free,” said Dale. Additionally, using GFS to pool storage resources, Xen and Cluster Suite to pool processing and memory resources and using a bonded, link aggregated, VLANed, Xen-bridged network configuration to pool network resources, “we had successfully delivered to our client an environment that surpassed our goals in compute resource and software development agility,” he said. “In the Federal space, ROI doesn’t really have meaning, but our client was getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

Additionally, the enterprise-class system was capable of handling data volumes that commercial enterprises rarely see. “We can add new capabilities without the purchase of additional hardware, and, because we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we leverage unlimited virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. Indeed, many capabilities can be made available in hours instead of weeks or months. “This is how we delivered 10 pounds of capability in a two pound bag,” said Dale.

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

One of the best value decisions Booz Allen Hamilton made was to establish a subcontract for its government client with Red Hat Global Professional Services group. “Through that subcontracting arrangement, we were able to use a full-time employee slot to bring in a number of highly skilled Red Hat, JBoss, and Metamatrix professionals who accelerated our work at critical junctures,” said Dale. Additionally, as a result of the successes the team experienced in terms of capability delivery, many team members sought out Red Hat, JBoss and Metamatrix training and certification on their own, which further benefited the client in terms of day-to-day value enhancement.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Be aware of all the possibilities. “Looking back to the beginning of the effort to re-engineer our legacy environment, I still cannot get my head around all that has been accomplished,” said Dale, who said that if he had been told a year ago, “This is the list of things your team needs to get done in the next year,” it would have been “soul crushing.” But now, having been through it, he is now finding it difficult not to look at any opportunity without thinking, “No problem, we have an answer for you and it isn’t going to cost you half of what you think. It’s also going to take less time, fewer people and be more capable and agile than you can imagine.”

2008 Red Hat Innovator of the Year

Creative Use Winner: IBM and Raytheon
Submitted by: Keith Bright

Vertical: Information Technology and Government

Geography: US

Websites: www.ibm.com, www.raytheon.com

Company Background

Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN), with 2007 sales of $21.3 billion, is an industry leader in defense and government electronics, space, information technology, technical services, and business and special mission aircraft. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 72,000 people worldwide. Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon, is a leader in joint battlespace integration. It serves as the prime mission systems integrator for all electronic and combat systems for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer program.

IBM is the world’s largest information technology services and consulting services organization, with 2007 revenue of $98.7 billion. As a business, IBM delivers innovation that matters for its clients. As a global enterprise, it values innovation that matters for itself and for the world, addressing some of society’s most complex problems with game-changing business and technology innovation. IBM’s collaboration with Raytheon is one example of its innovative approach to addressing challenges facing government and commercial organizations alike.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

The U.S. Navy required assistance building an open-architecture shipboard enterprise network that would allow seamless integration of all on-board systems. The system, called the Zumwalt Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE), would give the Navy increased ability to use open-source software and commercial-off-the-shelf hardware to build a ship wide infrastructure that supported all ship functions, including combat systems. The computing environment for this complex set of applications required deterministic low latency (real-time) performance. Although Linux’s Real Time capabilities were insufficient in 2005, a vibrant RT community was forming, which welcomed IBM’s participation and contributions. The project schedule was aggressive: time from the formation of the IBM RT team to the first release was just over one year.

Raytheon approached the project by envisioning a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) computing infrastructure comprised of hundreds of x86 servers, all providing RT response from an IBM-developed industry standard RT Java environment running on Linux. This solution would permit developers to write standard Java code that provides the RT response required for the Zumwalt program, reducing the need for special-purpose and legacy languages such as Ada, since the US Navy demanded the use of ubiquitous industry standards with vibrant communities and ecosystems (such as Linux and Java) to simplify complex projects such as the Zumwalt program. “However, when the project started some years ago, we were quite aware that it demanded capabilities that were well in excess of anything Linux had ever provided,” said Keith Bright, program director of IBM’s Linux Technology Center, in Austin. Furthermore, these capabilities were also well in excess of what the community was willing to support at that time. “Choosing a partner capable of addressing such challenges was therefore critically important,” said Bright.

Vendor Selection Process

There were three requirements that drove IBM’s search for a vendor. First, it needed a free and open source software (FOSS) environment with strong market acceptance; secondly, IBM needed to modify the environment to provide tens-of-microsecond response times; and, finally, the project required long-term vendor support.

