FAST FACTS

Company: ITI Neovision

Industry: Broadcast media

Geography: EMEA, Poland

Business Partner: Atom-Tech, Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland recommended Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the solution

Business Challenge: ITI Neovision looked to replace its enterprise platform solution, with a virtualized environment that could be supported by local teams.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization and Red Hat Cluster Suite

Hardware: HP BladeSystem BL460c

Migration Path: Gentoo Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: ITI Neovision has deployed a stable, reliable and officially supported platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization has significantly improved hardware management in terms of full utilization of available servers. Red Hat virtualization can easily scale to accommodate the demand for new servers. The company has also achieved significant cost savings and obtained all the required components in one solution.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting the Red Hat solution.”
- Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The ITI Group is Poland’s leading media and entertainment group. It is active in television broadcasting and production, multiplex cinema operations, home video and theatrical distribution, special events organisation and new media. As a subsidiary of the ITI Group, ITI Neovision offers the first Polish DTH (Direct to Home) platform, called “n”. The platform includes High Definition television channels and digital entertainment services broadcasting. The “n” package broadcasts 79 television channels, hundreds of satellite channels as well as a vast library of movies and TV series’ in the Video on Demand package. As the new generation TV, “n” continuously expands its programmes and introduces new services and channels, many of them in High Definition.

The dynamic growth and excellent results of “n” reflects a unique combination of high quality content offerings and innovative services. In June 2008, ITI Neovision launched a triple-play service combining television, internet and telephony. Following the upgrades of the nBox HDTV and nBox HDTV recorder software, subscribers of “n” have gained access to a range of new services and functionalities such as remote recording through internet and mobile phones. In October 2008, “n” launched its pre-paid television service “telewizja na karte”.

ITI Neovision worked with Atom-Tech, a Poland based Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, that focuses on generating measurable benefits for their customers by using the latest technologies and highly qualified personnel”. Atom-tech provides customers with, consulting services, IT services, and assistance with the production of customised software applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ITI Neovision required a new enterprise platform which would allow it to quickly and easily implement new technology solutions and also benefit from fully accredited local support. ITI Neovision’s hardware supplier, did not support its previous platform, Gentoo Linux.

ITI Neovision considered two possible solutions – Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. A positive experience with the Red Hat community version, a well-known brand name and HP’s ability to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux were the main criteria for selecting the Red Hat solution. Local partner Atom-Tech, who recommended the Red Hat solution, proved to be a reliable local partner during deployment.

SOLUTION
ITI Neovision deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 with virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform as its standard platform, all of which is running on HP BladeSystem. Other components of the infrastructure are MySQL database, Apache web server, FTP server, proxy server and SAN Network.

There are five host machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Every host machine supports four virtual machines including all the necessary applications. The virtual machines are also services in a failover cluster including Microsoft Windows 2003 servers. Such a set up offers ITI Neovision a high level of flexibility as it enables the migration of virtual machines between physical servers as needed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures high availability of the virtual instances, which run ITI Neovision’s mission-critical applications.

BENEFITS
It is of the utmost importance to ITI Neovision to have a robust, stable and reliable platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Since deployment the number of outages has been reduced significantly.

Another important benefit is ease of use. The Red Hat solution includes l a number of useful tools, such as clustering which enables the automation of several tasks managed by the IT department, increases work efficiency and saves time on a daily basis. Atom-Tech, the Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland, provides local Polish language support which is crucial for ITI Neovision, as well as excellent IT engineering skills.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has significantly improved hardware management by making the best possible use of all available hardware. Previously, servers were under-used in terms of processing memory because each operating system required one physical machine. Now thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization, ITI Neovision can use one physical machine for five operating systems. ITI Neovision is a fast growing company and with the Red Hat solution it is able to scale to meet any future growth.

“New projects are coming along almost every day and Red Hat virtualization can easily accommodate the demand for new servers. We can literally deploy a new server in a minute,” says Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

The Red Hat solution is less costly compared to proprietary alternatives, particularly because there are no license fees involved. An important added value of the Red Hat solution is that it contains all the necessary components in one solution set.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting Red Hat solution which is very important in the current economic climate,” said Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

FUTURE
ITI Neovision is planning to expand its Red Hat deployment to include the full 24/7 Red Hat support as well as leveraging Red Hat training and certification. As a result of its excellent experience with the current platform Red Hat has become part of the long term IT strategy at ITI Neovision. The company is planning to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more servers and thereby increase the potential for virtualization. Additional virtual instances are currently being installed on the same hardware server as a testbed for other platforms. Further expansion on other Red Hat products is also being considered.

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Tintas Iquine

Industry: Manufacturing: Paint and Tints

Geography: Brazil

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

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

Hardware: Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Local Government

Geography: The Netherlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [ PDF ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: YPF SA

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Argentina

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Geography: Republic of Korea

Business Challenge: Searched for a reliable, high-performing alternative to reduce server failure, optimize resources, and enable faster response times

Migration Path: From UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization technology, Oracle database

Hardware: Dell PE2950/ PE1850, EMC CX3-10

Benefits: Achieved significant cost savings by deploying a reliable, open source virtualization solution with Red Hat, reduced maintenance costs with hardware integration and clustering, acquired operation flexibility, and experienced ease of use and ease of management

“By deploying Red Hat’s open source-based virtualization solution, we were able to receive the proven stability of the platform and Red Hat’s reliable support and services.”
Hwang Sae Yong, assistant manager of Computer Operation Team for Korea Federation of Banks

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Korea Federation of Banks (KFB), a non-profit organization founded in 1928, plays a role in the development of the Korean finance industry. Its members include all commercial banks, special banks, and provincial banks, while its associate members include all Korean branch offices of foreign banks. It promotes the development of financial industry through cooperation between financial institutions, R&D of financial issues, and improvements of business practices of banking industry. It also establishes healthy credit transaction order with centralized management of credit information and evaluation about financial institutions clients.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
KFB faced the challenge of unreliable systems that could not meet the organization’s performance needs. Its previous server system lacked resources and often experienced failures that resulted in delayed response and availability of its mission-critical systems. In addition, the usage of the overall system was not balanced, causing some servers to be under-utilized.

