FAST FACTS

Company:Brazil Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF)

Industry: Government

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Needed a service-oriented architecture that improved Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s (STF) system integration process and the database and deployment governance in the STI (Technology Information of Office Secretary)

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Operations Network, JBoss SOA Platform, JBoss ESB, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, and Hibernate

Hardware: x86 commodity servers with Intel Xeon-Based Processors

Benefits: Reduced costs and increased agility, functionality, and flexibility with a combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions

Download the case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF) provides systems development for the Brazilian High Court’s coverage area which involves all Brazilian regional tribunals for second court appeal, which means something about 35 tribunals from all Brazil states. This includes providing new technology adoptions, computing and database net management, and software and equipment technical support and specialized assistance. All these systems supported by the Technology Office have both internal and external users who constantly demand new functionality. Among these demands is system integration, which was one of STF’s most critical functionalities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
While STF had a functional level system and solid applications development, they were experiencing a lagging performance in regards to collaborations and information sharing. Users consistently complained about slow access and the business delays caused by shared files not appearing in real time.

In addition to low performance and a great demand for court trials, STF also experienced system integration problems. The team needed an architecture that could offer a quick and easy integration between systems, that would enable the needed components, applications, services, programs and users to easily integrate with one another to successfully share critical files, such as contracts and processes. STF demanded the system integration capabilities that could handle requests per file and setup procedures for remote calls by shared database and message lines.

SOLUTION
When considering various platform options, STF researched:

• The Federal Government guidelines for open software usage

• STI’s prior experience with Red Hat

• Evaluation of the capabilities and experience of system administrators, developers, and other IT professionals with the platform vendor’s technology

The team determined that an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the best solution to meet its demands and requirements in a message system with the capability to implement several open integration patterns. After researching several SOA and ESB vendors and solutions, both community projects and open source software providers, the team selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

JBoss Enterprise SOA provides automatic message routing and supports several information exchanging providers and channels, such as FTP, SMTP, JMS and Web Services. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform enables business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective, open platform and aggregates pluggable security, auto-discovery, localization independence, and integration patterns implementation functionalities.

Every STI/STF architecture is now developed on open source software with Java technology. For software development and support needs, STF now uses Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. STF uses (ESX 3.5) Virtual Machine, 2 Processors 3 GHz, 2 GB and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform memory.

The JBoss SOA Platform (customized by STF for services patronization) is currently in the implementation phase. STI has a subscription for Red Hat’s technical support for four CPUs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

STI’s governance project will begin generating its services still in 2009, which STI expects to improve the aggregate value and transparency of the entire organization. 90 percent of its new projects will be based off JBoss Enterprise SOA and 100 percent of its legacy is currently in migration from JBoss.org and Fedora to JBoss Enterprise SOA. By using more efficient services, all of those who communicate with STF are expected to have benefits. For example, the lawyers win agility when they have to introduce a petition to the ministers of government. It can be done electronically, which represents a great evolution of government service.

Every STF service in production must be monitored and manageable, such capabilities are achieved using JBoss ON – JBoss Operations Network, which offers accurate information about the processing of the Services hosted in the JBoss ESB, as well as the quality and metrics delivered by the JMS technology. Based on Alerting features of JBoss ON, we can receive alerts in order to prevent any unpredictable service behavior, in addition to this, in certain cases, some default actions can be taken according the alerts, it allowed the IT team to focus exactly on real potential problems, letting JBoss ON resolve issues that can be addressed by an the enterprise SOA management solution.

For the STI team the most important benefit has been getting an infrastructure that is flexible and mature, coupled with development systems to assist the STF IT team. Also, the IT team got governance, being able to manage and measure its contribution for the Supreme Tribunal’s strategies with JBoss ON.

BENEFITS
STI reports positive experiences with Red Hat’s support as the team receives quick and informative responses. Red Hat’s support model eliminates the need for STI to staff Red Hat specialists in-house, thus cutting costs.. The STI also finds great benefit in the Red Hat Business Partner Tecnisys, which provides specialized technology consulting and support, as training and specialist technicals to assist STI needs.