The first requirement clearly pointed to the Linux kernel. The fact that Red Hat’s Ingo Molnar had recently launched an aggressive RT project for the Linux kernel helped satisfy the second requirement, as IBM and others could contribute to this project using their particular strengths. For example, IBM’s special areas of time-keeping, security, validation, performance, scalability, and read-copy-update (RCU) capabilities were critical to the project. Given the quick growth and progress of this new RT Linux community, an IBM-assembled skunkworks team with Ted Tso as lead architect stood a good chance of meeting the Zumwalt program’s performance and quality needs, even in the face of this program’s aggressive schedule. Finally, the third requirement favored the Linux vendor with the greatest critical mass and staying power – namely Red Hat.

Solution

Red Hat was critical to the success of this solution. Raytheon and IBM depended on Red Hat’s Ingo Molnar’s ability to lead a cutting-edge Linux-kernel project involving a large number of developers from a wide variety of organizations, including academics, industrial companies, other Linux distributions, and system vendors such as IBM. “We expect that the integration of community-developed code into the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux MRG RT Linux distribution will be a key enabler for future projects, permitting a more traditional support model.”

The Zumwalt utilizes an open-architecture shipboard enterprise network that enables seamless integration of all on-board systems. Zumwalt’s computing infrastructure provides computer support for combat systems, internal and external communications, ship control, maintenance, logistics, training, and other deployment functions. The RT Linux kernel provides tens of microseconds response times. IBM’s RT Java provides millisecond response times for garbage-collected code, and sub-100-microsecond response times for “real-time standard Java” (RTSJ) code. The natural integration of the RT code with the garbage collector enables Java’s rich class libraries to be used in RT code, but without source code modifications, preserving Java’s productivity advantages.

Benefits

This project was first of a kind, demonstrating that Linux is now capable of supporting some of the most challenging RT applications, while still running traditional mainstream software on the same computer system at the same time. “We believe that this project also demonstrates that RT processing is going mainstream,” said Bright. The overall impact included improved RT programmer productivity, reduced RT application development times, and reduced overall cost – for example, Zumwalt ramped up to 1,200 software professionals in more than 30 sites in less than two years. “It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to staff this project that quickly – or to maintain that staffing – if we’d used specialized proprietary technologies that required extensive education and training,” said Bright. “The ability to staff up a project so quickly provides Raytheon with an important competitive advantage.

Additionally, basing the Zumwalt program on Ingo Molnar ’s PREEMPT_RT project, which IBM’s Linux Technology Center could build upon, permitted use of a single operating-system environment throughout, greatly simplifying deployment. “Without the PREEMPT_RT project, meeting the Zumwalt program’s schedule would either have required a proprietary RT operating system that lacked Linux’s rich ecosystem, or would have required a mixed environment, with all the complex integration effort that such a mixed environment entails,” said Bright. “Again, Red Hat was the obvious choice.”

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

IBM used Red Hat consulting services in order to get fixes and features in areas of special Red Hat expertise as needed, and, additionally, to help ensure that the RT modifications – IBM’s Red Hat’s, and those of the rest of the Linux community – required for this project went upstream into Linus Torvald’s mainline Linux source tree. “In addition to being the right thing to do, it was also a U.S. Navy requirement to push the code upstream,” said Bright. “This guarantees that future projects will be able to reap the benefits of the good work done by the community.”

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

IBM believes that there are three critical things companies must do to get leading-edge capabilities from FOSS projects: participate, participate, and participate. “If we all contribute to our common goals, there is no limit to what we can accomplish together,” said Bright. And the resulting technology from this particular project is an outstanding example of combining commercial opportunities, Linux technology, and the Linux community. “The participation of Red Hat, IBM, Raytheon, and others within Linux community adds value for everyone, throughout society at large,” said Bright. “Even though the first release to Raytheon was a special one-off fork supported by IBM, the RT technology is being accepted into the mainline kernel, where it will be readily available to everyone. This project has been an exciting technology collaboration, in which we have been proud and happy to participate.”

Enhanced Security Winner: Likewise Software

Submitted by: Rosie Hausler

Vertical: Information Technology

Geography: US

Website: www.likewisesoftware.com

Company Background

Likewise Software is a privately-held company that provides audit and authentication solutions designed to improve security, reduce operational costs, and help demonstrate regulatory compliance for enterprises with mixed network environments. Its product, Likewise Open, which has been certified by the company to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is an open-source enterprise-class solution that addresses the authentication needs of organizations with heterogeneous network infrastructures, by easily and quickly joining virtually all enterprise platforms to common directories such as Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise Open is a great starting point for companies that are grappling with homegrown solutions to solve their authentication challenges. Likewise’s premier offering, Likewise Enterprise, which has been certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, provides enterprises with significant added value by addressing the authentication, audit, and reporting needs of companies running multiple operating systems in their networks. By providing an easy upgrade path for customers that have installed Likewise Open, Likewise Enterprise allows enterprises to use group policies to manage their mixed environments as well as their audit capabilities. Located in Bellevue, Washington, Likewise currently has 50 employees.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

