FAST FACTS

Company: Alpine Electronics

Industry: Electronics: Consumer

Geography: United States

Business Challenge: Without a single integrated enterprise resource planning and supply chain management solution, Alpine lacked the consolidated business data required for accurate long-term planning

Software: SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP 6.0, SAP NetWeaver, IBM Cognos 8 Planning, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: Systemx: System x3850

Solution: IBM Global Business Services leveraged its electronics and automotive industry expertise to design, deploy and manage a solution based on SAP Business Suite. Niteo, an IBM Business Partner, also helped to implement IBM Cognos Planning, which captures sales and budget data downloaded from the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse system at the Japanese headquarters location

Benefits: Enhanced process efficiencies have led to much more rapid access to business intelligence. By using SAP ERP, monthly financial closes can be completed up to 30 percent faster than before, and there has been a 40 percent reduction in operational workload for the finance department.

Download the case study from the IBM website [PDF]

Background
Based in Torrance, California, Alpine Electronics USA Inc. develops and markets a wide range of leading-edge integrated mobile media entertainment, and navigation systems for mobile use. The company employs 300 people and has a separate sister company which has strong focus on research and development – continually striving to generate and enhance a new kind of in-vehicle experience, based on the convergence of high performance audio, video, navigation and telematics in the form of integrated mobile multimedia systems.

As well as marketing its in-car mobile media systems to consumers, Alpine also designs and manufactures complete, integrated systems for the automotive sector. To align with the long-term strategies of the automotive manufacturers, Alpine needs to be able to plan sales and production 2-3 years ahead.

“Alpine operates under two separate business elements,” explains Mick Ono, Senior IT Manager at Alpine Electronics USA Inc. “The first is aimed at the after-market, working through retailers and representatives to sell products that can be fitted to existing vehicles. The second works directly with automotive manufacturers to integrate advanced mobile media solutions into new vehicles.”
Predicting future trends

“Working with the automotive manufacturers is a unique challenge: they are already designing vehicles that will not reach the dealerships until 2012. To supply integrated mobile media solutions that will meet the needs of drivers and passengers three or four years in the future, we need to be able to plan sales, quantities and pricing a long way ahead.”

Without a single integrated enterprise resource planning and supply chain management solution, Alpine lacked the consolidated business data required for accurate long-term planning. By establishing a central database as a ‘single source of truth’, and by gaining the ability to collect and analyze data in real time, Alpine could understand its current position and sales history, and analyze market trends from other sources to help forecast its future direction.

Finding a way forward
“We were coming from a situation where our North American manufacturing and sales companies were separate entities, each with its own IT systems,” says Mick Ono. “We decided to consult IBM to find the best way to implement a single centralized solution that could manage our operations and long-term planning processes from end-to-end.”

IBM Global Business Services performed a feasibility study to explore the unique requirements of Alpine’s business, and recommend both a target technology platform and a project management methodology that would ensure the success of the move to a fully integrated solution. Alpine then sent out a request for proposals to a number of leading business and IT consulting companies.

The need for industry-specific expertise
“We received four responses to our request for proposals, and IBM Global Business Services was by far the strongest candidate,” comments Mick Ono. “In addition to technical expertise, we wanted a partner that not only had experience in the electronics sector, but could also provide insight into the demands of the automotive sector, and IBM was one of the few companies that could deliver.

“IBM also has one of the most advanced project management methodologies for ERP implementations, called Ascendant. This gave us confidence that we could achieve this business transformation, fast.”

IBM Global Business Services designed and modeled a wide range of enhanced business processes for Alpine, helping to simplify and automate key workflows in the finance, procurement, sales and inventory management departments. These new processes are managed by applications from the SAP Business Suite, running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux and VMware on IBM x3850 servers.

End-to-end integration of business data
The solution provides an end-to-end process management framework, collecting and integrating data from a wide range of inputs, both digital and physical. Interfaces developed by IBM using the SAP NetWeaver Process Integration component enable Alpine to gather, process and seamlessly exchange data (future usage planning, purchase orders, inventory information and so on) with its local suppliers, its distributors and its largest clients.

This enables total traceability of each financial transaction and physical component throughout the supply chain – an ability that is highly prized by clients in the automotive industry.

With all key business data held in a single central SAP system, Alpine now has a reliable, accurate and accessible historical record of its entire business – which forms a basis for the creation of long-term planning and forecasting activities.