It was important to KFB to integrate its many physical servers into a virtualized environment to benefit from ease of management, cost savings, and for the ability to configure multiple guest operating systems. It also wanted to increase system availability.

SOLUTION
To address these challenges, KFB decided to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for its integrated virtualization technology. By duplicating the configuration of existing systems to server virtualization from Red Hat, KFB was able to leverage a reliable solution that provided no downtime.

“We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advance Platform after considering maintenance cost reduction, support, and manageability,” said Hwang Sae Yong, assistant manager of Computer Operation Team for Korea Federation of Banks.

“By deploying Red Hat’s open source-based virtualization solution, we were able to receive the proven stability of the platform and Red Hat’s reliable support and services. This also resulted in ease of management for our solutions. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, we are able to leverage our full hardware capabilities and cannot tell the difference between our physical and virtual systems.”

BENEFITS
In addition to integrated virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) technology for no additional cost. With these solutions, KFB was able to achieve high availability, maximizing availability by minimizing service downtime, and significantly increased reliability and availability of service.

“In addition, with Red Hat virtualization, we were able to reduce the number of servers we were maintaining, and were able to innovatively reduce operation costs including server and power costs,” said Yong.

“After implementing Red Hat virtualization technology, our systems are running much more smoothly, and we are able to achieve flexible service operation through online migration.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Wall Street Systems

Industry: Financial Services – Software

Geography: Global

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

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

Hardware: Intel® Xeon® based x86 servers

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Armonk, NY, and Raleigh, NC. 22 April 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Handelsbanken, one of the four largest banks in the Nordic Area, has achieved strong business continuity, security and cost-efficiency results by deploying virtualization technology using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on System z servers and IBM System z operating system, z/OS. The bank’s newly deployed technology solution will help maintain a highly resilient and secure network that scales based on business demands.

Today’s announcement comes at a pivotal time for Handelsbanken as the bank continues its path as one of Europe’s most innovative lending organizations with Internet banking features, such as unique branch office web sites and direct email addresses to each branch site for enhanced customer service. Handelsbanken joins the world’s top 50 banks that currently call upon the IBM System z server to run their banking transactions.

“Customers entrust us with their hard earned savings so it’s paramount that we select one of the industry’s most powerful and secure servers – the IBM System z,” said Roger Rydberg, technical manager at Handelsbanken. “System z servers are ‘almost perfect’ because of its availability and performance. It allows us to keep up with business climate changes because we can add or eliminate capacity any time based on customer demands. We can even make changes easily without having to stop any services.”

“One of the main reasons for us to standardize our Linux environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the ability to lower costs and use our IT personnel more effectively by leveraging the solution’s integrated virtualization functionality. We can now fully harness and utilize the knowledge and experience of our IT staff who manage our existing distributed Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems for our System z environment,” said Peter ter Laag, Central Data Department at Handelsbanken.

The bank’s virtualized environment has helped to lower costs by minimizing the need for additional systems that require more energy and space, translating into a greener IT infrastructure. The combination of Red Hat and IBM solutions has helped the bank move closer to meeting its greener computing initiatives.

To maintain business operations for Handelsbanken’s 660 branch offices across Sweden, Great Britain and the Nordic countries to run smoothly, the bank utilizes Parallel Sysplex IBM’s System z clustering technology and IBM’s availability and disaster recovery solution branded as GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex). Parallel Sysplex and GDPS together allows Handelsbanken to run its System z mainframes as highly powerful “clustered” servers that move new work requests to the available resources so that even planned or un-planned outages in multiple and distant data centers have little to no impact on business operations. Known for its ability to share system resources with one of the highest degrees of efficiency among other systems, the System z mainframe can consolidate hundreds of virtual servers into a single mainframe – allowing customers like Handelsbanken to run critical customer transactions in the midst of executing other strategic IT projects. Handelsbanken currently runs GDPS version 3.5. IBM most recently released Version 3.6.

In addition to standardizing its Linux systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its virtualization technology and benefits of scalability, performance and reduced costs, Handelsbanken also utilizes the System z operating system, z/OS, to perform ongoing simplification features and health-checking mechanisms. The bank’s infrastructure also includes extensive use of innovative policy-based networking services across multiple z/OS-based networks. Built-in automated reporting capabilities help Handelsbanken manage countless workloads and network traffic across its systems. Handelsbanken currently runs z/OS version 1.10, the latest release of the operating system.

“Most important for Handelsbanken is that we can achieve all the benefits of virtualized systems, while still maintaining a secure and flexible environment with high availability and reliability through Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These elements are extremely important to our business, especially when running transaction-intensive applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on System z has helped us meet mission-critical needs for our organization,” said ter Laag.

For more information about IBM System z mainframes, please visit www.ibm.com/systems/z.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com.

For more press, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

For more information about Handelsbanken, please visit www.handelsbanken.se.

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

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

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

Experiences heightened flexibility, stability, cost savings and ease of management with Red Hat solutions

RALEIGH, NC – 3 December 2008 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Scania, the leading Swedish manufacturer of heavy trucks and buses, has expanded its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated server and storage virtualisation capabilities. The company utilises the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its critical systems, including specific infrastructure services, databases, applications and high-performance computing (HPC) servers to leverage the solution’s compelling benefits, including cost savings, stability, flexibility and ease of management.

With its virtualised Linux environments, Scania is achieving shortened time-to-services and increased flexibility. Scania can now perform system maintenance by shutting down servers in a structured process, enabling preserved stability and reliability. Throughout the rest of its virtualised Linux infrastructure, Scania also has the option of leveraging the solution’s included Live Migration functionality, allowing for the transfer of virtual systems between physical machines in the network to reduce the hardware requirements necessary to maintain the same workload.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform replaces some proprietary Unix dialects in Scania’s infrastructure with an open platform without lock-in to a specific vendor. We are now building a cost-efficient, flexible and stable infrastructure on top of the Red Hat platform, and have maintained high security and stability throughout the process,” said Mikael Åhlqvist, service team responsible for Unix at Scania. “The virtualisation capabilities provided by Red Hat play a key role in our platform. The solution has provided cost and time savings by reducing the necessary number of physical servers and decreasing the need for related maintenance, administration and energy consumption.”