Likewise was founded to create solutions dedicated to improving the management, interoperability, and – most importantly – the security of Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac systems in enterprises with mixed network environments. With the growing popularity of Linux within companies large and small due to its robustness, ease of use, security, and low cost, Likewise needed to certify its application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the No. 1 Linux distribution in the world. “This was critical because our customers want to manage the entire diversity of their platforms to improve security and lower overall costs,” said Rosie Hausler, vice president of marketing for Likewise Software. “Since an increasing number of them hope to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux and still manage everything from their existing legacy directory – generally Microsoft Active Directory – we knew this would provide a great benefit to our customers.”

Vendor Selection Process

Red Hat was an obvious choice to include in the platforms Likewise chose to support in its initial releases of both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise in December 2007. “Red Hat is the open source leader so partnering with Red Hat was an easy decision for us.” said Hausler.

Solution

Users can download all the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-supported versions of Likewise Open directly from the Likewise Website and use it for connecting 118 platforms to Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise recently completed a deployment at a major online retailer that was driven by Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance and included 700 Linux and Unix servers – the majority of them running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “We were able to deploy in three weeks, which helped the customer pass its PCI audit and get more desirable transaction fees from credit card companies,” said Hausler. “The fact that we supported the customer environment of Red Hat as well as AIX and still allowed all 700 non-Windows servers to leverage their legacy directory was key to the deal.”

Benefits

Because Likewise chose to partner closely with Red Hat, Likewise Open is a compelling solution for authenticating Linux and Unix systems to Microsoft Active Directory.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Since Likewise is located in Bellevue, Washington, approximately half of its technical team came from Microsoft. “We struggled a bit with the decision to make our core technology open source, but this has been by far the best business decision we have made since the inception of our company,” said Hausler.

Delivered Value Winner: Nortel

Submitted by: Ernest Szeideman

Vertical: Telecommunications

Geography: International

Website: www.nortel.com

Company Background

By linking hundreds of millions of users the world over, Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering the communications capabilities that make its promise of “business made simple” a reality. Based in Toronto, Nortel provides enterprises and service providers in more than 150 countries with the next-generation technologies they need to support their multimedia and business-critical network applications. Nortel technologies help eliminate barriers to efficiency, speed, and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to their information-whenever and wherever they need it.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

In 2002, Nortel faced a growing demand from its design community for the latest coding tools and the need for an absolutely stable environment in which to deploy them. Nortel began searching for a patching and management infrastructure it could deploy locally on its network to achieve these goals. This was no easy task given the network in question had more than 291,000 nodes located in excess of 350 locations worldwide-not to mention 8,000 subnets housing a myriad of servers and desktops running a wide variety of operating systems that provided access to a broad range of network services.

“We needed a robust patching solution for the machines we were deploying in the field for three key reasons,” said Ernest Szeideman, Nortel senior systems analyst. “First, we needed to ensure security. Next, we wanted to deliver increased capabilities for the systems deployed. And finally, we needed to improve the manageability of the boxes themselves.”

In short, the company needed a robust, scalable patching solution that could be accessed and used similarly across all systems-and that would be deployed locally so that the integrity of its data could be ensured.

In addition to the technical challenges of finding an adequate patching solution, Nortel was faced with another: Despite having considerable Unix expertise and a growing Linux installation, its staff was still relatively new to the Linux world. Thus it needed a true partner to help it support its growing Linux environment and to collaborate with the open-source community in general to support its very heterogeneous infrastructure that contained a variety of systems including proprietary Unix to Windows to big iron systems.

Vendor Selection Process

Already familiar with Red Hat from its work with the company on other projects, Nortel nonetheless considered a number of offerings-including one from Ximian (now Novell)-but in the final analysis Red Hat was selected due to the capabilities offered,manageability of its products, and the ease of installation and use across the board.

Most importantly, Red Hat “enabled us to use Linux within our heterogeneous environment,” said Szeideman.

Specifically about Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Szeideman said, “We wanted a product that would allow us to perform the patching while making certain that no information left our internal network.” Ximian wasn’t as mature, he pointed out. “And it was absolutely key that we partner with a company that had a solid service offering to support our business,” he said. Red Hat was able to do just that.

