Intel and HP Customer Success Story:

Customer: Arabian Automobiles

Business Challenge: Arabian Automobiles needed to transform its business technology infrastructure to support double-digit growth. This required increased performance, reliability, and scalability while adhering to open-standards based architectural principles

Solution: Following internal architectural principles and based on the recommendations of HP Services and Intel, Arabian Automobiles implemented Intel® Itanium processor–based HP Integrity servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the database tier and HP ProLiant server blades based on Intel® Xeon® processors at the application tier

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle E-Business Suite: 38 modules with 20 additional major vertical extensions that support all business units, Oracle 9i RAC

Hardware: HP Integrity rx7640 Servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors, HP BL480c Server Blades with Intel Xeon processors, HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrary

Benefits: Improved customer satisfaction by 15 percent, increased process automation to 80 percent from 40 percent, improved availability to 99.2 percent from, simplified management of IT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standards-based Integrity servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors. This provided a reliable, high-performance, and highly scalable infrastructure for Oracle® E-Business Suite and the integrated application modules running all of the company’s business units

Download the Case Study PDF at Intel.com

Background: One of the largest automobile distributors in the Middle East and the sole distributor for Nissan, Infiniti, and Renault in Dubai and the Northern Emirates. The flagship company of the AW Rostamani Group, Arabian Automobiles believes its greatest asset is ensuring that every customer can leave any of its company showrooms with confidence that they are receiving the world’s finest driving technology backed by a level of service and support second to none.

HP Customer Success Story:

Company: FarmaLink

Industry: Healthcare: Prescription Drug Administrator

At a Glance: Datacenter transformation using HP Integrity server blades and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for databases; evaluation, prescription administration and analysis system

Objective: Establish a flexible, adaptable infrastructure that can continue operating while handling the exponential growth in the volume of information administered and accommodating the most dynamic business conditions. Maintain system availability in real time during all types of working situations. Increase redundancy and business continuity.

Solution: The core architecture of the Farmalink system is made up of mission-critical HP Integrity server blades with Intel processors running Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform connected to an HP StorageWorks 4000 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4000).

Hardware: 4 HP Integrity BL860c server blades, HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure, HP StorageWorks 4000 Enterprise Virtual Array, 3 HP ProLiant server blades

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle 10g Database

Download the Case Study PDF at HP.com

“HP Integrity BL860c server blades with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle allow us to offer highly reliable services in real time.”
− Pablo Giraud, Systems Manager, Farmalink

BACKGROUND
Farmalink has been operating for more than 15 years in the health industry, the company has established a leadership position in the market, where it is currently processing in excess of 4 million drug prescriptions per month for more than 45 health insurance agents.

The focus of Farmalink’s work is the processing of prescriptions so that it can create innovative tools for healthcare administration, integration, auditing and analysis

From an applications point of view, Farmalink developed an evaluation system for online prescription validation based on logical rules and has incorporated it into its services over the past few years. To do so, the company required a high level of availability, faster processing speed and analysis, and the
power to respond effectively during periods of heavy demand.

Some of the services it offers are:
• Online validation of medical prescriptions in dispensing pharmacies
• Pharmaceutical auditing of prescriptions
• Liquidation of payments to the various healthcare service providers in the pharmaceutical market (pharmacies, health insurance agents, laboratories, etc.)
• Programs for clinical management by pathology
• Programs for control of consumption online
• Systems and reports for analyzing information and making decisions
• Integrated processes on a reliable and secure platform.

Farmalink is dedicated to administering and auditing prescription drug plans for health insurance agents. Due to the nature of the business’ commercial end, in which precise and secure exchange of large volumes of information related to medicine is required, the company needed to find an innovative tool that would facilitate management of its IT processes and also ease the decision-making process for its clients.

APPROACH
Design a new technology architecture using 4 HP Integrity BL860c server blades, an HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure and an HP StorageWorks 4000 Enterprise Virtual Array

GROWTH PROMPTS FLEXIBLE BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY
Over the last few years, Farmalink has experienced significant growth in the number of clients served and the volume of information processed and consequently, incorporated new services on an advanced technology base. To meet current and future challenges, the company needed a strong infrastructure to have the flexibility to respond quickly to business changes.

In 2004, faced with the need to grow with a powerful, high-performance system, Farmalink chose HP solutions and migrated its entire technological infrastructure from RISC-based servers to HP Integrity rx2600 and rx5670 Servers with EPIC (Intel Itanium) Architecture, which fosters high levels of parallelism and computational capabilities, and the HP-UX 11i operating system.

The idea was to reorganize the datacenter with a storage area network (SAN) for centralized storage and add powerful processors to conduct database transactions in a UNIX-based environment.

• In 2006, when the need arose to expand this high availability architecture and provide real-time processing, the company chose HP Integrity BL860c server blades, becoming the first company in the region to adopt this solution. Designed for mission-critical applications, HP Integrity server blades combine the modular design and energy savings of the HP BladeSystem with the world-class performance and flexible capacity that the Integrity server family delivers for memory-intensive database transactions.

HP Integrity BL860c server blades offer similar levels of exceptional availability, reliability and power as HP Integrity entry-level, rack-mounted servers.

• Two years later, Farmalink acquired two additional Integrity blades with which it could increase the services provided by its core Oracle 10g environment without requiring additional physical space. This capability is made possible by the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure, which Farmalink acquired in 2006.

FAST FACTS

Company: ITI Neovision

Industry: Broadcast media

Geography: EMEA, Poland

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

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

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

Hardware: HP BladeSystem BL460c

Migration Path: Gentoo Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Whole Foods Market

CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Consumer

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

HARDWARE: 75 HP x86 servers, 16 virtual servers

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

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

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY:Allianz Australia Insurance Limited (Allianz)

CATEGORY: Carved Out Costs

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: Australia

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

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

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

HARDWARE: IBM System z10 mainframe, HP ProLiant servers

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: National City Corporation

Industry: Financial services

Geography: North America

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FAST FACTS:

Company: ANSYS Japn K.K.