STI has experienced increased agility and flexibility with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. From the commercial point of view, the cost savings are significant with the usage of open source software, and from a technology perspective, the infrastructure is more stable and failure tolerant; the service buses allow the IT team to work on more strategic work deployments, by the reuse of the available services in the service buses.

An additional, unexpected benefit from using Red Hat and JBoss is the STI developers’ attitude shift. Instead of thinking in components, developers now think in terms of aggregating services. This attitude shift contributes to increased service performance, agility, and maintenance economy.

COMPANY: American Family Mutual Insurance Company

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Property and Casualty Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a cost effective centralized management solution for its 1,200 instances of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform that would scale with its growing computing infrastructure

MIGRATION PATH: ad hoc monitoring solutions to JBoss Operations Network

SOFTWARE:JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON), JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on 150 plus systems, Red Hat Consulting, Oracle DB, HP OpenView

HARDWARE: Intel based Dell x86 commodity servers

BENEFITS: Improved availability and reliability of applications, a monitoring solution that can manage a large number of application server instances, simplified management, enhanced management and monitoring, and reduced costs

Download the PDF case study

COMPANY BACKGROUND
American Family Mutual Insurance Company, the nation’s third-largest mutual property and casualty insurer and 14th-largest property and casualty insurance company group, offers multiple insurance lines. These offerings include automotive, home, life, health, and business insurance.

American Family began with three employees in 1927 and has since grown to become a Fortune 500 company that generated $6.7 billion in revenue in 2008. American Family has 4,000 agents who serve 19 states.

BUSINESS/TECHNICAL CHALLENGE
An issue of scalability was American Family’s greatest technical challenge, as the Java application server environment was growing consistently and there was a need to identify a cost effective, stable and reliable management solution that would complement this growth. American Family’s prior management system could not scale to the size needed at an appropriate cost.

American Family deployed JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) across 1,200 JBoss application server instances and is using it to monitor and manage those systems.

DESIRED SOLUTION
American Family required a systems management solution that would provide: Real-time monitoring, alerting, historical trending, and the ability to control running systems in its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform environment. Performance of the product was a huge criteria-performance not only to scale, but to be responsive so that the operations team could use it successfully on a daily basis.

JBOSS PRODUCTS USED IN FINAL SOLUTION
About 3 years ago, American Family began migrating its IBM WebSphere environment to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to run many of the company’s business critical applications, including billing and claims, customer information management, an agent-facing sales suite, and web services. As the JBoss environment grew, American Family quickly identified the need for the tools to help monitor and manage the servers. The company evaluated a number of tools from several leading vendors and selected JBoss ON based on cost, scalability, and functionality.

The American Family operations team was asked to monitor, manage, and control a very large computing infrastructure with several different tools. JBoss ON will allow the Computer Operations team to manage the entire JBoss infrastructure with one console.

American Family will also continue to look for additional opportunities to use JBoss ON with their application developers. It is hoped that by using JBoss ON, American Family will be better able to detect and fix problems earlier in the software delivery life-cycle.

BUSINESS IMPACT
American Family expects to see improved reliability in the application server space due to the JBoss ON feature of historical trend analysis of key system metrics and faster time to react when there are problems due to the alerts based on those same metrics.

American Family is hoping to extend this capability into application support areas to detect problems early in the software development lifecycle. Through alerting, monitoring, and the opportunity to proactively address situations before they cause an outage, JBoss ON will improve the reliability and availability of Java application server applications and keep internal customers satisfied.

Ad hoc management scripts and tooling will be replaced with JBoss ON. The result should reduce time and effort needed to manage, monitor and control systems.

VALUE-ADD TO BUSINESS FROM JBOSS
American Family has been working in a collaborative manner with the JBoss ON engineering, support and product team for close to two years. JBoss provided four people on-site and over the course of two days, they worked out a number of technical challenges that could not have been tested or seen in the lab. This collaboration has resulted in improved scalability and features.