Szeideman also said that it didn’t hurt that Red Hat had the best independent software vendor (ISV) support of any Linux vendor Nortel was able to identify-a factor that was critical for Nortel’s ability to run its business.

Solution

In 2003, after much collaboration with and input to the Red Hat Network team, Nortel was one of the first Red Hat customers to deploy RHNSatellite along with various proxy servers to service its Red Hat installed base. Today, the company is using version 5.0.1 of Red Hat Network and employs both servers and workstations running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Nortel employs primarily Hewlett-Packard hardware (DL380, DL580, DL385, and DL585 servers as well as xw4300, xw4400, and xw4600 workstations); however, it also uses a significant quantity of Dell equipment. The range of software used on these machines includes Clearcase, Oracle, VMware workstation, and a variety of in-house applications for load builds. Today, Nortel has approximately 2,000 machines registered against its RHN Satellite server.

Benefits

For Nortel, the benefits of deploying RHN Satellite for its patching and infrastructure needs were numerous and immediate. Not only were the initial upfront costs (including licensing and hardware) substantially lower than proprietary Unix solutions, but the solution’s continually upgraded feature set has enabled Nortel to do things like automatically clean up duplicate entitlements (thanks to its exposed API), easily determine the number of each version of RHEL deployed on its networks, and provide patch penetration statistics for SOX and other audit points. The company has also been able to develop a front end to the “up2date” and “yum” commands that enables system administrators to patch supported machines by simply touching a file and running a command-regardless of operating system.

Most importantly, however, RHN Satellite has enabled Nortel to patch its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems seamlessly via its internal networks (providing bandwidth savings even for those outside of Nortel)-and it has done so in a safe, secure, and tested manner.

According to Szeideman, RHN Satellite long ago proved itself in terms of return on investment-so much so, in fact, that the company is now exploring Linux for the desktop. “Although hard-core designers represent the current market for Linux, we’re now exploring the option of going full scale with Linux as a potential replacement for the Microsoft offering,” said Szeideman. “It’s becoming a key to our environment.”

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

Nortel was also one of the first Red Hat customers to make use of a technical account manager (TAM), and it continues to do so very enthusiastically today. In addition, a number of Nortel engineers attended Red Hat Certified Engineer training, which helped the organization work effectively with both Red Hat and its offerings.

Today, Nortel continues to collaborate with its Red Hat TAM from both an image development and a support perspective-and continues to be extraordinarily pleased with the results which not only benefit Nortel, but the open source community as a whole.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Based on Nortel’s positive experience working with Red Hat technical account managers, Szeideman strongly recommends that any large company interested in deploying Red Hat throughout the enterprise should work with a TAM to get this done.

Said Szeideman, “I view the TAM as a cheerleader for us within Red Hat to bring about whatever we require in our environment and to meet our business goals.” These days, said Szeideman, Nortel is “lean, mean, and focused from a technology point of view. We deliver value for our customers-and over the years, we’ve been able to rely on Red Hat to help us with that mission.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the desired solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category: Emerging and Leading Edge Technologies
Submitted by: John Brzozowski, Architect and Principle Engineer
Vertical: Broadband services
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Website: http://www.comcast.com

Overview

Selected for ther use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization capabilities to create a cost-effective, highly efficient testing and certification environment to support the corporate IPv6 initiative.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

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

A public company with 87,000 employees, Comcast Corporation is the nation’s leading provider of cable, entertainment, and communications products and services. The company primarily develops, manages, and operates broadband cable networks and delivers programming content. Comcast currently serves 24.1 million cable subscribers, 11 million high-speed Internet users, and 2.1 million voice customers throughout the US.

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

As Comcast continues to expand existing offerings, add new services, and grow its subscriber base at rapid rates, the company faces an increased demand for IP address space. To accommodate this demand, Comcast has decided to adopt IPv6. IPv6 provides a nearly infinite IP address space it, however, IPv4 and IPv6 are fundamentally different protocols. In order to ensure that the adoption of IPv6 is seamless Comcast’s Back Office Architecture group within the Systems Engineering organization needed to create cost effective and flexible laboratory environments to support the wide range of activities related to the adoption of IPv6. Being able to easily and reliably support the development and testing of essential applications and systems is paramount. Furthermore, virtualized environments can further be leveraged to facilitate cost effective simulation of various events and activities related to the adoption of IPv6. The creation of the Back Office Architecture laboratory environment had to be cost-effective while providing the flexibility and scalability required in an ever-changing test and proof of concept environment.