In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in virtualisation, Scania is utilising Red Hat Network Satellite to retain in-house control over management and administration of its Red Hat-based systems. With Red Hat Satellite Server, Scania has access to Red Hat Network updates and has the ability to maintain local control over the management, administration and monitoring of its systems.

“We see benefits provided by Red Hat’s open source solutions, particularly in regard to its virtualisation capabilities and its subscription business model. Red Hat centers its business focus on delivering valuable ROI to its customers, and we are experiencing this valuable return today. We are continuously exploring the option of migrating additional systems to open source, and specifically Red Hat,” said Åhlqvist.

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

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

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

###

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Sydney

Industry: Education

Business Challenges: Quickly and cost-effectively develop a high-availability platform to support a web-based file repository, enabling the University to comply with new Government regulations

Migration Path: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat Consulting, DSpace (web-based file repository)

Hardware: 2 x HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers, 2 x Dual Core CPUs, HP EVA SANs

Benefits: Achieved quick deployment, cost savings, high availability, reliability, and scalability

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1850, the University of Sydney became the first university established in Australia. Today, it has an international reputation as a centre of research excellence and an active and engaged community leader.

The University boasts approximately 45,000 students and about 3,000 full-time academic staff. Its library holds the largest collection of books in Australia.

The University of Sydney is one of a number of member universities across Australia and New Zealand that takes advantage of the Red Hat CAUDIT Agreement. Through the CAUDIT Agreement, the University is given the opportunity to deploy an unlimited number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments covering both its server and desktop environments. Each Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is protected by unlimited 24×7 support, and the package comes at a small fee. The CAUDIT Agreement is currently one of the most successful university programs in the world.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2007, the Australian Federal Government introduced new guidelines for justifying university funding, based on evaluating the quality of research output from individual universities. Known as the Research Quality Framework initiative, the program introduced a peer-based output review process that relied on reviewers’ input from all over the world. In order for this to be successful, the Government required a reliable and secure channel of 24/7 access to each university’s repository of research.

The new guidelines presented two main obstacles for the University of Sydney. First, it was unsustainable to finance round-the-clock datacentre staffing to ensure the 24/7 system uptime that was required. Second, it would risk overloading its two aging datacentres. This meant that the University of Sydney couldn’t guarantee 100 percent uptime and needed a reliable system.

“In order to comply with the new rules we needed to quickly and inexpensively provide a high-availability platform for the ‘DSpace’ Tomcat Web-based repository application that would enable us to store research files and publications, along with a PostGreSQL back end,” said Nikolas Lam, Unix System Administrator, University of Sydney.

“The real dilemma was that both the University’s aging datacentres, situated approximately two kilometres apart and powered by different electricity sub-stations, were already under considerable cooling stress and were very close to electrical capacity. On their own, neither was considered to be reliable enough to handle the platform,” said Lam.

Lam and his team also recognised the need to enable DSpace to failover relatively quickly, not just between hosts, but between the two datacentres.

SOLUTION
Given that the university faced significant time, financial, and capacity constraints, it turned to Red Hat to help provide a virtualised open source environment as an alternative to adding multiple new machines.

In mid-2007, the University of Sydney deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 Advanced Platform with built-in virtualisation and integrated Red Hat Cluster Suite capabilities. It engaged the trusted expertise of Red Hat Consulting to provide guidance during the deployment, which was completed within three months.

“We were already running DSpace on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and the team was familiar with the operating system. Initially, we considered having the code of the application modified to make it cluster-aware, but it became apparent that it would be too complex a task,” said Lam.

“Red Hat Cluster Suite emerged as a straight-forward way of taking a non-cluster-aware service and placing it in a cluster, and was a fundamental component of the system. When it came to virtualisation, the compatibility with Cluster Suite, the extra efficiency of para-virtualisation and the ability to minimise the number of vendors involved meant that the virtualisation capabilities incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform made the most sense,” said Lam.

“Enlisting the help of Red Hat Consulting to assist with the installation also meant that our staff could continue with their normal workload, which expedited the implementation,” said Lam.


The University also employed Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite with management and provisioning modules, for additional administrative capabilities. RHN Satellite is an easy-to-use systems management platform for growing Linux infrastructures. Built on open standards, RHN Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities for large deployments. It enables organisations like the University of Sydney to manage many servers as easily as it would one.

Also important for the University was ensuring immediate, seamless automatic failover between datacentres, should a disaster arise. For this it relied on one HP EVA SAN in each datacentre. Another critical component was the layer three Linux Virtual Server, developed in-house to allow the University to present a single IP address to the outside world despite being hosted in various geographical areas.

BENEFITS
For the University of Sydney, one of the most notable benefits of the Red Hat deployment was the ability to plug in a standard application and instantly improve its availability, without substantial modification to the application source code.

“When we were suddenly faced with Government-imposed guidelines for managing and storing research data, it was Red Hat that allowed us to easily and effectively plug in DSpace to give us the solution we needed,” said Lam.

“It also meant that we could comply with the new regulations in a short space of time. The alternative would have required time and money that we didn’t have,”
 said Lam.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, the University was provided with a complete solution that offered both cost savings and high performance. The solution delivers integrated virtualization technology at no additional cost, eliminating the need for expensive, third-party alternatives. It also provides Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite as a part of the solution without added fees.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform allowed us to carve costs out of our deployment because we were able to consolidate servers and use a leading, high-performing virtualisation solution that came built-in as part of the solution without us needing to buy from another vendor,” said Lam.

