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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: India

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

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle DB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS:

Company: Guangdong Telecom: BizNavigator

Geography: APAC: China

Industry: Telecom

Business Challenge: With continuous development of the BizNavigator platform, Guangdong Telecom needed to expand the capacity of the Internet Data Center (IDC) deployed in Guangdong, so that it would support more than 10 function modules, including Office Automation, Inventory Management, Network-based Anti-virus System and Enterprise Messaging

Solution: Guangdong Telecom deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform on Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5400 series

Benefits: Reduced the probability of single point of failure, and improved the availability and manageability of the entire cluster system; saved even greater energy consumptions, and hence would reduce operational cost.

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Background:
As an important component of the Digital Guangdong campaign that promotes computerization in the enterprises, the Guangdong Telecom established an enterprise computerization solution service platform for small to medium enterprises, namely BizNavigator, and tried to provide the software and hardware application systems and IT environment in a one-stop computerization construction for enterprises.

Business Challenge:
By using the network, operation and professional human resources of the Guangdong Telecom, customers can customize their products according to different needs, so as to effectively control their enterprise management cost and speed up the computerization of the enterprises.

With continuous development of the platform functionality, Guangdong Telecom urgently needs to expand the capacity of the Internet Data Center (IDC) deployed in Guangdong, so that it would support more than 10 function modules, including Office Automation, Inventory Management, Network-based Anti-virus System and Enterprise Messaging.

Solution:
In January 2008, after careful comparisons and studies, Guangdong Telecom chose to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 AP (Red Hat EL) on Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-Core Intelо Xeonо 5400 series processors.

Hardware Platform with High Performance and Efficiency:
System security and stability are crucial in building such a large data center. Malfunctioning of any single system may cause the services to halt on the entire application platform, which would affect the business operations of tens of thousands of enterprises, and brings immeasurable damage to the reputation of Guangdong Telecom. Therefore, Guangdong Telecom requires the system vendor to provide a highly efficient and robust platform and multiple layers of security assurance for BizNavigator

Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers based on Quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5400 series , which built with 45-nm enhanced Intel CoreTM microarchitecture, brought higher performance and multi-task processing power for the core platform of BizNavigator.

Comparing with previous generation of Intel Xeon processors, the brand new 5400 series of Quad-core Intel Xeon processors with 45nm high-k technology further enhanced the system performance, and greatly reduced energy consumption, and the performance to energy consumption ratio was increased by 38%;

The Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers with Quad-core Intel Xeon processors were configured with two power supplies, two network cards, and RAID1 hard disk array, which greatly reduced the probability of single point of failure and improved the availability and manageability of the entire cluster system;

Benefits:
The Quad-core Intel Xeon processors were capable of multi-task processing, which ensured the reliability and high speed of the access and module functions of BizNavigator, and ensured the orderly processing of electronic businesses of enterprises;

The Quad-core Intel Xeon processors built with 45nm technology would save even greater energy consumptions, and hence would reduce operational cost.

Under the support of Dell and Red Hat, 73 Dell PowerEdge 2950MLK servers provided a reliable and efficient running platform for all the major modules of BizNavigator though grouping and clustering.

FAST FACTS

Company: Victoria University of Wellington

Industry: Higher Education

Geography New Zealand

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

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

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

Hardware: 4 x Dell 2850 servers with Intel Xeon processors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation of Peru Implemented Zimbra Collaboration Suite on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Achieve Greater Scalability, Security and Productivity

FAST FACTS

Company: Ministerio de Vivienda: Peru’s Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation

Industry: Government

Partner: Software Libre Andino

Geography: Peru

Business Challenge: Needed to replace the existing client/server e-mail and collaboration platform to achieve improved scalability, security, productivity, and to reduce costs

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Alfresco Zimlet, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Dell Quad Core Server, 3.0 Ghz, 8GB ram, 1.5 Tb. Fully redundant

Migration Path: From a client/server system running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise to Zimbra Collaboration Suite, a Web-based email technology, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and utilizing Alfresco Zimlet

Benefits: Improved communication and collaboration among users and provided a single integrated calendar and email solution; increased access to e-mail, agendas, and documents independently from physical equipment; reduced IT administration and support costs by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

“The high level of know-how and expertise of Red Hat’s consultants, coupled with Red Hat’s local presence, were decisive in making the decision to secure consulting rather than performing these tasks internally.”
– Jaime Honores Coronado, managing director of the General Department of Statistics and Information Systems, Ministerio de Vivienda.

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BACKGROUND
Ministerio de Vivienda, Peru’s Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation, is a government agency whose goal is to promote and improve the development of housing, water, and sanitation services throughout Peru by facilitating access to adequate housing and basic services, facilitating the management, growth, preservation, maintenance, and protection of population centers.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Building community in Peru is a key objective for the Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation. And technology—in the form of email, calendaring, messaging, and collaboration solutions—has become an essential tool in achieving that objective. The Ministry realized it was outgrowing its communications infrastructure, and the IT team began planning for the task of replacing its aging client/server email and calendar systems.

The Ministry’s aging and limited email communications platform was based on SUSE Enterprise Linux with Postfix and Horde for Web customers. Users relied on different versions of Microsoft Outlook to check their email, resulting in challenges due to the platform age and configuration. The platform also caused the need to add an exclusive server allocated to this service. The Ministry’s main problem consisted of the lack of scalability and security, and limited flexibility in management and constrained the user interface.