What was the desired solution?

Comcast’s Systems Engineering Back Office Architecture team required a solution that could be used to satisfy a wide range of requirements related to the adoption of IPv6 particularly those related to systems and the underlying infrastructure. The goal was to create a live environment where internal developers, as well as third-party vendors and partners, could take various applications and make them IPv6 ready. Many of the company’s third-party vendors did not have the resources to create their own development environments, so the ability to provide contained engineering and testing areas within the larger laboratory was important. Additionally, a comprehensive development and testing environment offered the flexibility required to support and rapidly determine the state of efforts related to the adoption of IPv6.

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

Comcast’s Architect and Principle Engineer, John Brzozowski, had worked with competing products in the past. He decided to perform a side-by-side evaluation of other solutions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Because RHEL5 provides built-in virtualization at the operating system level, the solution worked instantly right out of the box. It also enabled Brzozowski to build an unlimited number of guests without having to buy subscriptions for each one. Alternate solutions on the other hand, required learning a separate virtualization solution and were significantly more expensive. Brzozowski chose RHEL 5 because of the enormous cost-savings, ease-of-use, and flexibility it provided.

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

Comcast’s Back Office Architecture team implemented RHEL5 to create a cost-effective, highly efficient engineering and testing environment. Leveraging existing hardware, this team was able to use RHEL5 virtualization capabilities to test different operating systems, applications, and devices utilizing existing resources. Through the use of virtualization a wide variety of operating systems can seamlessly be created in a networked environment. Outside vendors as well as internal developers have secure access to separate virtual machines specific to their objectives, ensuring their products and applications are IPv6 ready and able to support Comcast’s adoption of IPv6.

Brzozowski uses RHEL5 to change his testing environment quickly and easily as needed. He decides whether to create a small number of virtual machines that require greater resources or a higher number of lower end virtual machines. Starting, stopping, and modifying the machines facilitates different testing scenarios. Because RHEL’s para-virtualization capability supports a large number of high-performing guests, Brzozowski was able to utilize lower-end servers for testing.

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

An IPv6 environment using RHEL5 virtualization is able to react and change rapidly to the demands associated with adopting IPv6. Creating an agile, flexible infrastructure expedites the development and testing processes, which is a critical element to the overall IPv6 initiative.

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

Comcast’s Systems Engineering Back Office Architecture team gained a higher return on investment by using RHEL5 to create its lab environment. Without the built-in virtualization capabilities, the company would have had to purchase a significant amount of additional servers. The use of competing virtualization solutions would have required a significantly higher investment. Instead, every dollar saved on subscriptions and physical servers can be better applied to the IPv6 initiative, ensuring thorough testing and rollout of the technology.

The flexibility of RHEL5 also empowered Brzozowski to create the resources he needs on demand. The solution makes it possible to add or subtract virtual machines and guests quickly and easily, building new systems on the fly as the testing environment and requirement change.

Additional benefits Comcast experienced from implementing RHEL5:
* power-savings, resolving a challenge that normally arises from the installation of many nodes
* maximum ease-of-use, flexibility to use both graphical and command line interfaces

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

Two HP DL380 servers running RHEL5. Each server currently supports the virtualization of a variety of Intel based operating systems.

Comcast’s Systems Engineering Back Office Architecture team is planning to transition to higher-performing Intel servers and to increase its virtualization capabilities specifically the number of guests per server. The company intends to test both Windows and RHEL applications and guests to ensure compliance with IPv6. Other Linux or BSD style operating systems will also be virtualized in this environment.

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

Red Hat Support Services played an important role in the creation of the IPv6 testing environment described above. Brzozowski has completed Red Hat Certified Engineer Training, but working one-on-one with the Red Hat sales engineering team helped him implement virtualization in his IPv6 laboratory environment successfully.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?
Virtualization capabilities are powerful, saving money and increasing efficiencies, but each organization has to determine its goals and what the added possibilities mean for them. Requirements will differ from organization to organization and even from project to project. Adopters of virtualization must first identify their objectives then determine how virtualization can benefit them.

Submitted by: Michael Simpson, CTO
Industry: Healthcare
Geography: Louisville, CO
Website: http://www.mckesson.com

Overview

Selected for being the first company to employ the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform to integrate its varied healthcare software applications on one unified platform, saving approximately one million dollars in combined software and hardware costs and allowing the company to provide a more robust and enterprise-ready solution for patient care.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

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

McKesson Provider Technologies is a $2.6 billion division of McKesson Corporation, the largest United-States based corporation specializing in the distribution of healthcare systems, medical supplies and pharmaceutical products. It is the 16th largest company in the United States and the single largest health care company in the world. McKesson’s products and services are designed to meet the information needs of all participants in the integrated health system.