The University was also impressed by the scalability of its new virtualised environment. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform’s virtualization capabilities accommodated the architecture’s current data load of about 15 gigabytes, as the University continues to grow and incorporate new video and other rich data formats, it will scale up to several terabytes of data without any configuration change.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Education

Geography: Singapore

Opportunity: To implement a cutting-edge, reliable, and affordable solution that scales with growing business needs, and to leverage virtualization technology to reduce hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Network

Hardware: HP Proliant G5 servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits:

• Approximately $40,000 cost savings
• High-performance, flexible IT infrastructure delivered through the integrated virtualization technology in Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Efficient allocation and management of computing resources through features such as dynamic addition/removal of server memory and processors.
• Simplified systems administration

Download the case study [PDF]

“We trust Red Hat virtualization because it delivers immediate, real benefits to U21Global. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux we met our goals for a high-performance virtualization implementation that is stable, reliable, scalable, and secure,” said Caven Yip, systems engineer at U21Global.

BACKGROUND
Established in 2001, U21Global is the world’s premier online Graduate School that offers globally recognised graduate programmes. The graduate school is backed by an international network of leading research-intensive universities in 11 countries and has successfully enrolled students from 60 countries around the world including those from Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

U21Global, understands the value and potential of harnessing advanced technology and the Internet to provide an invaluable learning experience for its enrollment of over 5,000 students worldwide.

To deliver high-quality, dynamic, and interactive academic content, U21Global relies on a powerful IT infrastructure to provide the highest levels of availability for its online programmes.

U21Global’s datacenter is located at its global headquarters in Singapore. It provides IT services to its students, faculty and support staff around the world, while simultaneously supporting the business-critical function of development and staging of courseware. Courseware developers, faculty members of affiliated universities, and quality assurance professionals access the datacenter resources to develop content and carry out user-acceptance tests and certification.

OPPORTUNITY
In 2008, rapid business growth put pressure on U21Global to add three new servers to keep pace with user demands on its development and staging platform. At the same time, 10 existing servers were also due for maintenance renewals. The cost of new hardware and renewals was substantial, causing U21Global to look for an alternative solution that could deliver a robust enterprise platform while also offering cost savings, reliability, ease of management, and scalability.

SOLUTION
U21Global was familiar with the reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, having used Red Hat solutions in various parts of its IT architecture for a number of years. When Red Hat delivered its integrated virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, U21Global decided to assess how this and other virtualization solutions could help it address its cost, scalability, and system management challenges.

U21Global evaluated three virtualization solutions. It had never utilized virtualization capabilities on its systems before, but knew that it needed the promise of quality support from the vendor it selected. U21Global also wanted to work closely with the technology provider to learn best practices and gain help during implementation.

“We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization for its cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management, and flexibility,” said Caven Yip, systems engineer at U21Global.

U21Global’s virtualization solution was installed with the help of Red Hat Consulting. U21Global had the internal expertise to install the solution, but it looked to acquire best practices from the experienced team of Red Hat experts. With Red Hat Consulting, U21Global was able to implement its Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization solution more quickly than had been anticipated at the beginning of the project.

Using Red Hat virtualization technology, U21Global has converted four physical servers to virtual servers (guests). It has also implemented a virtual server dedicated to new development work. By the end of 2009, U21Global aims to have a simple, yet powerful, infrastructure with one high-performance server and up to 12 virtual guest servers.

U21Global has also invested in Red Hat Network, an easy-to-use systems management platform, to help the company keep its open source environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and virtual servers. The system enables U21Global’s IT team to view the status of its servers at all times and allows the company to download important patches, configuration changes, and updates as they become available through Red Hat’s subscription service.

BENEFITS
Virtualization is a powerful enabling technology. It has allowed U21Global to create a highly flexible IT infrastructure where server memory and processor resources can be quickly re-deployed for any new server setup.

“While a typical server can cater for up to 10 concurrent users, with virtual servers, it is possible to re-allocate memory and compute resources on-the-fly to allow more users to log on to a server. The IT team is now able to provision servers and IT services in a timely manner,” said Yip.

Through Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology, U21Global has saved approximately $40,000. Because Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities are delivered integrated with its operating system at no additional cost, the company did not have to turn to a third-party vendor to purchase a separate technology solution and was able to eliminate the added expenditure for the virtualization technology.

“Virtualization presented a great cost-saving solution. By migrating a number of our physical servers to virtual servers, we were able to reduce the number of servers in the datacenter, increase utilization rates and reduce power consumption,” said Yip. “If we had not implemented virtualization, we would have spent $24,000 on three new servers and continued to incur the cost of annual maintenance for the original 10 servers.”

Additionally, due to the integrated virtualization, U21Global was assured that its deployment would be secure, stable, and manageable through collaboration with one reliable vendor. In addition to enjoying the flexibility of a virtualized environment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 also provided U21Global with dramatic improvements in performance.

After implementing Red Hat virtualization, U21Global has achieved a flexible IT infrastructure that allows for shared pools of compute and memory resources. For the IT team, this translates to the ability to rapidly provision new servers for staging and development.

With its previous deployment, the IT staff needed to back-up an old server before they could transition its applications to a new physical server. This was a tedious process requiring approximately two days. Virtual servers eliminated that entire process. And before implementing virtualization, U21Global’s IT team had to connect remotely to the server or access the console directly in order to manage the system.

“Now, I only need to access the virtualization manager from any Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system in order to access all the virtual servers,” said Yip. “It used to take days to provision new servers. Now, we can provide servers in just a few hours.”

“We have been using open source technologies since 2002 and have tried many different Linux distributions,” said Yip. “Today, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the enhanced security, the platform’s robustness, and the flexibility of the operating system. We also enjoy very good Red Hat support.”

FAST FACTS

Partner: Tapasol Solutions

Customer: ServusNet Informatics

Industry: Technology

Geography: Cork, Ireland

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

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

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

Hardware: Dell x86 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Tribune Company

Industry: Media

Geography: Chicago

Business Challenge: Reduce costs and time-to-market of new interactive products by moving to a virtualized environment based on x86 machines and open source Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite

Hardware: Commodity Dell and IBM x86 systems

Benefits: Cut capital as well as ongoing operational infrastructure costs, and boost competitiveness by flexibly bringing new products to market more quickly

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BACKGROUND
As the largest employee-owned media firm in the United States, the Chicago-based Tribune Company operates a broad range of businesses in the print publishing, interactive media, and broadcasting market segments. In addition to 10 daily newspapers – including three in the top 10 markets in the country – 23 television stations, and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, the company runs more than 50 websites serving 15.5 million unique visitors per month.