SOLUTION
In early 2009, the Ministry made the decision to evaluate solutions to replace its expensive proprietary software with lower cost, open source alternatives for a Web-based email solution with integrated email, calendar, and messaging.

The Ministry worked with Software Libre Andino, a Red Hat and Zimbra partner in Peru, in the evaluation process to replace its outdated systems.

“We needed a quick-to-deploy and easy-to-manage solution. We assessed several proposals from various vendors, among them, SUSE Linux and Microsoft Windows-based solutions, but we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and Alfresco, for the cost savings, simplified administration, reliability, and quick implementation,” said Jaime Honores Coronado, managing director of the General Department of Statistics and Information Systems, Ministerio de Vivienda.

The entire project consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Zimbra Collaboration Suite, including the migration of each account, installation, configuration, start-up, technical, and end-user training. Email accounts were configured with a 900 MB per user quota.

With Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as the primary development and deployment platform for the open source email platform. Zimbra Collaboration Suite integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, voice over IP (VoIP), and online document authoring into a single application with a rich browser-based interface, and is compatible with all standard email clients, and integrates easily with third-party applications.

The Ministry was able to deploy the Alfresco Zimlet, a tool created by Zimbra community members to allow a simple way for employees to store email attachments on the Alfresco server, and in turn select documents from the Alfresco server and attach them to a Zimbra email. This tool created by the open source community makes it easy for government agencies or companies to invest in multiple open source products to meet their needs.

Although the Ministry’s technical staff had minimal experience with a web-based email technology, Red Hat Consulting facilitated a faster implementation and provided the technical staff with the knowledge and tools to effectively manage the new platform.

“The high level of know-how and expertise of Red Hat’s consultants, coupled with Red Hat’s local presence, were decisive in making the decision to secure consulting rather than performing these tasks internally. Red Hat, through partner Software Libre Andino, contributed to service deployment, technical, and end-user training, and the migration of old e-mail accounts, allowing our team to quickly become experts,” said Coronado.

BENEFITS
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite e-mail platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux immediately improved the productivity and coordination of the Ministry’s employees by enhancing collaboration and sharing of work agendas.

“We have achieved a larger physical distribution of our users who are now capable of accessing their e-mail accounts wherever they are. Our investment project coordinators can perform Web queries of their local e-mail, manage their work agendas, and refer to the document management system, all in one single platform,” said Coronado.

During the evaluation, the Ministry weighed Microsoft Exchange against Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and determined that the latter would account for 30 percent savings compared with the former. Zimbra’s own studies show similar TCO savings.

Saving the government money is definitely one reason for the switch to Zimbra, but another important factor in its decision to deploy open source solutions is that open source platforms allow users to easily integrate and build new solutions.

The Ministry’s future plans contemplate expanding the use of the solution by integrating it with other applications and platforms. Engineer Honores Coronado said, “We hope to continue our commitment to open source solutions and trust in Red Hat as the ideal partner for our projects.”

“The Zimbra and Red Hat solution provides a cost-effective platform that allows for greater efficiency and a unified email and collaboration platform,” said Coronado. “And we also benefited from significant cost savings with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

COMPANY: GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company)

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: US

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Existing proprietary middleware platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

MIGRATION PATH: Proprietary middleware platform to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform: 28 bands (1 band = 32 CPUs), JBoss Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Consulting, Amentra

HARDWARE: 50 Dell servers

BENEFITS: Reduced the total cost of ownership by more than 30%, throughput gain of 3X with utilization down to 1/3rd of the current platform, overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

Download the PDF case study

COMPANY BACKGROUND
GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) is the third-largest private passenger auto insurer in the United States based on the latest 12 months written premium. GEICO provides auto insurance coverage for nearly 9 million policyholders and insures more than 14.4 million vehicles.

In addition to auto insurance, GEICO also offers customers insurance for their motorcycles and homes. Commercial auto insurance, boat, ATV, RV, personal umbrella protection and life insurance are also available.

GEICO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Berkshire Hathaway group of companies, is rated A++ for financial stability by A.M. Best Company and ranks at the top of several national customer satisfaction surveys. For more information about GEICO, go to www.geico.com.

BUSINESS AND/OR TECHNICAL CHALLENGE
In 2007, GEICO’s enterprise architecture team recognized they were facing several challenges with their existing proprietary middleware platform. The platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

The GIECO IT team identified the following challenges with their existing proprietary solution:

- Cost – GEICO’s license agreement was a “time bound licensing agreement” related to the number of proprietary application servers deployed during the time frame. Since GEICO experienced significant growth during this time frame, the cost to “true up” and pay for the additional licenses was significant.

- Performance – When GEICO upgraded their standard Java Development Kit (JDK) from version 1.4 to 1.5 on their existing proprietary platform, they did not see any improvements in machine (CPU/Memory) usage or application response time. After eight weeks of performance testing and tuning, they were finally able to configure the upgraded proprietary platform to match the earlier version’s performance. The upgrade was not only cumbersome but was also expensive since they had to engage external consultants to accomplish the upgrade.

- Memory leaks – The previous proprietary deployment also experienced unexplained memory leak(s). Developer load and memory testing returned misleading results unless the developer knew how to work around the leaks and complete certain types of tests.