McKesson provides software that powers hospitals. This includes software that aids in the emergency room, radiology department, with patient health care records, during surgeries and more.

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

Over time, McKesson has accumulated 23 applications to help address various in-hospital needs. Each application is on a separate architecture. The company’s goal in this project was to have one large enterprise architecture with a common operating system, common set of databases, while continuing their reputation to deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care.

As a patient enters the emergency room, doctors and nurses have no way to know everything about a patient – the medications they take, the operations they have undergone, etc. McKesson saw the importance in truly knowing everything about a patient and thus wanted to fix this disconnect by creating a messaging system that links to different hospitals, pharmacies and other healthcare systems to help organize a patient’s continuum of care. With this messaging system, a doctor or nurse can see a complete medical history of the patient, giving them the ability to deliver a better quality of care. As a result of bringing together these applications, caregivers in the healthcare industry can log in to an operating suite and all the documentation on a particular patient will flow back into messages from the clinical systems. Through this project, all aspects of the continuum of care of patients will be linked and a patient’s complete story will unfold for doctors and nurses.

McKesson faced a number of technical and business challenges in its project to integrate all of its healthcare software on one platform. One technical challenge came with the migration from mainframe Unix to Linux solutions. The migration itself was not difficult, but convincing the industry it was ready for this change proved challenging. With this change in mind, McKesson had to alter the mindset and education of its customers worldwide. Its customers previously were expected to be knowledgeable about Oracle management applications. Now each must be Linux trained and Oracle-on-Linux trained too.

McKesson also faced a great business challenge. Today, customers from hospitals buy hardware with the knowledge in 3-5 years the hardware will need to be updated or replaced. An example of this depreciation rate is a customer who purchased mainframe hardware just two years ago still only has about three good years of usage left on their systems. McKesson faced the challenge of showing an return on investment for why customers like this should move to a new solution faster, even with a balance of three years on their previous system still available.

Also, from the perspective of the industry as a whole, the world of healthcare is very risk-adverse. Daily interactions with patients are critical and can involve life-or-death situations. To change an already functioning system and process takes a lot of convincing. It also takes time to determine that the new system does not have any adverse affects that could alter patient care. The healthcare community has been using Unix for over 20 years. It’s hard for this community to understand that Linux offers the same support as Unix and can be equally as efficient. McKesson was challenged with ensuring community comfort with this change.

What was the desired solution?

McKesson desired a solution that included clinical care applications running on an open OSS stack, using industrial grade systems. They needed a system to enable safe an efficient care. Mandatories include reliability, scalability, manageability, cost effective, highly flexible and built for ‘what’s next’.

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

Prior to this project, McKesson was already employing Red Hat solutions in isolated areas throughout the company. Red Hat was the Linux solution ingrained in the minds of McKesson employees and had always provided very cost-effective ways to get customers moving forward quickly. McKesson had a good, standing relationship with Red Hat and had already enjoyed a superior product in other areas of its business. Red Hat was offering superior education and support opportunities for what McKesson needed for its current project. In addition to Red Hat, McKesson also chose to work with JBoss solutions because they were less expensive and still offered equal, if not better, solutions in comparison to other commercial applications on the market.

In February 2007, McKesson was the first to take advantage of the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform. The platform packages the Red Hat suite of open source products and services, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux updates via the Red Hat Network. It also includes dedicated customer support and services, as well as other open source technologies such as JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This complete solution provides superior levels of stability and performance as well as predictable maintenance cycles. The Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform fits seamlessly with McKesson’s commitment to product quality and customer service.

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

Red Hat and JBoss products are the cornerstone of the chosen McKesson solution. McKesson is the first company to adopt the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform. The company was able to overcome its business and technical challenges because of the flexibility of this Red Hat solution. Because of the ability to run Linux on most environments, McKesson was able to subset to put multiple Red Hat sessions on its boxes. Also with Red Hat’s flexibility, McKesson was able to use its existing hardware.

With Red Hat and JBoss solutions, McKesson had the ability to interoperate with all of the applications that were interfaced and not integrated. Now, McKesson has the ability to integrate its applications without having to change all of the code, rewriting as all one application. All information about a patient’s full medical history is now available to healthcare workers who are treating this patient.