A clear view of business activity
The solution also delivers a wide range of other advantages. Since application support and strategic development is handled by IBM Global Business Services – Application Management Services, Alpine benefits from a highly cost-effective and scalable support model, reducing the need to maintain highly skilled SAP administrators and developers in-house.

IBM maintains the entire SAP environment, ensuring smooth business operation, configuring new business requirements as per standard SAP practice, providing end-user training for new users, and conducting monthly meetings with key customer stakeholders to present the deliverables and project status reports.

IBM has also recently helped the company upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0, bringing its IT infrastructure into line with the parent company in Japan, and potentially paving the way for further ERP integration across the whole group. Keeping up-to-date with the latest SAP application releases also helps Alpine to minimize support costs and implement new functionalities as and when the business requires.

Since IBM provides an onshore/offshore support model by leveraging resources in both the US and India, development of the environment can continue 24×7.

Reaping the benefits
The end-to-end automation of key financial and sales processes has reduced workload for the accounts department by approximately 40 percent, and enabled monthly financial closes to be completed up to 30 percent faster.

“The ability to share the long-term future throughout business owners is very important to us, and it depends to a large extent on doing the simple things right: getting the right information in the first place and handling it reliably in our back office operations,” comments Mick Ono.

“Looking beyond the bells and whistles, you need to have a system that can manage your finances and supply chain effectively. SAP provides the building blocks of that system, and IBM Global Business Services continues to be a highly valued partner in our effort to improve quality and efficiency in all our business processes.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Banco Pastor

Industry: Financial Services Banking

Geography:Spain

Business Challenge: Improve payroll and human resource systems management and achieve cost savings performance improvements with an upgrade of the email infrastructure

Migration Path: From distributed platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes

Solution: The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes to run SAP NetWeaver, SAP ERP, and IBM Lotus Notes software

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server v5.3, SAP NetWeaver 7.0, SR3, SAP ERP 6.0 SR3, and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration 7.0.2

Hardware: Two IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes, three and four IFLs

Benefits: The new email platform reduced recurrent costs by 30 percent, improved performance for IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software and SAP applications, and guaranteed an exhaustive and scalable control of resources

“We have chosen Red Hat for the quality of its solutions and its outstanding technical support. Both Red Hat and IBM have clearly understood our project objectives, and together with Banco Pastor have been thoroughly committed to the proposal. We have built a very strong platform. We are delighted with what we have achieved.”
Montserrat Torres, computer systems manager of Banco Pastor

“Through the server consolidation benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class, customers like Banco Pastor can invest in innovative solutions that deliver important cost reductions and improve their services and security. The proven performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z allows Banco Pastor to increase their response capability and the availability of their business applications.”
Carlos Roldan, IBM System z Manager in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel

Download the case study[PDF] This story is available in the following languages: SPANISH

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1776, Banco Pastor has become the seventh largest banking group in Spain with 4,500 employees and 650 branch offices, and has presence in the US, Europe, and Latin America.

Banco Pastor is a bank focused on relationships, and closeness to the customer is a top priority in all their expansion decision making. The bank has firmly opted for new distribution channels, mainly telephone and the Internet, and it has an active presence in the Spanish market in both direct and Internet banking.

Banco Pastor occupies a prominent position in the Spanish banking sector’s rankings; it has the most advanced management systems and a highly effective and well dimensioned organizational structure, flexible and ready to take on the challenges of a rapidly evolving environment. In 2008, it increased its client base by 15 percent from the year before.

Banco Pastor has migrated its critical human resource and corporate email systems running SAP NetWeaver, SAP ERP, and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Through a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10, Banco Pastor has experienced decreased annual IT costs of 30 percent for the platform supporting its email system, improved performance, and increased scalability for the platforms running its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Banco Pastor looked to update its human resources management system. Banco Pastor desired a new operating platform that would help it to scale with growth, reduce costs, and provide flexibility for the infrastructure supporting those applications.

The bank’s email system, based on IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software, also needed an updated operating platform base to provide the reliability, security, and efficiency needed to serve its professional workforce, as well as the critical internal applications that rely on the platform.

When making the decision for a new platform, Banco Pastor looked for a robust, reliable, efficient, and secure alternative to service the bank’s 4,500 employees and the internal applications that rely on the platform, as well as those that support mail exchange, both internally and on the Internet.