- Documentation/Support – GEICO found it challenging to identify and understand the Java API in the current proprietary environment due to lack of documentation. They also had challenges in acquiring tools to identify memory issues, debug leaks, etc. For every instance of a high severity issue such as memory leak, external consultants needed to be engaged to identify and fix the problem.

- Staging – Due to these challenges, some of the GEICO development teams adopted JBoss technologies for their developer workstations and began building applications using JBoss. This dual use strategy became complex and redundant for IT Operations as they needed to make configuration changes on both the proprietary and JBoss platforms.

VENDOR SELECTION PROCESS
GEICO conducted extensive research and identified Sun’s GlassFish and Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware as potential solutions that were suitable for GEICO’s application and infrastructure. JBoss Enterprise Middleware was selected based on its’ market share and extensive support from Red Hat. GEICO conducted a proof-of-concept, installing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in a cluster of servers (POC environment). Performance and load tests were conducted using various tools for a selected business application on both platforms.

The JBoss results from these tests were astonishing. A few highlights include:
- User page transition time decreased as much as 19 seconds using JBoss

- During the proof-of-concept 1,749 additional business processes were created on the JBoss platform

- On the same hardware and environment, JBoss required 70% less CPU resources than the current platform

- Performance tuning with JBoss was accomplished in 40 man hours versus 1440 man hours for the existing proprietary platform

GEICO also conducted multiple reference checks with organizations that were of similar size and industry. The reference checks were extremely positive about Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

SOLUTION
The solution consisted of subscriptions for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and the initial deployment environment consisted of 540 processors. An additional 350 were added at a later date. A plan was put together to aggressively migrate 2 out of 3 mission critical applications in a time span of 3 months. GEICO also utilized a JBoss Technical Account Manager (TAM) who was dedicated to supporting GEICO’s specific needs during their switch to JBoss.

BENEFITS
By implementing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, GEICO was able to reduce the total cost of ownership by more than 30%.

When compared to the previous proprietary platform, GEICO also experienced throughput gains of 3x, and a 2/3 reduction in utilization. The overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

RED HAT SUPPORT, TRAINING, AND CONSULTING SERVICES LEVERAGED
One of the challenges for GEICO was the time bound migration process. GEICO’s middleware team was trained on JBoss for a week. With the support of Red Hat and Amentra (a Red Hat company), they successfully migrated the initial 2 applications and were able to migrate the 3rd application as well. This was a clear demonstration of expertise in Red Hat Consulting services and the ability of GEICO’s middleware team to adapt rapidly to the new JBoss environment.

ADVICE FOR OTHER COMPANIES FACING A SIMILAR BUSINESS CHALLENGE
“Open-source does not translate to unsupported. Don’t be afraid of change. GEICO had initial concerns about support, stability and deploying open-source software for its mission critical applications, but the market maturity and the premium level of enterprise support offered by Red Hat made it very easy to make the change to an open source environment. If your organization has been slow to consider adopting open-source solutions, they may lose a competitive advantage that can be gained based on lower cost of ownership and utilization of efficient/best of breed open source products.

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

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

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verizon was able to increase capacity, reliability and security, allowing end users to work more efficiently. Blake commented that, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has eliminated performance surges and through the consolidation the company was able to identify bottlenecks in the system, providing a more streamlined environment. End users were minimally disrupted by the change in systems but have since noticed a more improved IT environment. The total cost of ownership has been greatly reduced.

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

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

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.”

COMPANIES: Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Rivet Logic

CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Publishing

GEOGRAPHY: Cambridge, Massachusetts

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The JBoss Seam intranet application allows enterprise users to:

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

- Create and enter new content and associate metadata and relationships

- Manage digital rights of product-related media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Monash University: Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

Industry: Education

Geography: Australia

Business Challenge: Monash University needed to construct a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to support its biomedical research efforts. The cluster needed to be easily expandable, and CPU power per dollar spent was a major consideration.

Solution:cluster built on Dell PoweEdge blade servers and Dell PowerVault storage running Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge M600 blade servers with Intel Xeon processors, Dell PowerEdge M1000e enclosures, Dell PowerVault MD3000 modular disk storage arrays, Dell PowerVault MD1000 disk expansion enclosures

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Platfrom OCS (Open Cluster Stack)

Benefits: Able to add a new server node in minutes with no downtime, able to support 400% more research projects, research completed in weeks vs. months, favorable price, lower power requirements, easily expandability of both cluster and storage

Read the full case study at Dell.com

BACKGROUND
Melbourne-based Monash University, Australia’s largest university, is known as a worldwide leader in biomedical research. Until recently, however, the university’s researchers were limited in their ability to achieve results quickly due to fragmented and often insufficient computing resources. They sometimes had to spend precious research dollars hiring outside computing facilities to meet their needs—until a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster built on Dell hardware changed everything.

Although the university’s IT leaders knew that a local HPC cluster would greatly improve the situation, they had held off on the purchase due to cost and scalability concerns. “Building a cluster using specialized HPC hardware would have been too expensive, yet we knew we needed to start providing better computing facilities in order to remain
competitive,” says Adrian Ling, manager, infrastructure and major I.T. projects.

“Also, we knew that once we built it, it was going to grow quickly, so we wanted to make sure we could add new servers and storage capacity easily.”

The solution to both problems turned out to be the cost-effective combination of Dell PowerEdge blade servers and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. After considering servers from five vendors, Monash decided that Dell servers offered the most compute power per dollar spent.