Industry: Software: CAE

Business Challenge:Provide support for complex analytical simulations: address customer requirements for more advanced CAE technologies, investigate emerging processor technologies, increase productivity

Solution: Deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and selected AMD Opteron™ processors, which are scalable up to 8-processors/32-cores and widely employed in the CAE

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL785 G5, 8-processor, 32-core, Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, 256GB DRR2 memory

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ANSYS, Fluent and other CAE software solutions from ANSYS, Inc.

Benefits: The server runs continuously and stably under high loads. Found a highly manageable way of leveraging the power of the new server, like a cluster in a single box. Achieved a significant reduction in power consumption, making it possible to add additional servers. Provides customers with simulation results more rapidly, addresses customer challenges more flexibly, contributes to higher IT ROI

Overview: US-based ANSYS Inc. has taken a global leadership role in the field of CAE software, an integral and indispensable part of many manufacturing processes. ANSYS Japan K.K., the Japanese arm of ANSYS Inc., has deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux to keep pace with customer demand for complex engineering simulations. The company appreciates the benefits of the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including its stability under high loads and significantly reduced power consumption.

Download the Full Case Study at HP.com

FAST FACTS

Industry: Construction & Engineering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: Republic of Korea

Challenge: Migrate to a flexible platform to achieve cost savings for server consolidation in the data center project

Migration: UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database

Hardware: IBM xSeries, HP BladeSystem

Benefits: Reduce server operating costs; achieve reliable and flexible system operation

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Headquartered in South Korea, POSCO (formerly known as the Pohang Iron and Steel Co.) is one of the world’s largest suppliers of iron and steel products. The company produces more than 30 million tons of steel a year, employs more than 20,000 workers and includes subsidiaries: POSCO Engineering & Construction (which builds steel plants, steel-related infrastructure, and energy facilities) and POSDATA (systems integration).

POSCO operates iron and steel making operations in South Korea and India that are renowned for their high efficiencies throughout a physically huge and complex operational structure., so choosing a fool-proof backup and recovery system is critical to the company’s business health.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
POSCO relies heavily on an extensive array of servers to deploy numerous applications for day-to-day operations handling a massive volume of data transactions daily, making the operating platform for the servers critical to the company’s business health.

POSCO, through its systems integrator subsidiary, POSDATA, embarked on a project to replace its aging, disparate systems with an integrated platform as the company was experiencing problems with system performance, and cost control. The company needed to identify an operating system for the system wide server refresh project that would take place over three stages from 2004 to 2009.

SOLUTION
POSCO needed to replace its dated and costly UNIX servers with IBM and HP x86 commodity servers in order to consolidate its systems into one large-sized data center. POSCO began benchmark testing and the evaluation of operating system vendors. Paramount to POSCO’s decision was the solution’s ability to provide a flexible environment while matching, if not improving, the reliability and performance of its existing UNIX platform. POSCO also aimed to reduce operating costs. Already familiar with Linux, POSCO selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its server consolidation project because of Red Hat’s reliability, increased performance, security, and the resulting reduction in operating costs.

POSCO began gradually migrating its operating environment for select business systems from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux dating back to 2004 and today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux currently runs on more than 50 percent of POSCO’s servers. Due to the increased performance and cost savings, POSCO plans to continue its UNIX-to-Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration as the solution enabled the company to cut reporting time, improve data quality, strengthen accounting and financial planning, enhance asset management, and achieve integration within systems.

The organization has adopted six Sigma, in-house bulletin and data warehousing for new business systems and has performed migration of several systems, including ERP, EP/mail, KM, EDMS, and EAI from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided POSCO’s systems the reliability and performance expected from the operating platform systems, while providing unmatched reductions in operating costs when compared to UNIX and proprietary solutions.

“By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in an industry where IT trends are changing rapidly and user demands are becoming more diverse, we can save development costs and time. In particular, we can drastically reduce maintenance costs because we are purchasing subscriptions rather than proprietary licenses. In addition, the high interoperability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and industry-standard hardware and certified applications enables reliable systems operation,” said Oh Jong Wan, Manager of Information Planning Department Information Service Group for POSCO

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is equipped with a wide range of certifications through a broad ecosystem of hardware and software partners that allow POSCO to be flexible with their systems and selected vendors.

Because the entire deployment is open source it reduced development costs, eliminated license fees and significantly increased work productivity leading to shorter development time.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Healthplan Services (HPS)

Geography: North America

Industry: Healthcare

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

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

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast Facts

Industry: Education

Geography: United Kingdom

Business Challenge: To launch an extranet service that would be available to its external users of more than 35,000 examiners and moderators

Migration path: Proprietary, closed solution to a more cost-effective and flexible platform based on JBoss Enterprise Application platform

Solution:

Hardware – HP ProLiant Servers

Software – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Alfresco ECM, Enterprise DB

Benefits: Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including cost and efficiency savings of £250,000 per year, and freedom from vendor lock-in

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) is the largest of the three English exam boards. It is the leading provider of qualifications for UK schools and colleges, awarding 49% of full course GCSEs and 42% of A-levels nationally. In total, over 3.5 million students take exams with AQA each year.

AQA is an independent registered charity, with no shareholders, therefore all of its income is used to run examinations and carry out research and development to improve its qualifications and services.

AQA employs 1050 permanent staff across its offices, headed up by its Executive Board. The organization also works with about 35,000 teachers, lecturers, advisers and consultants who assist in setting and marking exams.