Founded in 1847, Tribune Company employs approximately 20,000 workers and earned more than $5.5 billion dollars in fiscal 2006. It is No. 388 on the Fortune 500 list. Three-fourths of the Companies revenues come from print publishing and interactive media; the remainder from traditional broadcasting/entertainment offerings.

The fastest-growing division within the Tribune Company, Tribune Interactive, offers dynamic online content – both local and national – including news and information, broadcast audio and video, entertainment, multicultural offerings, and classified advertising.

OPPORTUNITY
In 2005, under a mandate to cut costs and get new innovative online products to market faster, Tribune Interactive decided to experiment with a new IT platform. Although predominantly a Sun Solaris/SPARCstation shop, Alan Pitcher, Tribune Interactive director of technical operations, brought in commodity x86 systems running open source Linux – specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux – to build a new developing and hosting environment.

“We recognized that our existing platform was expensive, and built specifically for our newspaper products, in fact, it was preventing us from being nimble for any project not related to our newspaper sites,” said Pitcher. A number of internal partners were asking him for a system architecture that would allow them to prototype new interactive product ideas quickly and easily. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the obvious choice as it included the virtualization technology and OS support in a low cost offer.”

SOLUTION
Pitcher’s team “racked and stacked” x86 systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, which offers comprehensive virtualization technology integrated in the operating system at no additional cost. This allowed Tribune Interactive to deploy virtualization “out of the box,” using the technology that came built-in with the operating system. This solution had the further advantage of offering maximum flexibility and reliability with high-availability clustering and failover delivered through Red Hat’s Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite – both also included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for no added cost. Tribune Interactive is currently running a total of 80 virtual machines and has plans to further expand its utilization of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology. It also uses Red Hat Network Satellite to provision and manage the installation.

BENEFITS
The benefits of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform were immediately apparent, particularly in the speed of developing new applications. “This has given us the ability to set up a prototyping environment for new products in a couple of hours rather than days or weeks,” said Pitcher. And, whether provisioning a new machine or provisioning new processes on existing machines, it’s easy to give internal partners the ability to “get new applications and products out there quickly,” he said.

Pitcher recalls how an internal Tribune Interactive team was developing a new broadcast application to run on a Windows environment hosted by an external vendor. “The architecture and application were shaping up to be a huge failure,” said Pitcher. He offered the project team the virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, where they started from scratch, caught up and launched the project on time all within 30 days. “It was an eye opening experience for many people to see how flexibly and rapidly we could deploy this application,” he said. “It could not have happened if we hadn’t had the foresight to have this pre-made environment ready to accept a product at the drop of a hat.”

“The ability to turn projects around very quickly has a significant financial impact for generating increased revenues down the road,” said Pitcher. Additionally, the hardware savings – both from purchasing lower-cost commodity servers and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux integrated virtualization capabilities – have been substantial. “Because we’re carving up these cheaper machines into multiple machines we’ve saved a lot of money,” said Pitcher. Utilization is also dramatically improved. According to Mark Sennott, senior Internet administrator, whereas before the Tribune Company was using just 20 percent of its servers, “today, our utilization rate is closer to 80 percent.”

When coupled with new agile software development techniques that Tribune programmers are using, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based platform has “everyone embracing a new way of working,” said Pitcher. And in terms of reliability, Sennott added, “we haven’t had a single outage yet.”

The company is in process of bringing more applications in-house to run on the virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. It is already running all its blogs using Moveable Type. Next year, Sennott will be building a virtualized datacenter based on x86 hardware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization in Los Angeles, and will take over hosting the Tribune Interactive sites from AT&T. “This will more than double our Red Hat installation,” said Pitcher.

“The efficiency gains are just going to get better,” said Sennott. “As I get more comfortable with Red Hat, I’m confident I can load the machines up a lot further. At the moment, I’m installing four virtual machines per box; but I’m convinced I could easily go to five or even six successfully.”

“If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to get the most out of commodity hardware, Red Hat virtualization is a fantastic solution,” said Pitcher.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Real Estate

Geography: Germany

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

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

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

Hardware: HP Blade Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Red Hat has always been known as a leader in reliability and performance, and we’re pleased to see that recognition reflected in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 adoption in cutting-edge environments like Blackboard,” said Brian Stevens, CTO, Red Hat.

Scalent V/OE software enables Blackboard to manage, automate, and failover their mixed physical and virtual hosting environment, improving efficiency and reliability

Palo Alto, CA Nov 11 2008 – Scalent Systems, the leader in Real-time Management and Automation software for virtual and physical infrastructure, today announced that Blackboard Managed Hosting SM has implemented Scalent Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE) software to control and enable Blackboard’s compute cloud. Scalent V/OE enables Blackboard to deploy, change capacity or recover full system environments in minutes, dramatically improving efficiency and asset utilization while maintaining reliability and reducing overall costs.

Blackboard Inc is a public company that hosts mission critical applications for hundreds of educational institutions serving millions of active students and participants. Like many of today’s SaaS providers, Blackboard faced escalating expansion and reaction-time challenges driven by the increased pace of business change, statically allocated server hardware, and mixed physical and virtual environments.

In response, Blackboard combined products from Scalent, Red Hat, NetApp, and Dell to create a flexible, real-time environment – an internal computing “Cloud” – on which to base their next-generation platform.

Scalent’s software is unique in its ability to provide real time data center management, automation, and virtualization across physical and virtual servers, networks, and storage. Scalent V/OE software enables data centers to react in real-time to changing business needs by shifting workloads and connectivity: by dynamically changing entire bare-metal or virtualized systems and associated topologies – including which servers are running, what software is running on them, and how they’re connected to network and storage – without requiring physical changes to the underlying hardware infrastructure.

By using Scalent software to create, manage, and automate their compute cloud, Blackboard reduced deployment, change and recovery time to minutes.

“Blackboard’s customers demand and expect uptime and responsiveness” said Jonas Hirshfield, Sr. Director of Technology, Blackboard Managed Hosting SM. “We started by implementing the right platform foundation for optimal price-performance – using Scalent V/OE, we created a cohesive whole, while concurrently reducing future operational expansion costs.”