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

McKesson was the first company to adopt the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform. It allows McKesson to offer solutions for hundreds of dollars cheaper than before. In large mainframe environments, McKesson saved a million dollars in combined software and hardware costs for customers. The company offered not only a less expensive, solution, but also a better solution when considering the excellent support provided by Red Hat and JBoss. Overall, the total cost of ownership of the McKesson solution was significantly lowered. As a result, the solutions are able to be used in smaller footprint hospitals, making the integration of applications consistent among all hospitals using McKesson.

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

McKesson gained value across the board as a result of implementing Red Hat solutions. Prior to implementing Red Hat, McKesson was supporting multiple varients of Unix, which caused the company to spend time and resources testing products on each individual version. After migrating to Red Hat, internal efficiency was gained because the company no longer had to continue buying mainframes and did not have to test products on so many systems. There was now one test on one product. Now, McKesson can reuse and reprovision its capital needs more effectively. McKesson engineers all speak the Red Hat – JBoss language and that common language has been incorporated across the company.

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

McKesson customers include hospitals and healthcare providers of all sizes, so hardware is not consistent across customers and varies between each hospital. The company does have 5-6 different Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle racks for database tiers. There are also 5-90 application servers involved, depending on the size of the hospital. McKesson’s architecture takes advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss, and Hibernate.

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

McKesson has enjoyed excellent support and services from Red Hat and JBoss. Whenever training was needed, Red Hat was able to provide personal help within a day’s notice. On one occasion, Red Hat even flew engineers out to a McKesson customer when on-site help was necessary.

Prior to the Red Hat – McKesson engagement, McKesson was a BEA shop. As the company compared BEA to JBoss, it found that JBoss offered better support and better turn around time for defects within the JBoss community. One time in particular, JBoss turned around a McKesson issue in less than two days. Another vendor took almost four months to provide the same solution.

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

Just do it. Understand what your customer needs. In healthcare, cheaper solutions with better supportability and better training are needed. A company should always look at what its customers need. In this case, Red Hat and JBoss solutions met McKesson’s terms and gave a more robust, enterprise-ready solution to customers than was previously available.

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.

Category: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Submitted by: Sanjay Sen, Senior Director, Digital Properties; Aled Davies, Architect; Brian Compton, Architect
Industry: Entertainment
Geography: New York, NY
Website: http://www.wmg.com

Overview

Selected for implementing JEMS to create a customer asset management system with a Service-Oriented Architecture that enables efficient website data management and maximum scalability across WMG’s rapidly growing extended enterprise.

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

The Digital Properties Division of Warner Music Group provides in-house website development services for all of the entities that comprise the worldwide organization. With hundreds of labels and artists managing their own websites, efficient data management was a challenge for the Division. On Atlantic Records alone, more than 200 artists have individual web sites, which share much of the same data as their label’s corporate site.

Five years ago, the Division began implementing a customer asset management system to enable the web managers throughout the extended enterprise to make and publish content changes more easily. After experiencing major problems with an off-the-shelf solution, Aled Davies and Brian Compton, the Division’s Senior Software Architects, realized that to fix the software issues and address the organization’s specific business processes would mean rewriting the vendor’s code. This implementation was a custom version of an off-the-shelf product. There were many issues with the product as it did not integrate well with the business requirements and was not easy to use and customize. There was also a challenge integrating with e-commerce vendors, integrating with ad servers and providing search optimization techniques. The ease of change was essential as the music industry is rapidly changing and systems that support it need to change quickly as well.

Sanjay Sen, who runs the Digital Properties Group and Karen Stavisky, Vice President, Worldwide Content and Rights Management, WMG, put this challenge and the business requirements in front of the architects – Aled Davies and Brian Compton – who quickly realized that to fix the software issues and address the organization’s specific business processes would mean rewriting the vendor’s code. It would be easier to build a new asset management system using JBoss products –mostly because of the flexibility and the “open source” factor that the JBOSS product brought to the table.

3. What was the desired solution?

WMG required a solution that would enable the Division to support the company’s rapid growth without being locked into a particular package or vendor. Davies wanted a solution that was easy to maintain and offered affordable support fees. He wanted the members of his team to have the flexibility to fix problems themselves as they came up, without having to rely heavily on vendor support. Finally, the desired solution would enable the Digital Properties Division to build out a centralized asset management system from which web managers could pull data and turn it into content for their own individual web sites. This central system would also support integration with e-commerce vendors, B2B partners and ad servers easily, as well as provide a platform to be used for search optimization on websites.