AQA is committed to using modern technology to enhance the quality and accuracy of the examination process for the benefit of candidates and is always striving to modernize its assessment process.

OPPORTUNITY
AQA needed a secure extranet service that would be available to its external users of over 35,000 examiners and moderators. This extranet would contain valuable and important documentation allowing users to mark exam papers more effectively, eliminating the previous paper based process of printing and posting.

Security was a big consideration as all examination papers and marking schemes were held on the system along with overall guidelines on marking the papers. AQA needed a secure platform that would not be openly accessible. It was also important that the new system allowed users to access a variety of documentation twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

AQA had a system built around a more traditional, proprietary architecture that was too restrictive and costly to maintain. In order to reduce the costs associated with licenses, support and maintenance, AQA decided to replace all the proprietary software with open source solutions. This migration allowed AQA to benefit from an end-to-end open source solution deployed on open standards and at a value point that would allow AQA to continue to innovate into the future.

“We were spending six-figure sums every year on printing and posting documentation to examiners alone. We wanted to develop an extranet that could replace our paper-based manual processes with electronic documentation that could be easily updated,” explained Peter Morris, Programme Manager, AQA. “Prior to the implementation, we considered all the major vendors, but chose an open source strategy as it offered similar and even superior levels of functionality, security and quality, but at a tenth of the cost.”

Because of the high demand for AQA’s services the entire solution needed to be deployed, tested and put into production in just six weeks.

SOLUTION
AQA evaluated a number of open source solutions that could offer an alternative software delivery model to its existing closed proprietary solution.

AQA had an existing relationship with Red Hat and had been using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its servers for some time. Knowing that the same high quality support structure, value and superior technology development extended to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, AQA decided to migrate to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as well. The overall stack proved to be far more cost effective than its competitors and significantly less expensive than keeping the existing legacy systems in place.

The solution AQA has chosen is based on an open source stack comprising Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Alfresco and Enterprise DB, and will provide a strategic platform for future collaboration.

AQA used systems integrater Optaros to aid the smooth integration of the new open source platform. Optaros enabled AQA to create a customised user experience that focused on ease-of-use and utilised Rich Internet Application technologies to improve the overall experience. Optaros supported AQA in the adoption of an Agile Development strategy which reduced the timescale for development to around four weeks.

The extranet was initially rolled out to a pilot group of 200 examiners whose feedback has been resoundingly positive.

BENEFITS
Key requirements for the migration to open source technology were cost and efficiency savings. AQA calculated that it was 10 times less expensive to implement a solution from Red Hat than to extend the previous proprietary solution to this external audience.

Red Hat’s subscription model now provides AQA with increased value as it can consolidate onto a single subscription. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced, and printing, posting, licensing and other ongoing operational costs are significantly reduced. By automating its manual process online and enabling users to update details themselves, they have improved accuracy and administration staff are now free to carry out other tasks.

As a result, AQA expects to save £250,000 or more than $340,000 annually.

The other important consideration was that migrating to an open source platform facilitated the rapid and agile development of the system, enabling two or more developers to work on different aspects of the project at the same time. This had not been practical with the proprietary technologies previously used and was another area where Red Hat’s solution helped the developers to meet the challenging completion deadline of six weeks.

AQA also utilised Red Hat’s expertise through its training and consultancy services to enable them to take the application stack and server to build a version that is ready to use and web facing. This had a significant impact in enabling the system to go-live within a very short timeframe.

AQA is no longer dependent on individual technology suppliers and now has the flexibility to decouple, plug and unplug solutions as and when required without impacting the whole stack. This has given AQA a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The migration to open source solutions has helped AQA meet the commercial challenge of staying ahead of its competitors while improving the level of service for its customers, examiners and candidates.

Peter Morris from AQA commented: “The first phase of our project with Red Hat has been a great success. We will continue to innovate and grow the technology stack. The new system has changed the way we work and has had a massive impact in terms of cost and efficiency savings. Red Hat pulled out all the stops to deliver over and above our expectations. We are now looking to migrate further services to open source as it will give us the competitive advantage to maintain our position as market leader and stay ahead of our competitors.”

FUTURE
The first phase of the project has moved exam materials online for operational cost savings. The next phase will involve messaging capabilities that will help communication across the organisation. This includes adding more exam papers, marking schemes and even training material such as online demos and screen captures to further enhance the user experience. AQA would also like to implement a forum so users can participate in conversations and discussions, creating an online community to share thoughts and learn from each other.

Eventually, AQA’s plan is to open up its information to candidates and a broader range of teachers. This will require a system capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users; AQA believes its open source system will be able to scale to meet this demand.

Fast Facts:

Company: SPH Search

Industry: Information technology

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: SPH Search needed a reliable and secure solution to drive its new search engine services, Rednano,sg

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite

Hardware: HP Intel Xeon-based servers

Benefits: Established a robust, reliable, and secure search engine with the confidence of enterprise-level support

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
SPH Search is a collaboration between two media powerhouses — Singapore Press Holdings Group (SPH) and Schibsted Group. The two companies, headquartered in Singapore and Norway respectively, have long been in the business of giving people information and significantly, the context which make the information more useful.

Both companies have also established reputations as trusted sources, each over more than a century, with their continuous delivery of accurate information speedily. The platforms on which they do this have changed over the years and have, since the 90s, included the World Wide Web.

Their joint venture, SPH Search, aims to provide the premier online tool for anyone seeking information about Singapore; its people and its businesses. It intends to respond to queries speedily. Most importantly, it plans to make relevance the hallmark of its answers.