END-CUSTOMER VALUE
By working together, American Family and Red Hat have given back something of value to the open source community.

RED HAT CONSULTING / SUPPORT
American Family worked closely with JBoss ON resources to ensure that the product met functional and non-functional requirements such as scalability and performance.

ADVICE FOR COMPANIES FACING SIMILAR CHALLENGES
American Family suggests detailing the desired solution’s requirements and identify a provider who not only can offer the specific product, but also the support and willingness to collaborate and devote resources to making the relationship successful.

INNOVATION
The American Family and JBoss collaborative work on JBoss ON blazed a trail for the future features and scalability of the monitoring and management product and will provide benefits to other customers and developers to capitalize on.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

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

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

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

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization increases ability to handle mission-critical educational demands utilizing JBoss Enterprise Middleware

RALEIGH, NC – April 28, 2009 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Brazilian National Institute of Educational Research and Studies (Inep), has migrated its applications to a full suite of JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology, including the JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal Platforms. Since beginning its migration to JBoss solutions, Inep has increased scalability, performance and stability for its mission-critical applications.

Inep, a Federal Institution linked to the Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), manages the data and results from educational studies, research and evaluations related to the Brazilian Educational System. It is also responsible for the National High School Brazilian Exam (ENEM), which had over one million online registrations in 2008. After regularly encountering IT issues that required reconfiguring Inep’s system, the organization decided that the performance and scalability of its complex IT architecture must be increased to better execute daily tasks.

After evaluating a number of middleware solutions to address its performance and scalability needs, Inep selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware for its ability to meet the organization’s mission-critical demands, as well as for its affordable, reliable architecture. Inep’s solution includes JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Operations Network (JON) and JBoss Seam Framework. All of the solutions are deployed on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology and are in compliance with the Brazilian Federal Government’s recommendation of utilizing open source solutions.

“We believe that JBoss is the best middleware architecture for enterprise use because it brings together expertise and advanced technology to meet the mission-critical demands of our systems,” said Fábio Petrillo, information systems general coordinator at Inep. “Our choice to use JBoss’ open source middleware technology has been very successful. We now have innovative technology that reduces both software and hardware costs, provides large performance gains and allows for ease of management. Just after the exam results were released at the end of 2008, thousands of people had accessed the web site, with peaks of 90,000 simultaneous accesses. Between November and December of last year alone, we had around 2,000,000 unique access hits to our systems. Red Hat support had been essential for this success”, said Petrillo.

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

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

About Inep
Inep, a Federal Institution linked to Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), promotes statistics studies and valuations at all educational levels that help to create and deploy public policies to the educational area. In addition to Enem, Inep promotes the Certification and Competences National Exam (Encceja), Students Performance National Exam (Enade), Graduation Courses Valuation, School Census and Basic Education Valuation National System (Saeb), School Census, and University Census.

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.

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.

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2009/inep.html

Online bank selects JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for web applications

MILAN, ITALY, 10 February 2009 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that IWBank, an organization focused on financial services and online banking, has selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the JBoss Operations Network to improve the efficiency of its web-banking applications.

IWBank is committed to providing integrated online financial services that guarantee high efficiency, safety and transparency levels, in addition to offering competitive terms and excellent service to its customers. In late 2008, IWBank decided to extend its collaboration with Red Hat, which provides the bank with open source solutions, by adopting the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to develop its web applications.

IWBank’s goal was to effectively address growing customer demands to conduct increasingly complex and steadily growing volumes of transactions.

“Application performance, affordability and speed is a real competitive advantage in our business. As such, all our applications are developed in-house by a team of highly skilled professionals. We need to constantly innovate and enhance our services, which led us to evaluate the platforms we use for development and choose JBoss. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is the best middleware platform to meet our needs”, said Massimo Pavan, Director ICT and Technologies, IWBank. “JBoss enables us to provide more and more efficient and affordable services, which is crucial in the current economic climate”.