SOLUTION
From the various alternatives considered, Banco Pastor selected an SAP solution for its human resources management system, including its payroll, career, and training systems. As part of the overall IT project, Banco Pastor looked for a new operating platform that would enhance the SAP system’s performance, reduce hardware costs, and enable scalability.

Having previously utilized Red Hat Enterprise Linux on distributed platforms, Banco Pastor had great confidence in Red Hat’s technology, support, and ability to deliver reliable, secure, enterprise-class solutions at lower costs than proprietary vendors.

This positive experience, coupled with Red Hat’s close relationship with IBM and SAP, prompted Banco Pastor to select Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating platform for its business-critical SAP and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration applications.

Today, Banco Pastor’s new SAP and IBM Lotus Notes infrastructure is based on two IBM z10 Business Class mainframes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 – one server with three IFLs and the other with four IFLs. Banco Pastor’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 reflects the business’s need for one of the world’s most sophisticated business servers, with the equivalent computing capacity of nearly 1,500 x86 servers, an 85 percent smaller footprint, and up to 85 percent lower energy costs.

“Our consolidation project and upgrade to the SAP system is a critical component of our business strategy, and we needed to ensure that we selected the optimal operating platform and hardware for immediate results and future scalability. We valued the close integration with Red Hat, SAP, and IBM, and with Red Hat’s service and technical support, we knew we made the right decision. The performance of our Red Hat systems has matched our expectations as well,” said Montserrat Torres, computer systems manager of Banco Pastor.

The SAP platform represented a completely new infrastructure for the bank. Red Hat’s scalable solution on IBM System z10 mainframes has enabled Banco Pastor’s engineers to maintain maximum control of the platform’s growth – a top priority for the company. Once the second phase of the SAP project comes into operation in 2011, the bank intends to expand its Red Hat environment and acquire new systems.

“Through the server consolidation benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class, customers like Banco Pastor can invest in innovative solutions that deliver important cost reductions and improve their services and security,” said Carlos Roldan, IBM System z Manager in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel. “The proven performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z allows Banco Pastor to increase their response capability and the availability of their business applications.”

BENEFITS
The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM System z, and SAP applications has provided Banco Pastor with a significant reduction in annual IT costs, a strengthened ability to scale with continued business and IT platform growth, and the ability to manage resources easily and with optimal performance.

“With our Red Hat solution, we have achieved annual cost savings of up to 30 percent in recurring expenses. But more importantly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z has enabled our IT team to plan the resources required to manage the SAP system in a dynamic way, without having to increase the number of machines, and consequently to reduce the complexity of the platform and control the management costs,” said Torres.

“Red Hat provides proven enterprise-class solutions at an affordable price. We make our IT decisions with our business, the required performance, and the associated operating costs in mind. In that sense, running SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers maximum value to our business.”

Banco Pastor is one of the most efficient banking institutions in the Spanish market and has the best efficiency ratio, achieved through a meticulous management of its resources, including financial, human, and technical resources.

The benefits that Banco Pastor achieved by choosing IBM System z Business Class with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to implement its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications includes increased efficiency by maximizing its cost savings, increased control over planning the diverse environments installed within the company, and strengthened control over the platform’s growth, which is one of the bank’s top IT strategic concerns. Banco Pastor has also saved valuable manpower resources in troubleshooting time, allowing its IT professionals to work on other projects to maximize resources.

“We were able to implement Red Hat at substantial savings over competitive offerings and receive premium 24×7x365 support, and in the end all of the improvements will allow us to serve customers better – increasing satisfaction – while controlling mainframe hardware and software costs,” said Torres.

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Tallahassee Community College

Industry: Education

Geography: United States

IBM Business Partner: Mainline Information Systems, Red Hat

Business Challenge:
Needing to grow its organization to keep pace with its student body, TCC sought to update its aging IT infrastructure. Its existing environment included an IBM zSeries® 890 mainframe, a storage area network (SAN) with 1TB of capacity and a Novell net­work. The college wanted to boost its technology with reliable, flexible and scalable hardware that featured additional storage capacity to support new initiatives.

Solution: With help from IBM and IBM Business Partner Mainline Information Systems, TCC migrated its applications from its mainframe to an IBM System x™ platform featuring one IBM System x3950 server that hosts the production environment and runs the Red Hat Enterprise Linux® operating system and one System x3950 server that hosts a test environment.