Incorporated in September 2006, the company is located in News Centre. The jointly formed company has its own technology team who are working on producing a system which allows users of personal computers, PDAs and mobile phones, easy access to SPH Search’s search and directory tools.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Starting from scratch, SPH Search wanted to quickly occupy and dominate the empty space between the general search engines of the world and the niche-oriented online directories.

SPH Search was faced with a very short timeline to launch the business and get the search engine and directory business up and running.

Immediately identified as critical to the success of SPH Search, top priority was given to the choice of a technology platform, in particular the choice of operating system to run on its Intel-based servers. Clustering was another important requirement due to the traffic and peak demands a search engine business garners, the IT organization has to load balance among multiple machines.

Rednano.sg, Singapore’s local search and directory platform requires a reliable and scalable infrastructure. The systems software vendor must be able to provide good, local technical support,” said Mr Christopher Yeo, Chief Technology Officer at SPH Search, “We considered various open source options and after a careful selection process, we decided on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Yeo is impressed with the extensibility and scalability of Red Hat solutions, which are backed by major vendors that Red Hat has established partnerships with, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SGI.

“Red Hat is well-established in Asia and this gives us the necessary confidence that we can get support when we need it,” said Yeo. “Through its business model, open source vision, and acquisitions, Red Hat has shown that it has a clear strategy.”

SOLUTION
After selecting Red Hat as its software vendor, SPH Search deployed several Red Hat products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, both 32-bit and 64-bit, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS for shared file storage, and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite for systems management. In addition, SPH Search’s open source-based platform includes Java, Apache, MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and Tomcat running on HP’s Intel Xeon-based servers.

The solutions were deployed starting in July 2007, and today run on about more than 140 servers, including Intel Xeon processors, HP ProLiant DL360, BL460c, and BL480c servers.

“We are very pleased with the entire implementation process. Red Hat was able to do the things that we required for our hardware and infrastructure. The easy-to-use graphical user interface facilitates easy installation and configuration,” said Mr Yeo. “Cxrus Solutions, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner and iLIUP Partner, helped us a lot with the implementation and ensured that our servers ran smoothly,” he said.

According to Chua Boon Wee of Cxrus Solutions, Red Hat has been part of his company’s Linux strategy since 2003. Cxrus has helped many enterprises build robust Linux infrastructure, including the busiest and biggest online cinema booking system in Singapore for Golden Village. “We helped set up the infrastructure, namely the operating system and the network for SPH Search, which later
required a high-performance storage that can be accessed concurrently by few servers. Cxrus then helped to build three Red Hat GFS clusters for the company,” said Chua.

BENEFITS
Since implementation of Red Hat solutions, SPH Search has launched its search engine services and tested its database servers. The company practises good risk management with security penetration and performance load testing.

Its trust in relying on the open source platform has proven to be a wise move. The results have exceed expectations and the system was launched successfully in March.

“Red Hat is a good fit and it delivers great technical support around the clock — which is an important factor in our business. Red Hat also provides constant software updates and patches through Red Hat Network Satellite that come with detailed information to ensure that our solutions are always tweaked for maximum performance and security. What’s best is that it’s easy for us to find and
contact Red Hat-certified system engineers and Red Hat’s presence in Singapore provides local support,” he added.

The combination of Red Hat solutions and the numerous Intel Xeon-powered HP servers was just what SPH Search needed to drive its business.

“Our network and infrastructure must be designed and implemented correctly right from the start, and the Red Hat-Intel combination gives us the necassary power, performance, scalability and security needed by our search engine,” said Mr. Yeo.

Going forward, SPH Search has plans to leverage the industry-acclaimed Red Hat Training programs, including its well-known Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) hands-on training.

“Open source is very reliable with lots of community support. In Singapore and across the region, we can find many good technical engineers and developers,” said Yeo. “We are continuously working on deploying new search services to serve our users and continuously optimising and pushing the limits of our infrastructure and solutions to power ever more new services.”

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Sydney

Industry: Education

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Education

Geography: Singapore

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

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

Hardware: HP Proliant G5 servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits:

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Government, tax collection

Geography: Ecuador

Challenge: To develop a technology solution on a stable, secure, and affordable platform for an Internet-based tax return project.

Migration Path: From proprietary software to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and from JBoss Application Server 2.4 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Software: Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Hardware: HP blades with dual-core AMD processors and quad-core Intel processors on a 64-bit architecture

Benefits: To promote and enable Internet-based tax return filing by taxpayers to reduce processing times and avoid increasing the customer service infrastructure at its own counters and bank tellers.

SRI’s experience with open source has been successful. The organization has achieved an efficient, reliable, scalable and affordable platform. The access to Red Hat’s source code has allowed the company to customize the functionality of the products in terms of business needs. The success achieved with Red Hat solutions has encouraged the organization to explore open source solutions for other areas of the business.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Internal Revenue Service – SRI -, Ecuador’s tax management agency, provides services to over one and a half million taxpayers throughout the country’s 24 provinces. It maintains a workforce of 2,400 and recorded an annual income of over USD 5 billion as per 2007 data. SRI services include: taxpayer register, reception of tax returns, authorization of sales receipts, taxpayers’ claim and inquiry handling, and tax audit, among others.

SRI invested in information technology to provide over 15 different services through its portal for taxpayers and for the 60 applications on its Intranet for internal management, all Web-based. In addition, it keeps automatic information exchange processes with other government entities.

CHALLENGE
SRI developed plans to implement a new tax service program that would promote voluntary compliance with tax obligations among its taxpaying customers. It investigated different ways to make it easier for its customers to comply with fiscal procedures and created easier processes.

In 2002, SRI decided to pilot an Internet-based tax return project aimed at encouraging taxpayers to submit their tax returns online instead of submitting papers through the banking system. This called for a technology solution that could offer a stable, secure, and affordable platform.