“We’re very pleased to have signed this deal with IWBank”, said Gianni Anguilletti, country sales manager, Red Hat Italy. “It emphasizes two core features of Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware: first, the high functional value of our technologies, which can fulfill sophisticated and complex needs. Second, the deal with IWBank represents further proof of how Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise solutions are providing valuable support for businesses facing difficult economic conditions”.

IWBank was the first bank to simplify the management of free online bank accounts combined with deposit accounts. It was selected as the Best Online Bank 2008 by Of-Osservatorio Finanziario (a prominent independent institute for bank services monitoring and rating).

For more information about Red Hat and JBoss, please visit, www.redhat.com and www.jboss.com.

About IWBank
IW BANK S.p.A. is part of UBI Banca Group, the fourth largest banking Group in Italy.
Active in the online trading sector since November 1999 as @IMIWEB Sim S.p.A., it has progressively expanded its offer since 2001, after its transformation into a bank, presenting itself as a reference operator in the online financial services sector. Since 23 May 2007, IWBank has been a public company, listed on the Expandi Market of the Italian Stock Exchange “Borsa Italiana”.

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

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; 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.N

FAST FACTS

Company: Covad Communications Group Inc.

Industry: Telecommunications

Geography: San Jose, California

Opportunity: Transition from inflexible and costly proprietary middleware software and hardware to JBoss Enterprise Middleware to cut costs while speeding new broadband/VoIP products to market

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Operations Network

Hardware: x86 system

Benefits: Reduce costs by more than $500,000 annually in hardware and software support; enabled cost-effective modernization of service-oriented architecture (SOA); improved performance of existing systems; reduced time-to-market of new products.

“In the current challenging economic situation, it is all the more important for Covad to retain its edge in automated Operations Support Systems while reducing the software support costs. We needed to modernize our SOA and roll out new products, all the while doing a new software rollout every six weeks and maintaining 99.9% uptime. That’s why we love JBOSS – it allows us to do more with less.”
- Unmesh Kulkarni, Director of Software Architecture and Delivery, Covad Communications Group, Inc.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Covad Communications is a leading provider of integrated voice and data communications. As a broadband specialist and pioneer, Covad was the first vendor to commercially deploy DSL in the United States. It owns the largest broadband network in the country, and is the only provider of data, voice, and wireless telecommunications solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with a nationwide DSL footprint. A major supplier of broadband access for companies like Earthlink, AOL, and AT&T, Covad offers its services to more than 57 million homes and businesses to 235 major markets in 44 states.

OPPORTUNITY
Covad has an advanced and fully automated Operations Support System spanning everything from Sales to back-end provisioning, Network Management and Billing. Covad had developed a broad range of front-end applications in-house using this proprietary software that integrated with the BSS/OSS back-end applications and were accessible to sales and support representatives via the Internet. These applications were also part of a modular service-oriented architecture (SOA) Covad had built in 2003 to enable rapid deployment of new software as needed.

But Covad increasingly found the licensing terms of the proprietary software inflexible, inhibiting its ability to add new functionality to its existing systems, develop new ones, and scale to meet market demands. “If you wanted to do something as basic as use the middleware on a different network, you had to completely renegotiate the license,” said Unmesh Kulkarni, technology leader of the software and information systems (SWIS) department within Covad, that is responsible for automation of all sales and support operations for the Covad network services. “This inflexibility was really hampering our ability to innovate, which is a cornerstone of our company.”

Additionally, the proprietary systems – both the hardware and the software – were prohibitively expensive. “We were spending millions of dollars on these proprietary solutions, and knew we could find a cheaper alternative,” said Kulkarni.

But, as important as cutting costs were, Covad couldn’t afford to compromise on quality and availability. Its middleware platform was the basis for a broad range of mission-critical applications.