“Using standardized, off- the-shelf Dell servers for our cluster nodes instead of custom-built HPC hardware has allowed us to purchase much more CPU power per dollar,” says Ling. “Dell’s pricing was much better
than the competition on a price-per-flops basis.”

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.”

FAST FACTS

Company: KSH Holdings

Industry: Construction

Geography: Singapore

Challenge: Needed a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution to monitor project budgets and ensure timely data reports for use by the KSH Holdings management team

Migration Path: Paper-based reporting system to a Progress Claims System (PCS) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, PHP, and Apache

Hardware: Dell 2850 with 2 GB RAM and 1 x Processor

Benefits: Developed a scalable Progress Claims System (PCS) that offered access to real-time financial data, reduced manual input errors, and enabled expedited reimbursement processes for subcontractors

“We handle a lot of data input on a daily basis and require something stable and capable of handling the load. That’s why we chose Red Hat.”
-Tony Tang, Chief Financial Officer of KSH Holdings.

Download the Case Study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
With more than 28 years of experience, Kim Seng Heng Holdings (KSH Holdings) is a well established construction, property development and property management group with operations in Singapore, Malaysia and China. The group’s activities are construction in Singapore and Malaysia, and property development and management in China.

Among its notable private sector construction projects in Singapore are The Coast, The Berth By The Cove, The Spectrum, Montview, the Mustafa Shopping Centre extension, and the restoration of Far East Square. Its public sector portfolio includes The Frontier Community Place, Choa Chu Kang Sports Complex, Nanyang Polytechnic, and Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal. KSH Holdings has also secured a S$32 million contract to build an assembly plant in Selangor and a S$7.2 million contract from Tan Chong & Sons Motor for the construction of a warehouse and office in Selangor.

CHALLENGE
With several simultaneous projects underway in Singapore, KSH Holdings’ finance department needed to a better system to keep track of all claims for payment for work completed by subcontractors. This manual process involved the subcontractor submitting a claim, the quantity surveyor verifying the work done, and the manager and director approving the submission. The previous claims system involved a paper form that had to be passed by hand across sites in Singapore to reach project managers and directors located in different offices.

As a result of the outdated manual process, there were inconsistencies in the progress claims, and the KSH Holding management team could not reliably track their budgets.

“We needed something to monitor the project cost at almost real time to ensure that we were not exceeding our budget. When insufficient or incorrect information is provided to the finance department, payment to the subcontractor may be delayed. The manual process was inconsistent and we could not generate management reports,” said Tony Tang, Chief Financial Officer of KSH Holdings.

The company wanted a solution that could streamline the entire claims process and deliver accurate, real-time data that could be used to produce meaningful management reports.

“Users must be able to log in to the system from any location to input the data. This data will be stored centrally and the system must be able to compute the information and push back to the financial system. The system must allow project managers and directors to check on the current progress in development and payment. It must also be reliable and secure,” said Tang.

With these criteria in mind, KSH Holdings decided to turn to Cxrus Solutions, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, to develop a Process Claims Systems (PCS).

SOLUTION
Cxrus Solutions studied the construction company’s needs and spoke to its quantity surveyors, project managers, directors, and the finance department to understand the requirements for the desired PCS.

“We handle a lot of data input on a daily basis and require something stable and capable of handling the load. That’s why we chose Red Hat,” said Tang.

According to Alvin Teo, Business Solutions Director of Cxrus Solutions, the cost of using Red Hat is lower than other platforms.

“The solution also runs faster and performs better when deployed on Red Hat. Of course, Red Hat is renowned for its security, reliability, and scalability,” said Teo.

Cxrus Solutions conducted end-user training for about 40 quantity surveyors, project managers and directors, and finance department staff at KSH Holdings. The PCS, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, PHP, and Apache, went live in October 2007.

Teo believes that taking part in the Infocomm Development Authority’s (IDA) Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP) has given his company a technology edge.

iLIUP is aimed at promoting mutually beneficial partnerships between local enterprises in Singapore and infocomm multinational corporations, leveraging the strengths of each party to bring about greater synergy and results.

“Cxrus Solutions has gained much from Red Hat’s technological insights of the Linux operating system versus other operating systems. This has helped us to craft the best possible solutions for our customers. KSH is a good example of a customer that has benefitted from our participation in iLIUP,” he added.

BENEFITS
It took some time for the KSH Holdings staff to become accustomed to the switch from a manual system to an automated system, but the employees quickly realized the benefits of the solution.

“PCS is a means to record work done. The Red Hat-based solution has met our objectives of improving data accuracy, better visibility of project cost, and prompt payment to our sub-contractors. Our quantity surveyors can now check the status of their claims online from any location,” said Tang.

Since the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based system was implemented in 2007, business has increased by about 70 percent. Due to the scalability of the platform, the KSH Holdings financial department was additionally able to handle the associated workload increase without needing to recruit more staff, saving more money.

In addition to providing increased accuracy and scalability, PCS has also made data more easily retrievable so that management reports can be produced quickly when necessary.

Claims processing time has been cut by 50 to 60 percent, enabling sub-contractors to be paid more promptly. This, in turn, leads to maintaining good relationships and enhanced corporate reputation.

Going forward, KSH Holdings plans to link PCS with the financial system to enable customised management reports on the fly.

“We are also planning to add a document management system to PCS so that we can reduce the amount of paper utilised. By doing this, we will also have better document security, and we’ll save on storage space,” said Tang.