SOLUTION
SRI first began using Red Hat solutions in 1999 when it implemented Red Hat Linux 6 on Intel Pentium III processors for a variety of internal projects but mainly to implement the Internet-based billing issuance control system. It turned to Red Hat solutions after analyzing product capabilities and the freedom from licensing costs. This last detail allowed SRI to move ahead with the project as it avoided the red tape typical of government procurement, with the ensuing time saving.

After experiencing success with its initial implementation of Red Hat Linux 6, SRI analyzed Red Hat solutions for use in its Internet-based tax return project.

SRI started a solution evaluation process that included Novell’s SUSE and Red Hat Solutions. Red Hat Linux was chosen for cost savings and reliability. When they searched for an application server solution, the organization investigated offerings from Oracle, BEA and JBoss. JBoss was the option that best met the standards and budget set for the project and the organization opted for implementing JBoss Application Server 2.4.

With the combination of Red Hat Linux and JBoss Application Server, the Internet-based tax return system was implemented as a pilot project by the end of 2002. The project introduced the Internet as a massive interaction platform with taxpayers for the first time. Three years before, in 1999, SRI implemented the Internet-based billing control system, but this is used by a limited number of users (authorized printing houses) in order to authorize sales receipt printing for taxpayers.

From the beginning of the project, Red Hat has been the operating system of choice for the internal application servers and updated it with each new version released to the market. SRI is currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is used on 90 percent of the HP Blade servers with dual-core AMD processors and quad-core Intel processors on a 64-bit architecture. It supports the 60 Intranet applications and 15 Internet applications, and approximately 95 percent of SRI’s employees rely on Red Hat solutions daily to execute their job.

BENEFITS
SRI has achieved the goal it set out to accomplish with its Internet-based tax return project and today, the number of taxpayers approaching bank tellers and SRI counters looking for help to submit their tax returns has dropped remarkably, especially high-income taxpayers that account for 70% of the tax collection aggregate.

SRI has experienced hardware and software cost savings after migrating to Red Hat solutions. In terms of hardware, the organization was able to purchase servers with lower cost architectures, such as x86 in place of Sun’s Sparc, which was SRI’s primary platform. In terms of software, Red Hat offered the best total cost of ownership – TCO – against proprietary competitors.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform have provided SRI with a robust platform for reliable Internet services for its taxpaying customers.

SRI’s experience with open source has been successful. The organization has achieved an efficient, reliable, scalable and affordable platform. The access to Red Hat’s source code has allowed the company to customize the functionality of the products in terms of business needs. The success achieved with Red Hat solutions has encouraged the organization to explore open source solutions for other areas of the business. As a matter of fact, SRI’s planned software architecture up to 2011 mostly contemplates open source solutions as certain risks relating to support availability have been eliminated with the Enterprise version alternatives.

HOPS is a leading provider of data analytic tools and products, utilizing its unique data analysis engine to quickly get clients to places they have never been before. The HOPS data analysis engine is an innovative solution for maintaining and analyzing massive amounts of data—hundreds of terabytes and greater. Combining unparalleled speed, compression and sorting capabilities, HOPS is one of the fastest data analysis tools ever produced blasting through the scalability issues that limit traditional database solutions. What’s more, HOPS is delivered using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, enabling customers to gain all the benefits of a high-performance, highly secure data center that’s accessible 24×7, without incurring the capital and operating expenses associated with such an environment.

Approach
Deploy HOPS data analysis engine on HP Integrity rx6600 server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Business technology improvements
• Increased the speed of database scan by 97 percent
• Ensured high system availability and reliability
• Gained Linux training and certifications to easemigration from UNIX

Business outcomes
• Enabled dynamic reporting on billions of data records
• Met highly demanding service-level agreements (SLAs)
• Gained eight times the performance at one quarter the cost

The key to delivering blazing-fast data analysis results over the web is running HOPS on a high-performance and highly reliable infrastructure. For years, HOPS relied on a RISC-based HP AlphaServer system with Tru64 UNIX. As this system approached end of life, the company searched for a new system that could take HOPS to a whole new level. After a thorough evaluation of leading systems, HOPS chose HP Integrity servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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FAST FACTS

Industry: Real Estate

Geography: Germany

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

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

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

Hardware: HP Blade Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: CQUniversity Australia (Central Queensland University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: Australia

Opportunity: To migrate from an HP Tru64 Unix environment to a cost-effective and performance-boosting platform within Central Queensland University’s budget

Migration Path: HP Tru64 Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite Server on HP 7000c Blade and BL460c Blade Servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle 10g RAC, PeopleSoft Enterprise Applications (Finance & Student Administration), Talent2 Works (HR)

Hardware: HP 7000c Blade System and BL460c Blade Servers

Benefits: Experienced increased cost savings, performance, ease of management, and reliable ongoing support

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
CQUniveristy Australia (Central Queensland University) was founded in 1967 as the Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia). It became the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education in 1971 before a transition phase as the University College of Central Queensland in 1990. It achieved University status in January 1992 and today offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on-campus and through distance education.

CQUniversity has campuses and learning sites in Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Mackay, Emerald and Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast and operates international campuses in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast. Some of the Univeristy’s programs are also delivered in Singapore.

With about 20,000 students and approximately 1,200 staff, the daily functioning of the University relies heavily on the reliability and stability of its IT environment, which powers critical finance, human resources, and student-administration systems. With campuses located across various time zones, CQUniversity requires an infrastructure that supports standard operation for at least 13 hours per day.

OPPORTUNITY
For a number of years, CQUniversity serviced its student body and faculty with an extensive HP Tru64 UNIX deployment. As the University continued to expand and demand more from its technology infrastructure, CQUniversity’s IT department knew it was quickly outgrowing its existing IT system, consisting of a four-node cluster for production with two additional web servers, and a six-node cluster with another three web servers for test development, and needed a reliable alternative.