For example, it had built a “prequalification engine” that sales representatives use to determine which Covad services are available to a potential customer at a particular location. “You have to go through a lot of data to come up with an answer quickly,” said Kulkarni. “Our applications often had less than two seconds to respond, otherwise the customer won’t wait, and we lose the sale.” Because Covad gets literally millions of these requests every day from hundreds of partners, “this was an absolutely mission-critical system, and our middleware needed to be robust enough to handle it,” he said.

SOLUTION
Kulkarni, a long-time proponent of open source, had been keeping his eye on the developments of JBoss Enterprise Middleware for some time. His team performed extensive due diligence of both the technology and the company, and the decision turned out to be an easy one. “In the last few years, JBoss has not only caught up with the leading middleware platforms, but overtaken them in many areas. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform had everything we needed in a technology platform: it offered superior performance; a full range of functionality; high-quality support; and was reasonably priced,” said Kulkarni. “Clearly, JBoss was our best option going forward.”

Today, Covad has x86 and SPARC machines running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and running JBoss Operations Network, an integrated management platform that simplifies the development, testing, deployment and monitoring of JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

BENEFITS
Thanks to this flexibility, the cost savings have been substantial. “We’re saving $500,000 per year by deploying JBoss,” said Kulkarni. “My executives love the fact that our invoices are going down every quarter,” said Kulkarni.

Moving from the proprietary platform to JBoss Enterprise Middleware was part of an overall corporate mandate that came from the very top of the organization to run lean software operations – but without sacrificing the ability to provide Covad customers with the highest quality services.

“We’d recently gone from a public to a private company, and were under new management,” said Kulkarni. “With the economy shrinking, these kinds of cost savings were exactly what our senior managers were demanding. But we still had to offer our customers 99.99 percent availability, and our developers still had to roll out new software every six weeks. That’s why we love JBoss – it allows us to do more with less.”

JBoss also enabled Covad to reduce the time-to-market of new services. The software division recently designed and deployed a new JBoss-based voice over IP (VoIP) solution within four months. “We moved from concept to product within this extraordinarily tight timeframe – something we could never have done with our proprietary middleware,” said Kulkarni. “And instead of costing us millions, the cost was minimal.”

JBoss Enterprise Middleware has proven to be a boon within Covad’s SOA strategy as well. The firm first rolled out its SOA four years ago, and used the proprietary middleware as a way of deploying Web services throughout the organization. Because of JBoss Enterprise Middleware’s’ advanced support for Java Platform Enterprise Edition (JEE) and flexibility with Web Service stacks, Covad is currently migrating its SOA over to the JBoss platform. “There’s no way I could have modernized my SOA without JBoss,” said Kulkarni.

The JBoss Operations Network (JON) allows Covad to improve operational efficiency and reliability through thorough visibility into production availability and performance and effectively manage configuration with a single, integrated tool.

The fact that Covad has freed itself from vendor lock-in is another big plus. “With all the consolidation going on in the middleware industry, prices are going up and vendors are less inclined to work with customers and be flexible,” said Kulkarni. “Not only does JBoss give us exactly what we need now, it provides us with choices going into the future.”

Looking forward, Covad is currently working on a very aggressive new product roll-out for 2009, primarily in the form of providing customers with Internet-based network services delivered “in the cloud.” JBoss provides Covad with a much more flexible approach to support this growth. “We’re looking at the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to implement business rules and process models, and at JBoss Seam as deep Web integration platform,” he said. “Whatever we do, JBoss is certain to be a core part of our efforts.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Car rental

Geography: EMEA

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

Migration Path: Proprietary Sun hardware with Solaris and Weblogic-based application server platforms to a more cost-effective and flexible platform based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Windows Server 2003

Hardware: Wintel environment incorporating Dell hardware, Intel-based dual-CPU, quad-core machines with 8-16Gigs of RAM, Windows Server 2003 32bit and 64bit

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate framework

Benefits: Experienced significantly reduced TCO of at least 50 percent from reduced maintenance costs, as well as increased licensing flexibility and reconfigurability and decreased server load

“Avis has absolute trust in JBoss and its mission-critical enterprise applications. We are very satisfied with the results that we’ve achieved since migrating to JBoss solutions.”
–Jens Utech, Director Revenue and Fleet Applications at Avis.