“Red Hat has always been known as a leader in reliability and performance, and we’re pleased to see that recognition reflected in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 adoption in cutting-edge environments like Blackboard,” said Brian Stevens, CTO, Red Hat. “Scalent V/OE software complements Red Hat’s existing commitment to Linux Automation by taking care of the underlying ‘plumbing’ differences, blurring the lines between physical and virtual compute resources and associated connectivity needs.”

“NetApp helps Scalent and Blackboard hosting customers to realize the business benefits of a highly-efficient data center build upon NetApp unified storage,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Scalent’s network virtualization, combined with NetApp® FlexClone®, Snapshot™, and SnapMirror® technologies, allow on-demand, near-instant deployment, capacity scaling, cloning, backups, and disaster recovery of entire systems—not just data.Together, these technologies are huge in terms of quantifiable business benefits, like operational costs savings and reducing downtime.”

“Scalent software enables organizations like Blackboard to stop pre-planning and worrying about tradeoffs between bare-metal and virtual, network redundancy and complexity,” said Ben Linder, CEO of Scalent Systems. “The point of ‘cloud computing’ is that it should be real-time infrastructure; Scalent software makes this vision a reality, enabling data centers to set up any servers, any software, any network, and any storage access, with guaranteed failover, in minutes.”

About Scalent

Scalent Systems is the leading provider of Real-time Management and Automation software for virtual and physical infrastructure to data centers worldwide. Scalent’s software enables data centers to react to changing business needs by dynamically changing what servers are running and how those servers are connected to network and storage. The result is a real-time infrastructure, where data centers can transition between different configurations – or from dead bare metal to live connected servers – in five minutes or less, without physical intervention. Using Scalent software, companies have been able to implement cost-effective solutions while reducing server counts, simplifying manageability, and increasing reliability. Many of the Fortune 1000 companies rely on Scalent to support their success, having adopted the software as an integral part of their business continuity, QA test infrastructure automation, and IT operations. Scalent Systems is based in Palo Alto, with offices worldwide. Scalent’s software is available globally both direct and through partners and resellers. Learn more at http://www.scalent.com.

FAST FACTS

Company: Booz Allen Hamilton

Industry: Government, Management Consulting

Geography: McLean, Virginia

Challenge: Build a service oriented architecture (SOA) solution for a government client that could be leveraged and reused for other client engagements

Migration Path: Transitioned a custom coded, proprietary-based solution to a a hybrid COTS/GOTS/Open-Source application that leveraged a significant portion of the Red Hat product portfolio.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform including JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules, JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Xen virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat GFS.

Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Hardware: Eight Dell 2950 servers with 32 gigabytes of memory

Benefits: Booz Allen built a modular SOA environment that efficiently supported the development and integration of new applications into the system, reducing the dependence on custom coding when doing proof-of-concept or production deployments of client systems across a broad range of government and commercial applications

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs. The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”
– Christopher Dale, associate, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Download the Red Hat case study [PDF]

Download the JBoss case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of strategy and technology consulting for more than 90 years. Every day, government agencies, institutions, and infrastructure organizations rely on the firm’s expertise and objectivity, and on the combined capabilities and dedication of our exceptional people to find solutions and seize opportunities. Providing a broad range of services in strategy, operations, organization and change, information technology, systems engineering, and program management, Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure. With 20,000 people, Booz Allen generates approximately $4.0 billion in annual revenue.

CHALLENGE
In 2004, Booz Allen was approached by a government agency to perform a proof of concept for a proprietary-based document-processing system. Although the proof of concept was successful, attempts to scale the solution up to a production-grade system encountered serious roadblocks. “We went into it carrying a lot of ‘baggage’ due to short-cuts we’d made in the prototype system because of the lack of time and the resources we’d had during the proof of concept,” said Christopher Dale, an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton. Over the next year and a half as more users were added, the team “spent a great deal of effort trying to deal with that baggage,” Christopher said. “But the system simply couldn’t scale the way we needed it to.”

When the agency secured funding to take the system to a new level of capability, the Booz Allen team knew it had to completely rethink its options. From the start, Christopher believed that open source was the answer, and virtualization clearly needed to be part of the solution. Additionally, “we knew we needed a clustered file system, as the old way of moving data back and forth was a real bottleneck,” said Isaac Christoffersen, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. There also had to be a lot more flexibility for dealing with changing customer requests for additional functionality as well as scalability.

SOLUTION
After thinking through its options, Booz Allen decided to design a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based cloud platform using an enterprise service bus (ESB) for a variety of reasons. First, a highly clustered and highly virtualized architecture was needed to build the kind of agile grid of computing and storage resources necessary to scale to the extent the client agency needed. Additionally, Booz Hamilton wanted to build a platform it could leverage in the future for other client engagements.

The physical layer of the architecture was made up of the computers, storage-area networks (SANs), Ethernet networks and Fibre Channel switches. Booz Allen used commodity hardware to build this layer out. The foundation layer of the architecture created a physical “resource pool” for the system to utilize at the virtualization layer, where server, network, and storage resources could be more efficiently leveraged. Booz Allen also used Xen virtualization and the Red Hat Global File System (GFS) on top of Red Hat Cluster Suite to create an environment for transaction processing. Red Hat’s Conga Cluster Management capability, a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, was used to control cluster and storage management.

At the application layer, JBoss Enterprise Application Server provided the ability to create a clustered application server environment. Its built-in redundancy allowed Booz Allen to implement a message-driven Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) infrastructure using the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform that included JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules. JBoss Operations Network was used to perform application and service management.

BENEFITS
The Red Hat-based implementation provided the agency with a multitude of benefits. For starters, it was able to consolidate 55 underutilized servers into just eight servers. This reduced number of systems not only handled the existing processing load, but left capacity available for even more growth in the future.

The system also helped Booz Allen design a system with tremendous flexibility and scalability. Using Red Hat solutions, Booz Allen was able to help the government agency adapt to changes in its mission and system demand in a more agile manner. Over a one-year period, data processing has increased from 1,000 documents per hour and 18,000 documents per day to more than 10,000 documents per hour and 100,000 documents per day. The number of users increased 600 percent in the first year that the system was implemented.