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

Download [PDF]

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.

“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

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.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Media

Geography: India

Challenge: To transform existing legacy infrastructure into a future-ready solution, while protecting existing investments, and giving the group the foundation to accelerate cost effectively

Migration Path: Novell Netware 3.12 OS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with Oracle 10g Database

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge 1900, 2800 and 2900 Server series, 64-bit Intel Xeon processors

Benefits: The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has given Indian Express a highly available, secure, and reliable platform with freedom from vendor lock-in, and the ability to scale cost-effectively without subsequent investments in hardware.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Indian Express group is one of India’s most well-known media firms, with several popular publications to its credit. The group owns The Indian Express, which continues to push the boundaries of excellence in investigative journalism and uses the slogan ‘Journalism of Courage.’ The group also owns other newspapers in India including the Financial Express, a business newspaper focused on the Indian economy; Marathi language daily Loksatta; Hindi language daily Jansatta; and Screen, a tabloid focused on the Indian entertainment industry.

CHALLENGE
The India media industry is extremely competitive, and is constantly adapting to cater to changing consumer demands and technological developments. In late 2004, even as the Indian Express group was establishing new benchmarks in journalism, it was grappling to cost-effectively scale up its IT infrastructure.

As a national-level newspaper, the Express group operates across more than 19 locations in the country, and needed a robust IT infrastructure that would give it the ability to publish content quickly, without compromising on quality. Over the years, to gain a competitive advantage, the group had deployed a diverse mix of software and hardware, leading to a prevalence of islands of information, numerous point-to-point interfaces, and inconsistent business processes.

The group’s backbone LAN servers were powered by Novell Netware 3.12 OS with the limitation of client licenses; while for its messaging needs the group used .cc:Mail 8.2. These applications were impacting the group’s agility in an industry where speed is of critical importance, and were proving to be complex and expensive to maintain. It was clear to the group that it needed to evaluate a solution that would not only meet existing needs cost-effectively, but give the group the reliability it needed for the future.

“Our top priority was to ensure uniformity, standardization, and compatibility of operations, while building the IT foundation for us to accelerate quickly in the future without any limits – either imposed by technology or the vendor,” said Tridib Bordoloi, CIO, Indian Express Group.

SOLUTION
While assessing the right infrastructure to power its future growth, four important considerations were made. “In the media industry, we cannot afford to have a downtime. Hence, high availability is a critical need. We also evaluated platforms with respect to the TCO, future readiness, and ability to scale,” said Bordoloi.

In the end, the decision was made quickly due to the team’s familiarity with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), having used the platform effectively for running its file and print servers. In fact, almost every member of the IT team in the group is trained on using and implementing RHEL.

The group planned a series of modernization initiatives with Linux at the heart. The group implemented SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to streamline business processes, gain complete control, and achieve information transparency across the country. The Express group has deployed four SAP modules, which includes Material management, Media Advertisement Management, Finance and Control, and Media Sales and Distribution.

“The selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was an obvious choice, as it fulfilled all the requirements we envisioned for building a future-ready platform. We are all for open standards, and -did not want to be tied down to a single vendor. Red Hat gives us the flexibility to change to a different hardware platform, if necessary,” said Bordoloi.

Further, with SAP certifying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the Express Group is ensured that all the criteria necessary for full interoperability of Red Hat solutions with all modules of SAP are in compliance.

BENEFITS
With ease of use, protecting existing investments, and the ability to scale cost-effectively without subsequent investments in hardware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has given the Indian Express group the ability to move forward with its business goals without any technology constraints. Like any other national newspaper, the smooth transfer of stories and pages within the organization, across locations is vital. Today, a complete workflow enables this while integrating agency feeds, and has the added ability to accommodate last-minute breaking news without compromising on quality of printing.

“In addition to high availability and reliability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 gives us access to features such as clustering and virtualization that would otherwise have been – possible through the purchase of additional third-party solutions,” explained Bordoloi.

The group uses Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 10g as the database, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as the platform. This combination provides the group increased flexibility and significantly reduced operational costs. For example, the Express Group can now dynamically provision nodes, storage, or CPUs to lower costs and improve utilization.

“With the combination of cost, flexibility, and reliability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has truly exceeded our expectations. When compared to contemporary solutions, the TCO is very low. More importantly, Red Hat’s security features enabled through the Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality, has given us peace of mind, vis-à-vis other platforms that are facing new vulnerabilities and threats almost every day,” said Bordoloi.

What is also special about the Indian Express Group is that the group is a trendsetter in usage of open source technologies in India. From mail servers, file servers, SAP, and even the company’s website, the group uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the backend. The list of accolades doesn’t stop here. “The Indian Express Group happens to be one of the earliest users of SAP on RAC in the region,” said Bordoloi.

“The Express Group has always been on the forefront of publishing high-quality articles that can positively change the society we live in. Hence, when it was revealed in a recent Network World test that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was named the Greenest Operating System, pulling as much as 12 percent less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware, we were overjoyed with our choice and the small contribution we are making to make the world a better place to live in,” said Bordoloi.

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

FAST FACTS

Company: CSS Corp.

Industry: Information Technology

Geography: Global, headquartered in San Jose, California

Opportunity: To reduce IT costs and increase user productivity by improving the performance and eliminating downtime of Lotus Notes and Domino applications being used throughout the worldwide enterprise.

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite Server, Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino.