Download the case study [<strongPDF]

BACKGROUND
Avis Europe is a leading car rental company with a presence in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia. It serves over eight million customers per year via the Avis and Budget brands in over 3,800 locations. Avis holds leading positions in many markets in Western Europe, with approximately 80 percent of its revenues generated in the five major markets of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

OPPORTUNITY
Avis’ revenue management system, undoubtedly the organization’s predominant application affecting main business function, is used to conduct forecasting for business areas including future demand for car rental, the best placement of cars for rental services, what types of customers to target, and pricing decisions. Used in over 500 stations across Europe, the system needed to be upgraded and simplified to enable ease of use.

Avis’ station application, allowing agents to check in cars via handheld devices, and the company’s system for printing rental agreements both also needed to be optimized. The previous processes were conducted in-station using noncompliant, non-customer friendly, and incumbent systems.

In 2006, Avis recognized the need to replace these expensive, incumbent systems based on proprietary software with a reliable and affordable alternative. Though it had little experience with open source solutions, it decided to migrate its proprietary Solaris and combined BEA and Weblogic application server platform based on Sun hardware to the more cost-effective and flexible platform offered by open source solutions.

SOLUTION
Avis evaluated a number of open source solutions that could offer reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), expanded flexibility, and unmatched scalability. Avis required a J2EE-compliant Application Server on the Windows platform that offered support and a related monitoring and management infrastructure.

Ultimately, Avis selected a Wintel environment combining Dell hardware, Windows Server 2003, and JBoss Enterprise Application Server. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform also incorporated the use of JBoss Operations Network for monitoring activities.

The solution ecosystem consists of Windows Server 2003 32bit and 64bit, JBoss Enterprise Application Server, and SQL Server 2005. The overall solution includes 10 production servers used for the organizations revenue-management systems. Half of these solutions are based on JBoss Application Server, and all use the Hibernate framework.

The migration involved no integration with the incumbent platform, and was a full-system port. The process operated on a phased, three-year timeline with iterative releases occurring approximately every three months. No system integrators or value-added resellers were leverage during the migration process, as all development was done in-house.

Avis used consultants to aid the smooth implementation of JBoss Operations Network Server monitoring and management. This allowed the company to rapidly incorporate the tool without having to invest heavily in administration and installation internally.

BENEFITS
Avis selected JBoss solutions for the offering of reduced TCO and increased performance, flexibility, and availability of resources with familiarity in the market.

One of the distinct advantages of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is that it enables ease-of-use for development. The solution integrates easily with IntelliJ IDEA, and Avis’ development cycle, and Avis employees are now able to run the JBoss platforms on their personal laptops.

The platform has enabled significant development efficiency and developers are more effective running JBoss in their processes and taking advantage of the full IDE integrationand very rapid start-up times. The time required for startup with the new JBoss-based system has been reduced considerably. Now, with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Avis can quickly and easily add new servers to its architecture. The new architecture has allowed Avis to buy, deploy, and redeploy additional servers at very competitive prices.

In addition to reduced TCO amounting to savings of at least 50 percent of original costs, Avis also achieved enhanced performance from its newly implemented JBoss platform.

“It’s now definitely easier to scale a number of CPUs up and down in the current model and the system really brings us a lot of value, especially in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in the development process. We have saved at least 50 percent on TCO,” said Jens Utech, Director Revenue and Fleet Applications at Avis. “Thanks to JBoss’ integration with the development tools and the ability for the developer to work in very flexible ways, common development tasks around deploying, re-deploying, and generally working are three to four times faster with JBoss than any of the competitors.”