“We knew the time was coming for a change, particularly when we knew we would need more than eight CPUs for a single database server,” said Bruce Young, Peoplesoft Systems Engineer, CQUniversity. “HP Tru64 UNIX was a discontinued product, and we didn’t have unlimited funds to throw at the problem, so we were forced to look at more cost-effective alternatives for expanding our capacity.”

CQUniversity searched for an updated, scalable, and performance-boosting solution that could fit inside its limited IT budget.

SOLUTION
In late 2006, CQUniversity’s IT team decided that from both a hardware and software perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its operating system of choice. “We looked at a few different configurations, including Solaris on Sun T2000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell, but it was quite obvious that the HP Blade Servers together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided a winning combination that met our needs,” said Young.

Today, CQUniversity runs 12 HP Blade Servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its databases. Ten additional Blades run CQUniversity’s middleware solutions to support its applications.

“Already, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be a fundamental component of our infrastructure, and while we’re running more environments than before, we’re running them a lot faster,” said Young.

The University has also extended Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its research students and staff, using Red Hat Network Satellite (RHN), Red Hat’s reliable systems management solution, to efficiently manage the deployment and keep it updated without additional, costly resources. Red Hat Satellite Server offers a centralised management tool that enables users to manage server systems more efficiently. With RHN Satellite, CQUniversity has been able to reallocate resources to focus on proactive, high-value roles, instead of reactively maintaining complex systems and lifecycles.

BENEFITS
Since putting its production systems into operation in April 2007, CQUniversity has completed the initial stage of its migration. To date, the University has realised immediate savings of approximately $100,000 when compared to Solaris on Sun T2000 servers.

“We’re definitely impressed with the initial cost savings and the boost to server performance, and we also expect further long-term savings on licensing costs,” said Young. “The reality is that for our budget, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to do what what we set out to complete. With Red Hat solutions, we didn’t have to resort to a poor band-aid job, as would have happened if we had chosen a proprietary solution.”

In addition to carving out costs, CQUniversity has experienced a boost in server performance, which has increased by between 20 and 30 percent, and enjoyed an easy-to-deploy solution. “In terms of ease of management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the best choice, and the closest fit to what we were familiar with when using Tru64,” said Young.

For the future, CQUniversity has plans to transition additional systems to its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Tourism and hospitality

Geography: Spain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

This case study is available in the following languages: HERE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: 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: Utility

Geography: Italy

Opportunity: Combine varied IT systems following the merger of two companies, while modernizing obsolete equipment, reducing costs, and ensuring compatibility with existing solutions

Migration Path: AIX Unix and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Solution:

• Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, SAP systems, Oracle database, Apache, MySQL, Open CMS, customized billing
• Hardware: HP Proliant and Bull servers based on Itanium2, SAN for storage (25TB overall)

Benefits: Increased performance levels, system stability, and continuity, while simplifying usage, reducing overhead, and combining two radically different IT systems

“In addition to providing us with reliable support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux represents a strategic choice for us. By moving to the new platform, performance improved and systems became more stable, thus allowing us to greatly increase productivity.”
– Roberto Ganio Mego, Iride Energia’s system administrator

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

BACKGROUND
The IRIDE Group, an important player in the Italian utilities market, was formed at the end of 2006 as a result of the merger of AEM Torino and AMGA Genova. Its aim is to provide services to residents and businesses throughout local urban areas.

The IRIDE Group is composed of the parent company IRIDE S.p.A. and four sector-leader companies. IRIDE ACQUAGAS distributes gas and water. IRIDE ENERGIA produces and distributes electricity and thermal energy for district heating. IRIDE MERCATO sells electricity, gas, and district heating. And, IRIDE SERVIZI provides technological services to municipalities and telecommunication infrastructure management services.
The IRIDE ENERGIA division of The IRIDE Group produces and distributes electricity and thermal energy directly to customers. It’s active in energy planning and consulting, and also carries out additional activities such as engineering, planning, and reliability studies. The company produces electricity and thermal energy through renewable energy sources like hydroelectric plants, or through equavalent sources like cogeneration plants.

OPPORTUNITY
When AEM Torino and AMGA Genova merged to form The IRIDE Group, two radically different information systems had to be seamlessly combined, while keeping performance high and costs low. AEM Torino’s system was based mainly on a combination of Unix and Linux, while AMGA Genova’s system was Microsoft-based. The combined company searched for a cost-effective solution that could provide a consistent, reliable platform that was compatible with its Oracle databases.

SOLUTION
AEM Torino first selected Linux in 2003 when the company saw opportunities to improve its IT infrastructure, previously based on AIX (Unix) mainframes and systems. At the time, there was a need to modernize the company’s equipment, while reducing costs. There was also a desire to follow the evolution of its Oracle technology, which played an important role in the company’s overall IT strategy.

After original tests provided positive results with Linux solutions, Iride Energia decided to implement Linux for its external environments, like its proxy server and application servers. Initially, the company deployed Fedora and experienced ease of use and reliability. Soon, the requirement for ongoing support made it necessary to select a commercially supported product.

The requirement for compatibility with Oracle solutions led the company to Red Hat. Known for its high-quality support services, Red Hat was selected by Iride Energia after tests carried out on alternative products fell short of requirements. During the migration to Red Hat solutions, SAP certification was also added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, delivering increased value to Iride Energia.

“Our experience with Linux is a long-standing one, since we had opted to operate within an open source environment as early as 2003,” said Roberto Ganio Mego, Iride Energia’s system administrator. “We wished to update our IT infrastructure and improve its performance, while ensuring that we received excellent quality of service, such as Red Hat provides.”