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

Digital Properties had used JBoss solutions in implementing other development projects. Zero-cost product licenses made the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite very appealing, since WMG had been paying large fees for licensing and support. JEMS open source code and readily available knowledge base meant that Davies’ team would be able to fix problems themselves quickly and easily. With affordable subscriptions, the Division would also be able to call on Red Hat Support when necessary. The Digital Properties Division evaluated other J2EE application server vendors but their performance running on JDK 5.0 was too low. The performance needs of the WMG application running on other programs would have required a significant hardware investment. JEMS provided all the services that the Division required within one affordable, easy-to-maintain bundle. As a result, the Digital Properties Division decided to migrate to JEMS in 2005.

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

WMG implemented a combination of JEMS solutions to develop its own customer asset management system with a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Using JBoss Application Server, the Digital Properties Division created a three-tiered architecture including a business logic services layer that all WMG websites can now access for various services. By calling the services, sites have the ability to access data using Java Server Pages or Servlets, SOAP, or XML. The Digital Properties Division recently started developing a number of common website services, such as user registration and polls. Because these services can be found at the business services layer of the system, developers now have the ability to easily drop them into various sites, quickly providing functionality as needed. Services can be called independently from the presentation layer, enabling PHP and Flash sites to use the same services to access data without having to use the JSP implementation. To facilitate data processing, the Division mapped JBoss Hibernate onto the database at the data tier. And to improve the performance of the web sites, which attract enormous amounts of daily traffic, WMG uses JBoss Cache.

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

The new SOA implementation created an affordable, easy-to-maintain, and scalable system, resulting in enormous time and cost savings for the Digital Properties Division. Because the Division no longer has to pay for software licenses, annual support costs have dropped significantly. Developers now maintain the system easily, accessing the code and solving problems quickly as they arise. As a result of using open source code, the development team is much more self-sufficient and completely vendor independent. Unlike the previous solution, which would stall when too much data was added, the SOA system provides maximum scalability to support the continuous growth of the company. Integration with e-commerce vendors, B2B partners, ad servers and provision of a platform to be used for search optimization on websites has been easily achieved with this solution making this tool the heart of WMG’s drive to take the artist and label web sites to the next generation of ad-generated revenue, e-commerce enablement and provide optimized search techniques.

The new SOA system also resulted in increased user satisfaction within WMG. The streamlined solution eliminated layers of web pages, enabling web managers to maneuver through the asset management system more quickly and work on their sites more effectively.

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

As a result of implementing JEMS, WMG realized significant gains in working efficiencies that optimized resources and improved productivity. Today, the organization can do more with the same amount of resources. Because web managers spend less time handling data, they are able to manage a larger number of sites than before. Recently, WMG added two new divisions, and with the new JEMS SOA in place, it was possible to integrate the new websites into the asset management system and to support the sites without growing headcount. The JEMS SOA system also enabled the Digital Properties Division to run more sites with less hardware. Continuing to migrate old sites to the SOA system will free up more servers, and the Division plans to reallocate these to other projects or to use them for other functions within the new environment.

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

WMG implemented JBoss Application Server 4.03, Hibernate 3.1, Apache Tomcat, and JBoss Cache. Three Solaris machines run the JBoss Application Server solution. Each machine is divided into six nodes running two instances of JBoss Application Server and one instance of JBoss Cache. Fourteen nodes share three caches: twelve nodes run on a live cache while two nodes run on the internal business site cache where sites are previewed before publishing. Hibernate is mapped onto an Oracle database.

Two nodes on each machine run the asset management system, based on the JBoss AS platform. The node configurations are divided by business units. For instance, all international web sites run on one node and all Warner sites run on another.

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

WMG is a JBoss Platinum Support subscriber. The Digital Properties Division worked with two JBoss consultants to implement the caching capability correctly. The SOA system has been in production for over a year, and as Davies had hoped, the Division has not needed to request support very often. Whenever a request has been submitted, the support experience has been very good.

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

Don’t be afraid to solve the problem yourself. Many organizations look for off-the-shelf solutions to solve their problems completely and end up having to do a huge amount of work to get those systems to work properly. Many times this requires as much work as developing the solution yourself from start to finish. Usually business requirements are so specific to each individual business that we really need to solve the problems ourselves. With tools like JEMS, we can create comprehensive solutions for our organizations more quickly and easily, meeting our particular business needs without having to rely on inflexible vendor products.

Category: Joint Red Hat / JBoss Deployment

Winner: DST Health Solutions

Submitted by: Gary Krasovic

Industry: Health Information Systems

Geography: Birmingham, Alabama

Overview

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

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

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

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

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

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

3. What was the desired solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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