“Avis has absolute trust in JBoss and its mission-critical enterprise applications. We are very satisfied with the results and we are also impressed with JBoss support. We are provided with very professional, very prompt, and very helpful answers as opposed to the usual vendor nonsense. We use the support portal website as well,” said Utech.

In addition to all of the valuable benefits delivered by JBoss solutions, Avis also found that many of its development staff perceived the use of JBoss and open source solutions in general as very positive. This has led to increased motivation and expanded recruiting for Avis’ internal staff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Bank PHB

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

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

About Qrios

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Tourism and hospitality

Geography: Spain

Challenge: Provide greater performance and stability for the company’s web platform with the fundamental objective to increase online sales

Migration Path: Oracle Application Server to JBoss Enterprise Application Server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v4, and JBoss Operation Network

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Server 4.2 and Red Hat Enterprise ES Linux 4.0

Hardware: 3 + 2 servers, 2 for Application Server, 1 for JBoss ON, 2 servers for Oracle database on HP-UX.

Benefits: Improved performance, stability, and scalability of the platform, while also enhancing architecture control

“The continuous increase in online sales made through the web means the priority of the Corporate IT department must be to seek maximum availability and performance of the technology platform. Red Hat solutions have proven to exceed expectations for the the current and future needs of our platform.”
– Ricardo Mardomingo, IT Manager of NH Hoteles.

Download the case study [PDF]

This case study is available in the following languages: HERE

BACKGROUND
NH Hoteles (www.nh-hotels.com) is a well-known European business hotel based in Spain that is listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange. The hotel chain includes 350 locations, totalling more than 50,000 rooms across 21 countries in Europe, America, and Africa.

CHALLENGE
The company’s web platform, which includes its corporate website, a hotel search engine, and its online booking system, is a fundamental element of the business that is necessary to enable online sales. In 2006, its portal received around 17 million visitors. In 2007, the number of site visitors increased to over 22 million.

NH Hoteles was experiencing problems related to the stability and performance of its web platform. As a result, in May 2007, it decided to issue an RFI (Request For Information) to explore possible solutions that could ease the issues related to its web platform. It established a series of criteria for its platform solution, including heightened performance, scalability, standardization, support, monitoring, and procedures.

SOLUTION
The NH Hoteles web portal project consisted of migrating its Oracle Portal infrastructure that supports the NH Hoteles web platform to a 100 percent open source environment. After assessing various options that included the use of other proprietary application servers, NH Hoteles selected the solution proposed by Oxxigeno Networks S.L., a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, based on JBoss Application Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. NH Hoteles worked with Oxxigeno Networks S.L., a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, to complete the project, which spans the operating system, application server, web servers, and applications, as well as the subsequent platform operation management. The project was completed in October 2007.

The support services related to the new solution are based on practices of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standard and cover support tasks, including performance guarantees, proper operation of the platform, comprehensive monitoring of all NH Hoteles web portal applications, system configuration management, production environment update management (application and software updates, etc.), development methodologies, and the production of each task on the platform.

BENEFITS
After implementing Red Hat solutions, NH Hoteles benefited from a reliable technology infrastructure that was fault-tolerant, robust, supported by open technology, and standards-based.

The implementation of Red Hat solutions was a success and has exceeded the objectives defined by NH Hoteles. The hotel chain experienced an impressive increase in system stability with improved platform availability that grew from an average 98 percent before migration, to 100 percent after migration, as measured via the availability of the NH Hoteles portal homepage. The 66 percent performance increase of the platform enabled the execution of a complete web-booking cycle, including cancellation, and resulted in minimized response times for users., improving the online image of NH Hoteles.

Due to the management capacity of the JBoss Application Server clusters through JBoss Operations Network, NH Hoteles has also experienced greater control of its current architecture. The solution has provided ease-of-use and scalability, and has led the company to consider the suitability of implementing additional Red Hat solutions throughout the rest of its information systems.

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.”