Hardware: 64 servers, divided between Dell 2950s, HP DL380s, and IBM X3650s and desktops.

Benefits: Dramatically improved application performance for users, improving their productivity while freeing up IT resources to focus on more strategic issues for the business.

“Because of the difference in performance and reliability running Lotus Notes and Domino on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are going back to our customers who run Notes and Domino applications and convincing them to switch as well. The IBM-Red Hat partnership is a win-win situation for all concerned.”
– S.Pranatharthi Haran Practice Head – IBM Services, CSS Corp.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1996, Cybernet-SlashSupport (CSS) Corp. is a leading provider of global technology operations management services. With more than 5,000 employees working in offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, CSS’ mission is to foster a 100 percent satisfied customer base, and is committed to building long-term client partnerships that maximize system quality, availability, and reliability. CSS has two business units: Cybernet Software Systems is a business and technology solutions provider specializing in software design, development, and sustenance services to enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs); SlashSupport provides technical support services to enterprises.

OPPORTUNITY
As a leading global information technology (IT) firm providing software development, support, and consulting services, CSS needed its business and technology professionals to work at top efficiency. Priding itself on eliminating excess expense and operational inefficiencies from client engagements, CSS needed to do the same internally. And as the entire 5,000-employee organization used Lotus Notes and Domino applications running on Microsoft Windows to communicate and collaborate on key business and technical processes, the reliability and performance of those applications was a critical aspect of its ability to succeed.

These applications included critical human resources systems such as the basic employee information database, the travel management system, the performance appraisal system, and the bills tracking system. Also on Lotus Notes and Domino were mission-critical financial systems including budgeting, procurement, and financial concurrence systems. Lotus Notes and Domino were also used for important administrative systems such as the electricity consumption and telephone bills trackers.

All in all, the company was extremely dependent on Lotus Notes and Domino applications. Any downtime of any of these systems directly and severely impacted the day-to-day operations of CSS. “And given the fact that CSS is a global company, it was essential that these systems be available round the clock,” said S.Pranatharthi Haran Practice Head – IBM Services, CSS Corp.

But these important Notes and Domino applications were plagued with performance and reliability problems. First installed in 2001, the Windows servers frequently crashed and needed to be rebooted, making critical applications unavailable to users at times of high business urgency.

Frequently, our Windows machines’ CPU and memory utilization would go up to 100 percent due to our viruses and memory leakages in the system,” said Haran. “When this happen, our internal applications would go down, which had very serious implications for our business.”

Then there were performance issues. The applications often ran slow or froze altogether, making it difficult for CSS’ professionals to get their jobs done.

“Over time, the performance of the systems were getting slower, and the server was hanging more and more often,” said Haran. “It was really impacting our users’ daily activities.”

On the IT side of the house, CSS IT professionals were spending a great deal of their time putting out fires and dealing with tactical systems issues rather than devoting themselves to issues that were more strategic to the business. Patch management was an especially thorny problem: the CSS IT team had to spend eight to nine hours per month installing Windows patches alone – this in addition to other server-related maintenance tasks.

“Every 15 days, Microsoft would release the patches for Windows servers and service packs,” said Haran. “These patches needed to be tested in our lab before being deployed, which consumed a significant number of our personnel hours on a regular basis.”

All this time, CSS was growing into new territories and countries, and it was the responsibility of our IT division to get the new locations, premises, and people up to speed as soon as possible. “That’s IT’s primary agenda. Yet because of these server-related issues, the majority of our IT professionals’ time was spent taking care of problems rather than these other key, more strategic tasks,” said Haran.

SOLUTION
After experiencing numerous crashes and deteriorating performance for more than two years, CSS decided to migrate from Windows to Linux platform. It put three versions of Linux through their paces: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; SUSE Linux from Novell, and Debian, from Ubuntu, paying special attention to patch management, resource utilization, and security concerns with Domino client access.

CSS is also transforming its desktop strategy by moving to the IBM Open Collaboraiton Client powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. This new environment gives CSS a more secure and cost effective Microsoft desktop alternative that provides a pathway to the future.

One of the main reasons that CSS chose to go with Red Hat was the quality of the support. In the past CSS had had experiences with SUSE support, but “the support that Red Hat provides is legendary in the open source industry. We didn’t have to think twice,” said Haran.

BENEFITS
CSS has experienced significant benefits from the migration from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For starters, application performance was dramatically improved – between 30 percent and 40 percent. The reliability of the applications was also boosted considerably – since the migrated 2.5 years ago, CSS hasn’t experienced any server crashes under Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

On the desktop front, switching over to Linux has significantly improved the performance of Lotus Notes and Domino-based applications. A robust operating system on the server side coupled with an improved graphical user interface has significantly lessened the learning curve for users, reducing the need for training and substantially increasing productivity.

Migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux couldn’t have gone more smoothly, said Haran. It only took 30 days for three engineers to migrate application servers with more than 230 applications and databases, and seven days for them to migrate a mail server with more than 2,000 mailboxes.

Users have been most appreciative, as their productivity has shot up under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, the recruitment center application depends on manual data entry by temporary employees. In Windows, employees were able to create and update 30 documents per hour. Under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they were able to process 66 documents per hour.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also allowed CSS to optimize its use of hardware. “Using VMware, we were able to create a number of virtual machines under Red Hat Enterprise Linux – I could consolidate eight different Web server applications onto a single server in a single operating system,” said Haran. “This not only saved us money, but provided for high availability.”