Believing that Booz Allen could leverage what the team had designed for other client engagements, the team briefed a group of Booz Allen partners on the idea… and they agreed. These partners agreed to fund a new initiative that is taking the SOA groundwork that the team created for the federal government, and using it to build a more general platform for application prototyping, development, and production for other government clients.

The current configuration of this platform offers database as a service, storage as a service, network as a service, and hardware as a service. The concepts in this SOA are those that industry leaders such as IBM and Amazon have been promising to deliver at some point in the future, Christopher said. “But we’re able to deliver it now.” Among other things, SOA has greatly improved our ability to integrate commercial and government off the shelf (COTS/GOTS) products. Historically, around 50% of Booz Allen’s development efforts were related to writing custom software to enable the integration of COTS and GOTS. By selecting solutions that leverage commercial and open standards, Booz Allen’s SOA approach reduces the need for this custom software and helps their clients achieve better reuse within their enterprise. Going forward, this new platform promises to be absolutely mission-critical to the way Booz Allen will provide its technology consulting services.

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs,” said Christopher. “The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”

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5/08

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.”

EsSalud utilizes virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.specsavers.co.uk

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Florida Hospital

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Orlando, Fla.

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

Migration Path: IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

Hardware: HP and IBM servers

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

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

Download the case study[PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Industry: Food Manufacturing
Geography: Italy
Opportunity: Ensure the fast processing of customer orders by reducing system response times and maintaining consistent performance levels, even during peak periods
Solution:

• Software: 6 virtualized instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running on IBM z/VSE and z/VM, DB2/Udb database, Ware Place and Tomcat
• Hardware: IBM zSeries 9 Business Class mainframe

Benefits: Maintain response times calculating to under one second, efficiently manage various databases with over 24 gigabytes of data and simplify communication among operating systems through use of XML within the mainframe

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

BACKGROUND

Fratelli Carli was established in 1911 when Giovanni Carli, the youngest son of the oldest family in Oneglia, Italy, began selling the oil produced in his olive grove to the public. Soon, the family’s printing business started to incorporate olive oil sales and experienced an increase in customers and olive oil orders. Though unchanged in its traditional values and the quality of its products, Fratelli Carli is today a modern company that delivers its products to hundreds of thousands of customers.

Fratelli Carli’s business is unique in its direct sales process. Its products are sold directly to end customers, without any intermediaries, and speed in processing orders is crucial. Orders are mainly received by telephone, but are also available through mail and via its new e-commerce website. Fratelli Carli receives approximately one million orders and sends over two million packages to over 600,000 Italian families per year.

OPPORTUNITY

With speed of ordering and delivery as a key component in the business, the main challenge for Fratelli Carli’s IT infrastructure is the ability to maintain reduced response times. Currently, response times average below one second, but it is increasingly difficult for the company’s 40 Customer Relation-team operators to maintain the same efficiency levels even during peak periods, such as Christmastime.

Fratelli Carli started its operations with a 360/20 mainframe with a DOS operating system in 1970 and has since migrated to the latest generation IBM z9 Business Class mainframe that runs the z/VSE and z/VM operating systems, which was selected for its reliability and performance. Approximately two years ago, a decision was made to change the IT systems in order to standardize the way customer postal addresses are handled on the z/VSE to ensure consistency and reliability in the data.

“The existing standardization was obsolete and hard to update and integrate,” said Marco Gardini, Mainframe System Architect at Fratelli Carli. “Unfortunately, our market research did not produce many alternatives which are compatible with the z/VSE system. There were very few products available for the mainframe environment, since most are based on new-generation technologies such as C++, Java, and Web standards.”

SOLUTION
Gardini decided to utilize a mainframe and began searching for a solution that would fit well with this hardware. He suggested that the research and development team look for a Java-based solution for a Linux platform that would also work in a zSeries environment. After assessing multiple solutions, the group opted for DB2/Udb database and Egon by Ware Place, a Java-based application that ensures that customer addresses for the Gardini business would be entered correctly.

Once the address standardization software was selected, Gardini assessed various Linux programs and opted for Red Hat solutions. “I like Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is a standard Linux product much closer to the logic of a mainframe than other products,” said Gardini. “I am totally satisfied with this choice. Red Hat support is very competent and always available, and it has supported me very well in the completion of this complex project, involving Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ware Place software developed with Java, on a Tomcat server, which communicates with the z/VSE Cics in XML through a hypersocket network.”

“I believe that over the next few years, we will see the revival of many mainframes thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM zSeries. This revival is due to the interaction among classic mainframe operating systems such as the z/VSE with the CICS TP monitor and the z/VM, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is capable of offering the efficiency of an open source system and the graphics of a web server developed with Java,” said Gardini.

In August 2006, Fratelli Carli purchased the IBM z9-BC mainframe with DS8100 disks, which allows the installation of Linux applications on the same equipment that manages z/VSE applications in production. The z/VM, IBM’s sophisticated virtualization system, is essential to the integration of the two environments. In fact, the mainframe has a dedicated IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux) engine, in addition to the traditional Constraint Programming (CP) engine.

As a result, the z/VSE system that contains almost forty years’ worth of data now interacts with the Ware Place Java application and the DB2/Udb database via XML, all managed by Red Hat. This is a complex operation, as the VSE mainframe environment’s data memorization feature differs from that of Linux and Windows; therefore, when a request comes from one of the Customer Relations team operators, an elaborate conversion process begins with a complex search within the database for address standardization and the inverse conversion to return the data to the z/VSE.

The project analysis began in 2006 with the search for the application for address standardization and ended in the first quarter of 2007 with the deployment of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in production. Five out of a team of eleven IT professionals worked on the project in two separate phases: an initial analysis phase aimed at selecting the product and communicating with the system users and a second programming phase which involved the Cobol development of the code that calls the Java product from the VSE.

Genoa’s Delphis Informatica – an IBM business partner and a Red Hat Advanced Partner – provided integration for the project and ongoing global IT infrastructure support to Fratelli Carli.