The process of migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was very straightforward for Iride Energia. All production hardware was replaced and equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which today is present on all Iride Energia servers, amounting to approximately 35 subscriptions. All company applications also currently operate on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, including Oracle databases, various types of Web services (proxy servers, web servers, etc.), content and document management systems, and application servers. The company billing system, developed in-house using Java technology, is also highly compatible with Linux and complements the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 implementation.

Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Iride Energia has also launched a virtualization program that has resulted in the creation of 150 virtual machines installed on 15 physical hosts.

BENEFITS
The advantages of moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux were immediately evident for Iride Energia. With the ability to successfully combine two different companies with very different IT systems, the entire IT infrastructure immediately benefited from increased stability, resulting in a significant increase in productivity. Simultaneously, cost savings due to the elimination of software licenses allowed for the company’s hardware equipment to be updated, further increasing system performance.

“Following the merger of AEM Torino and AMGA Genova, the Iride Energia IT department was faced with the monumental task of integrating two disparate sets of IT systems and data. By moving all of the systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we have been able to simplify operations, reduce costs, and increase performance, while ensuing compatibility with our Oracle and SAP databases,” said Ganio Mego.

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FAST FACTS

Industry: Travel

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To increase performance, reduce costs, and expand scalability for a mission-critical, rapidly evolving IT architecture requiring 100 percent uptime

Migration Path: Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Hardware: HPx86 and Intel

Benefits: Achieved system reliability, 90 percent cost savings, 3x performance gains, and unmatched scalability, while standardizing its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Sabre Holdings is a privately held world leader in the travel marketplace that is owned by Silver Lake and TPG. It merchandises and retails travel products and provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. Headquartered in Southlake, Texas, the company maintains approximately 9,000 employees located across 59 countries.

In 2006, Sabre Holdings earned $2.8 billion in revenue as it supported travellers, travel agents, corporations, and travel suppliers around the world through its three companies: Travelocity, the most popular online travel service offering consumer-direct services for the leisure and business traveller; Sabre Travel Network, responsible for marketing and distributing travel-related products and services through its travel agency and corporate channels; and Sabre Airline Solutions, the world’s largest provider of software products with over 200 airlines relying on its passenger solutions and consulting services.

The first automated passenger reservation system offered by Sabre Holdings was installed in 1960 and marked a dramatic technological leap forward for the airline industry. Since then, Sabre Holdings has pioneered technological advances for the industry in areas such as revenue management, pricing, flight scheduling, cargo, flight operations, and crew scheduling.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
For years, Sabre Holdings utlized proprietary solutions to support its advanced IT architecture. Internet-based travel bookings were gaining rapid acceptance among a growing segment of customers and travellers demanding more services and better options were driving up costs for the worldwide travel leader. To capitalize on its enormous growth opportunity, the company needed an infrastructure that was faster, cheaper and more scalable. Looking to increase performance and reduce technology costs associated with proprietary solutions, Sabre Holdings decided to investigate open source alternatives to help it face the relentless conditions of a fast-moving, challenging travel industry.

“While operating the largest travel distribution service in the world that processes tens of thousands of transactions per second, it’s always a peak business hour somewhere and we need to be available 24×7,” said Robert Wiseman, chief technology officer at Sabre Holdings. “This creates heavy demands on our IT infrastructure and presents challenges, but with Red Hat we are able to build stronger and smarter systems with our global customers in mind.”

SOLUTION
Enabling more than 32,000 transactions per second, Sabre Holdings’ IT infrastructure demanded 100 percent uptime. If its systems were to experience downtime, the result would be disastrous with planes grounded, passengers stranded, and trips unable to be booked.

To improve the stability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of its IT infrastructure and to ensure reliability for its own customers, Sabre Holdings turned to open source solutions. It evaluated the leading Linux offerings on the market, but ultimately chose Red Hat for its established market leadership and renowned support offerings. With Red Hat, Sabre Holdings also discovered the power of the developer community that could provide reliable, consistent updates and fixes that could be incorporated in realtime.

“We selected the IT solution that would allow us to run our business most effectively. Our customers use our services for the content, speed, price, and presentation, not for the operating system our business runs on,” said Josh Hartman, chief technology officer at Travelocity. “Red Hat provides a proficient and effervescent experience for our customers, who don’t even realize that Red Hat is there. And that’s the way it should be.”

With millions of online customers completing tens of thousands of transactions per second, Sabre Holdings has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on thousands of HP x86-based servers and it continues to expand its use of Red Hat solutions today.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is our corporate standard – as we purchase hardware and build systems, they are required to work seamlessly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Wiseman. “Our systems now perform three times faster while costing 90 percent less when compared side-by-side to other providers.”

When Sabre Holdings recently acquired lastminute.com, a leader in European online travel, its IT system included over 1,000 servers running numerous free open source operating systems that required significant time and resources to operate and maintain. Today, Sabre Holdings is in the process of migrating all of lastminute.com’s servers to its corporate standard, Red Hat Enterpise Linux 5.

BENEFITS
Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sabre Holdings has benefited from system reliability, cost savings, increased performance, and scalability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled Sabre Holdings to standardize its IT architecture, consisting of thousands of systems worldwide, across all three of its companies’ IT infrastructures. “Red Hat has allowed us to horizontally scale our systems with the ability to drive thousands of transactions per second, 24×7, 365 days a year,” said Hartman. “Red Hat is the leader in the marketplace and offers the performance and stability to drive our high-transaction business at a high economic value.” In addition to the performance improvements and cost savings realized since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sabre Holdings also further strengthened its position as an innovative technology leader and employer. Working with open source technology partners has allowed Sabre Holdings to recruit and retain the best talent.