The industry-renowned Red Hat support provided during the migration period was excellent, said Haran. “Once, one of our key applications wasn’t working properly, so we called Red Hat. Their engineers actually provided us with some custom code that solved a very complicated problem we were having,” he said.

From a sheer cost perspective, Red Hat Linux has turned out to be a boon as well. Each Red Hat Enterprise Linux server costs just $1,500 as compared to $2,700 per Windows server.

Most significantly, CSS’ precious IT resources were freed up to focus on more strategic issues. Today, updating the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers with new patches takes just one to two hours a month rather than eight to nine hours per patch required under Windows. And there have been any number of intangible benefits, as well, said Haran.

“In our business, time is money,” he said. “We work on projects on an hourly basis, and have to give our clients accurate estimates of the number of person hours a project will take. Our success is based upon bringing projects in on time and under budget. With Red Hat Linux driving our Lotus Notes and Domino applications, we keep our clients happy while maximizing profitability.”

“Because of the difference in performance and reliability running Lotus Notes and Domino on Red Hat Enterprise, we are going back to our customers who run Notes and Domino applications and convincing them to switch as well,” said Haran. “The IBM-Red Hat partnership is a win-win situation for all concerned.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Technology

Geography: Headquartered in Seoul, Korea

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

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle databases

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge servers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimized Systems

Winner: Infoplex

Submitted by: Sean Kaye

Vertical: Information Technology

Geography: Australia

Website: www.infoplex.com.au

Company Background

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

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Business and/or Technical Challenge

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

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

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

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

Vendor Selection Process

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

Solution

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

Benefits

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

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

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

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

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

Fast Facts:

Sector: Public Administration

Geographic location: Spain

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

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

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

Hardware: HP, Dell, and Fujitsu Siemens servers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Semiconducting

Geography: Worldwide

Opportunity: Replace aging, deficient UNIX-based system with a Linux solution that could deliver reduced costs, expanded flexibility, and heightened stability

Migration Path: RISC-based UNIX servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell x86 servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network

Hardware: Dell x86 servers

Benefits: Reduced costs by 60 percent, enabled the sharing of data through flexible support of Network File System (NFS) protocols, gained flexibility in vendor selection, and increased work efficiency by more than four times

“We were also very satisfied with the choices that we were presented with once we deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Before, if we wanted to use an alternative operating system, we were locked in with a specific vendor. Now, we’re able to select vendors based on quality and stability and not brand.” – Seok-Ho Choi, Researcher at Fairchild Semiconductor.

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Background
Fairchild Semiconductor is a leading global provider of semiconductor technology that powers products and makes them more energy efficient. Fairchild continues to build on its rich history of innovation to address one of the greatest challenges of today – reducing wasted energy and improving efficiency in an increasingly power-hungry world. Its headquarters are located in South Portland, Maine, and its main design and manufacturing facilities are located in Buchon, Korea.

Challenge
Concerned with deploying systems that can support fast-developing semiconductor processing technology and semiconductor manufacturing designs, Fairchild became concerned when its former UNIX-based EDA system was not providing adequate performance, cost, and stability requirements for its systems.
Semiconductor manufacturing designs require complex and detailed operations, and Fairchild’s systems were experiencing instability with its systems. Closely related to the verification of design, an important step in semiconductor manufacturing, the instability issues that the company was experiencing needed to addressed immediately. With a five-year internal lifecycle for its systems, Fairchild decided to quickly migrate its verification system to a new, more reliable solution.

Solution
When considering alternative solutions, Fairchild became interested in Linux for its cost savings, stability, and interoperability with x86 servers. For compatibility with x86 servers, its choices were limited to Windows or Linux-based operating systems. “Windows did not support the functions and stability that we desired, so we decided to test various Linux solutions,” said Seok-Ho Choi, Researcher at Fairchild Semiconductors. “Linux was not only able to provide a similar environment to our original UNIX solution, but it was more cost-effective.”

Fairchild evaluated Red Hat solutions and after obtaining solid results, decided to migrate its UNIX-based EDA system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A large portion of the company’s 150 RISC UNIX servers were migrated to Dell x86 servers equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Each is managed using Red Hat Network.

Benefits
After migrating from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fairchild benefited from elimination of system downtime and was able to load libraries that correspond with each EDA tool from the operating system without the disconnection issues that it had experienced with its previous solution. It also reduced costs by 60 percent in terms of server maintenance, was able to freely share data with the support of NFS protocols, and was able to manage a heterogeneous architecture more easily due to the solution’s interoperability.
“We were also very satisfied with the choices that we were presented with once we deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Seok-Ho Choi “Before, if we wanted to use an alternative operating system, we were locked in with a specific vendor. Now, we’re able to select vendors based on quality and stability and not brand.”

Red Hat Network also provided Fairchild with ease of management of its Red Hat-based servers. “What satisfied us most after implementing Red Hat solutions was patch management,” said Seok-Ho Choi “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network, we were able to ensure that our system was optimized with just one click. If solution patches were necessary, or just normal updates, it was a lot easier for us.”
Fairchild is currently working on a project that converts all of its graphics-related tasks to Linux systems in order to further reduce costs and improve the efficiency of its IT architecture. “We also plan to convert our UNIX workstations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop,” said Seok-Ho Choi.