There are now six instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the z/VM hypervisor on the IBM zSeries mainframe: two with Ware Place, two for testing and development activities, and an additional two with an ERP system from the Italian company RDS for accounting and inventory.

BENEFITS
“I am definitely satisfied with the results associated with Red Hat solutions, although there is still much to do,” said Gardini. “We are now able to manage different DB2/Udb databases with over 24 gigabytes of data in an open source environment, thereby offering our customers better service than in the past. We have achieved our aim of keeping response times under one second, communicating among different operating systems through XML within the mainframe.”

This was the first IT environment of its kind in the industry, and the IT department at Fratelli Carli had no previous experience to draw upon.

“Red Hat’s strong points? Definitely support, which was provided at any time necessary. The attitude of the company in gladly accepting our challenge was excellent as well,” said Gardini. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers versatility and standardization to a variety of users, as it sets no restrictions.”

“I am firmly convinced that Linux is the turning point for the evolution of mainframes, which, now as in the past, continue to be excellent systems in terms of reliability and performance,” said Gardini. “As far as we are concerned, this is only the beginning: there will be many improvements in the years to come.”

Based on the success of this project, Fratelli Carli has begun to work on a number of new internal projects. The projects involve the transfer of project-management software packages for mainframe-linked hardware infrastructure, such as terminal emulation and printer-management software, currently installed on other platforms, within the IFL engine.

Industry: Services

Geography: Switzerland

Opportunity: Swisscom IT Services needed to create a standardised and stable operating system environment to host outsourced services for its customers. The company also wanted to simplify the provisioning and allocation of new servers by creating an automated staging infrastructure.

Solution: Hardware: IBM Blade servers
Software: Simple Managed Linux (SIMLUX) including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Satellite Server, JBoss Enterprise Application Server

Benefits:

• Swisscom IT Services now has a highly stable standardised Linux platform called Simply Managed Linux (SIMLUX).
• The solution, combining Red Hat and JBoss solutions, delivers simple management through the reliable Red Hat subscription model.
• The solution also delivers top price-performance ratios for Swisscom IT Services.

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Background

Swisscom IT Services is a strategic subsidiary of the Swisscom Group, the largest Swiss telecommunications provider, and is one of the largest outsourcing companies in Switzerland. It offers services that range from the integration, operation, and further development of complex IT environments to the development and maintenance of applications.

Opportunity

Swisscom IT Services was running a comprehensive Linux infrastructure at the beginning of 2005. But Bertrand Dafflon, the head of the internal IT department, decided to further advance the company’s infrastructure. Dafflon’s team looked to implement a completely standardised Linux environment with an automated staging infrastructure for the majority of applications.
Solution

Under the name “Simply Managed Linux” (SIMLUX), Swisscom decided to work with Red Hat to develop a highly flexible and effective infrastructure for its data centres.

“Over the years, we have seen time and again that Red Hat follows a more conscientious approach than others. Red Hat only makes functions available once they are stable and suitable for enterprise use,” said Thomas von Steiger, systems engineer at Swisscom IT Services. “We run many applications within the SIMLUX environment that are critical to our company and our clients, making Red Hat’s concentration on the reliability of its software essential to us. We believe that the principles of open source development are best represented by Red Hat. We would rather use open source software for SAN multi-pathing than the tools provided by the SAN provider. In this way, when we carry out a kernel update, we can update the multi-pathing functions at the same time without having to worry about proprietary drivers and so on.”

The decisive factor in choosing Red Hat was the company’s total commitment to the reliability of its software and its open source strategy. Our clients depend on installations such as SAP in our Linux environment. There was no serious alternative to Red Hat in that respect.

Swisscom IT Services uses IBM blade server hardware for the SIMLUX infrastructure. The IT team has assigned both data management and the operating system to a Storage Area Network (SAN) and has enabled the blade server to boot directly from the SAN without a hard drive. This ensures system stability and hardware independence. The server hardware can be replaced easily with minimal configuration, as all the data is held separately on the SAN. As a result, the blade servers now require less cooling because without a hard drive, they produce much less heat. In addition, the SAN images serve as the basis for the automated staging infrastructure, making it possible to allocate a new server with just a few clicks in a web interface—a process which only takes about 30 minutes.

Swisscom IT Services deploys web, application, and database servers. All software is installed in the RPM format developed by Red Hat. So the company can use Red Hat satellite server as the central administration centre for updates, monitoring, and allocation.

As of June 2007, Swisscom IT Services operates approximately 70 SAP, 40 Oracle, 90 Web and 100 JBoss application servers in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based SIMLUX environment. The IT service provider also uses Red Hat Cluster Suite as the basis for 20 cluster nodes. The SAN provides 40 Terabyte of memory too. With the benefits of Red Hat’s management tools, Swisscom IT Services’ two Linux administrators are more than capable of maintaining the entire infrastructure. They ensure optimum supply for more than 50 outsourcing clients on the SIMLUX platform in addition to other responsibilities.

Benefits

The SIMLUX infrastructure offers Swisscom IT Services an extremely stable and flexible data environment that can be managed centrally by Red Hat Satellite Server. Red Hat’s subscription model also gives Swisscom the ability to benefit from technical innovations and updates without incurring additional costs. Since 2006, Swisscom IT Services has implemented 64-bit applications and device mapper multi-pathing for booting from the SAN after a corresponding operating system update. At the start of 2007, Dafflon’s team also began the most crucial test phase for server virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. “Virtualization with Xen is a good example of a function that other providers have pressed ahead with, without being able to offer the required stability and integration into the complete solution,” said von Steiger. “In contrast, we wanted to optimise our hardware capacity without endangering reliability for our clients. Red Hat’s virtualization solution makes this possible. With virtualization integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, new systems are provisioned as virtual machines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Application Server make it possible to integrate even the most demanding of architectures into a virtual infrastructure. Swisscom IT Services has installed a cluster of JBoss Application Servers in virtual machines on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

“Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss was another lucky break for us,” said Dafflon. “Since the acquisition, we have been able to profit from the same excellent price-performance ratio for middleware as for the operating system layer.”

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