“Our team at Sabre Holdings is unparalleled in the industry, we are the leading travel services provider and our use of open source software attracts IT leaders to our company,” Wiseman said. From building the first computer reservation system in the 1960s, to blazing the trail for online travel in the 1990s, to delivering the sophisticated, cutting-edge travel solutions of today, Sabre Holdings has made innovation its business. “With decades of experience in the travel service industry, we built a culture of uptime and reliable performance. Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has allowed us to focus on our core business competencies,” said Wiseman.

“Sabre Holdings relies on Red Hat as our corporate standard operating system for our mission-critical IT infrastructure.” As it continues to evolve its IT architecture, Sabre Holdings plans to incorporate additional Red Hat solutions and is currently assessing Red Hat integrated virtualization technology. “We are beginning to take a close look at Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities and have been impressed with its recent virtualization management technology development. We’re also interested in flexible deployments of Red Hat on Amazon’s elastic cloud,” said Wiseman. “We value Red Hat as a long-term partner in our development of Sabre Holdings’ corporate IT goals because of the visionary, leadership role Red Hat plays in the open source community.”

Industry: Consumer

Geography: International

Business Challenge: To establish an open source platform to support Centrebet’s OpenBet online betting application and provide the reliability demanded by a 24×7x365 business

Migration Path: Mixture of heterogeneous systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite

Solution:

• Software: OpenBet, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite
• Hardware: 10 x HP DL360 G5, 10 x Sun Sunfire x4200

Benefits: Experienced increased performance results, lowered costs with the elimination of licensing costs and easy-to-manage maintenance for its solution

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BACKGROUND

Centrebet was Australia’s first government-approved bookmaker to offer online sports betting. Today, it’s regarded around the world as one of the most reputable and established sports and racing betting operators.

Since its beginnings in 1992, Centrebet has grown into a leading global wagering and gaming company offering competitive fixed-odds betting via the Internet or phone. Its offerings cover a wide range of sports and racing events with availability 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Centrebet also offers state-of-the-art gaming products through Centrebet Poker and Centrebet Casino. All licensed companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of Centrebet International Limited, which is today listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX Code: CIL).

Generating revenue from gaming services means that Centrebet relies on a loyal customer base.
“ICE Systems understands high availability computing. We have invested and honed our expertise to consistently design and deliver highly reliable, resilient and robust enterprise computing platforms.” explained Ian Atkins, Sales Director at ICE Systems.

“Centrebet customers enjoy 24 hour-a-day, 365 day-a-year access to our services, but if those services are unavailable, our customers will simply go somewhere else,” said Shane Paterson, Network Operations Manager for Centrebet.

“Our backend IT systems are the core of our revenue-generating business and how we manage and maintain the technology is critical to the ongoing success and growth of the company.”

CHALLENGE

In May 2007, Centrebet introduced the Orbis OpenBet application for establishing and maintaining high-traffic gambling websites. OpenBet delivered a solution that would enable Centrebet to provide customers with the ability to bet and play across multiple products and platforms in all languages and currencies.

“Using OpenBet meant we had a user-friendly, singular, clear view of all customers via comprehensive management and reporting tools, but it also demanded we had a steadfast open source platform to run it on,” said Paterson.

Centrebet also recognised the need to manage its open source infrastructure in an efficient manner. Without a dedicated management resource, the company had to look for a solution for managing patch deployment and software consistency.

SOLUTION

Working with technical partner ICE Systems, one of Australia’s premier Systems Integration houses specialising in the design and implementation of high-availability, storage, disaster-recovery and backup solutions, Centrebet implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a combination of HP and Sun hardware, including 10 HP DL360 G5s and 10 x Sun Sunfire x4200s, which provided a solid base for the company’s OpenBet application.

“Most of the software that we were planning to install was geared toward running on Red Hat solutions, and we knew that with Red Hat we would have a consistently supported platform, which was a high priority,” said Paterson.

“We were familiar with the all of the available Linux-based operating systems on the market, but Red Hat offered a highly secure operating system with lower ongoing security maintenance costs, and it was the only proven platform with the support to back it.”

Centrebet also introduced Red Hat Network Satellite, a centralised tool to help boost productivity by creating a single template for managing multiple servers, enabling the organisation to tie all of the management and maintenance of its machines into a single, easy-to-use interface.

According to Sam Higgins, an analyst for Australian research firm, Longhaus (http://www.longhaus.com), only Red Hat provides a value-added, appliance-based option that offers users a way to keep operating systems current, updated and, more importantly, secure.

BENEFITS

Today, Centrebet boasts a resilient and robust IT environment that can be patched or upgraded seamlessly, with limited interruption to its customer base.

“In our 24/7 business, uptime is paramount. Today our system stability is critical in the website delivery to the customer and we attribute that stability to our Red Hat technology,” said Paterson.

“If ever we do experience any problems, we can instantly diagnose the issue and have immediate access to the excellent support available from ICE Systems and Red Hat.”

In addition to impressive performance results, Centrebet has benefited from significant cost savings with the ability to eliminate the need for expensive software licence renewals and the need to invest in additional administrative resources.

“Not only is ICE Systems’ implementation of Red Hat helping us make money by supporting our revenue-generating operations, but it is also helping us to save money,” said Paterson.

Red Hat Network Satellite’s scheduled maintenance has also proven beneficial for Centrebet. It has enabled customer packages to be loaded on Red Hat Network Satellite Server and automatically deployed either at scheduled times or as required.

“At ICE Systems, our goal is to understand the client’s business and support their goals by utilising proven technology. We ensure that the technology is a perfect fit and fully supported.” said Patrick Speare, Senior ICE Systems Solutions Consultant.

Centrebet’s next priority is to work with ICE Systems and Red Hat on implementing a viable virtualisation solution.