Delivered Value Winner: Nortel

Submitted by: Ernest Szeideman

Vertical: Telecommunications

Geography: International

Website: www.nortel.com

Company Background

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

Business and/or Technical Challenge

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

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

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

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

Vendor Selection Process

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

Benefits

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

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

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

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

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

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

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

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

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

“Red Hat training is a big reason why we’ve been able to keep things running smoothly.
The best compliment from our average end user is nothing at all and that is what we’ve heard since the RHEL deployment.”

Jon Cutler, Director of Systems Administration, Marshall University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: West Virginia

Opportunity: Running on a slow and expensive older system caused frustration for many at Marshall

Migration Path: SunGard Banner on HP AlphaServer with Open VMS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: SunGard Banner on RHEL

Hardware: Dell

Benefits: Enjoying increased performance, improved speed, and enhanced hardware options in a simplified environment

Marshall University is a state-supported research university located in Huntington, West Virginia, offering two- and four-year undergraduate degrees as well as graduate degrees. Founded in 1837 and named after the late Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, the school has an enrollment of approximately 10,000 undergraduate students and 4,000 graduate and medical students. Marshall offers 26 associate programs, 47 baccalaureate programs and 49 graduate programs and boasts a faculty of more than 700.

Marshall’s Division of Information Technology is responsible for the vision, policies, planning, development, implementation, and administration for the university’s vast technology system. The division is comprised of Computing Services, Distributed Education Technology, Libraries, and the Marshall University Technology Outreach. Marshall’s robust IT division employs more than 100 IT professionals, committed to helping the university fulfill its mission of being an “Interactive University.”

OPPORTUNITY

Marshall uses the popular Banner suite from SunGard for important administrative and academic tasks, including human resource functions, payroll, class registration, and financial aid. Used in almost all facets of campus life, Banner provides students with a way to manage and monitor class schedules, registration, and financial information while giving faculty and staff members a unified system for academic administration, finance, and student evaluations. The Banner suite is widely used on campus and its deployment has spread to the Marshall University Alumni Association and the Marshall University Foundation.

Prior to deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), however, the university’s IT staff was experiencing subpar performance that slowed these critical campus activities. “Systems infrastructure was a big pain point for us for several years,” said Jon Cutler, Marshall’s director of systems administration. Banner, running on aging HP AlphaServer systems with OpenVMS was using older direct-attached, SCSI storage subsystems, and the University Computing Services (UCS) staff determined that a large-scale upgrade was needed to improve speed while increasing flexibility and maintaining a manageable architecture.

SOLUTION

Once Marshall decided to upgrade systems, the choice to go with Red Hat was an easy one. SunGard recommended RHEL to run its solution suite and noted that RHEL was a SunGard supported platform. The Marshall UCS staff was confident in Linux and happy with the less expensive hardware options open to them when using RHEL. Already using Dell hardware and storage from EMC, UCS benefited from Red Hat’s strong partnerships with those companies and SunGard. “Our application vendor, storage vendor and hardware vendor were all on board with our decision to go with Red Hat and we were happy to be able to take advantage of less expensive hardware options that were previously unavailable to us,” noted Cutler.

The UCS team began pre-deployment testing in late 2004 and the system was live in May 2005, the next time available for upgrades due to the academic calendar. Members of the UCS Enterprise Systems and Systems Administration staff received Red Hat training prior to going live and continued training post-deployment, with a few becoming Red Hat Certified Technicians. “Red Hat training is a big reason we’ve been able to keep things running smoothly,” said Cutler. “A number of us at UCS would like to continue training to take full advantage of the benefits of RHEL and become Red Hat Certified Engineers.”

BENEFITS

Since the RHEL deployment, Marshall UCS has noticed improved performance and a dramatic increase in the speed of many critical applications. Marshall’s infrastructure is now able to handle the workload at peak usage times like course registration. Additionally, the IT department has been able to shelve the peak usage contingency plan that many other colleges still have in place. “We’ve been able to stay ahead of the growth curve on many things with RHEL,” noted Cutler. “It’s a great advantage not to have to worry about our infrastructure being able to handle a high volume of users or updated technologies.”

In addition to enhanced performance, Marshall has enjoyed cost savings, not only with RHEL itself, but also with hardware choices previously unavailable to the school. “Along with being cost effective itself, RHEL has made a big difference in hardware acquisition and support costs. We needed to replace some of our older hardware and running RHEL gave us the option to purchase something more affordable,” stated Cutler.

Support issues with Red Hat have been virtually nonexistent. Since the deployment more than two years ago, Marshall has had just one support ticket , while finger pointing among vendors when a problem arises has ceased. A simplified environment has helped with maintenance, as patch management is very easy via Red Hat Network and Red Hat’s many partnerships allow Marshall to receive updates quickly. “It’s common in higher education to have too few people running too many systems, but running RHEL has helped us greatly with our workload and mindshare,” said Cutler.

Marshall’s “power users” – those who use SunGard’s Banner and many other applications frequently – have noticed the increased performance while other end users have been able to conduct business as usual during and after the migration. “The best compliment from our average end user is nothing at all and that’s what we’ve heard since the RHEL deployment,” stated Cutler.
Marshall’s Red Hat deployment has been so successful that both the Marshall University Alumni Association and Marshall University Foundation have migrated their SunGard suite to RHEL at the advice of UCS. The UCS team is also looking to move other servers and databases over to Linux to take advantage of the many benefits.