Benefits: Achieves roughly US$250,000 per year in savings by growing its SAN, enabling the college to reallocate the funds to its operating budget. Enables the client to tackle new initiatives with greater flexibility and storage capacity. Supports all of the college’s different enterprise applications and enables it to provide students and faculty with larger storage accounts for e-mail and personalized Web portals

Download the PDF case study

Background
Founded in 1966, Tallahassee Community College (TCC) is a comprehensive open-admission community college. It aims to deliver excellence in teaching and learning through educational programs that promote students’ intellectual, social and personal development.

Challenge
Needing to grow its organization to keep pace with its student body, TCC sought to update its aging IT infrastructure. Its existing environment included an IBM zSeries® 890 mainframe, a storage area network (SAN) with 1TB of capacity and a Novell network. The college wanted to boost its technology with reliable, flexible and scalable hardware that featured additional storage capacity to support new initiatives.

Solution
With help from IBM and IBM Business Partner Mainline Information Systems, TCC migrated its applications from its mainframe to an IBM System x™ platform featuring one IBM System x3950 server that hosts the production environment and runs the Red Hat Linux® operating system and one System x3950 server that hosts a test environment.

To support the institution’s new initiatives, TCC also installed a 25TB SAN composed of an IBM System Storage™ DS4800 device with two IBM System Storage DS4000™ EXP810 Expansion Units. The storage and application servers connect via four 4GB IBM SAN Switches.

TCC leverages IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager software to back up its applications.

Benefits
• Achieves roughly US$250,000 per year in savings by growing its SAN, enabling the college to reallocate the funds to its operating budget
• Enables the client to tackle new initiatives with greater flexibility and storage capacity
• Supports all of the college’s different enterprise applications and enables it to provide students and faculty with larger storage accounts for e-mail and personalized Web portals

“By deploying the IBM System x and IBM System Storage solutions, we save about US$250,000 in IT costs each year. We can now reallocate that money and use it in a way that benefits the students.” —Tallahassee Community College

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Queensland Motorways

Industry:Travel & Transportation

Geography:Australia

Business need: Heavy traffic on Brisbane’s motorways was creating congestion, lengthening journey times for motorists and reducing travel reliability for local businesses. Toll plazas added to the problem, creating a choke point for motorists slowing to pay tolls. The Queensland Government, in conjunction with Queensland Motorways, which manages and operates the Gateway Bridge, Gateway Extension and Logan Motorways, decided to embark on a major upgrade project to enable traffic to flow more freely.

Solution:To support the Gateway Upgrade Project, Queensland Motorways wanted to implement free-flow tolling on its motorways. IBM Global Business Services was contracted to design, build, test, and deploy the intelligent free-flow tolling central system solution based on technology from IBM, SAP, Dacolian, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The SAP applications, identification, rating and interoperability applications, Internet Web portal and Oracle databases run on an IBM Power 570 server with 16 IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used as the operating system for the entire environment.

Software: Business Integration, Energy Efficiency, Enterprise Resource Planning, IT/infrastructure, Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Service Oriented Architecture, Smarter Planet, Transforming IT, SAP

Hardware: BladeCenter H Chassis, BladeCenter HS21, Storage: DS8000, System p: Power 570.

Benefits:
The solution allows Queensland Motorways to combine its knowledge of commuters’ travel patterns with real-time data on traffic conditions to recommend fastest routes and avoid congestion. This helps to speed journeys, reduce congestion, and cut exhaust emissions. Drivers no longer have to stop to pay tolls, which reduces congestion, increases safety and enhances network reliability.

Download the PDF case study

Background
Snaking its way from the southern approaches to Brisbane city to the north of the city, the multi-lane Gateway Motorway, the most significant part of Queensland Motorways’ network and the city’s road infrastructure, bypasses the central business district to provide easy access to Brisbane’s sea- and airports and the cities of north-eastern Australia. Half-way along the route, it crosses the Brisbane River at the iconic Gateway Bridge.

“Improving traffic flow on the Gateway Motorway, and particularly on the Gateway Bridge, is key to ensuring effective network management in Brisbane,” says Phil Mumford, CEO of Queensland Motorways, the company responsible for managing and operating this road infrastructure. “Any congestion or issues on the bridge ultimately affect the whole network: people start to divert to other roads which are already carrying high traffic volumes and soon enough, everyone’s journey is negatively impacted.

“The physical upgrade is vitally necessary, but we can’t keep building multi-billion dollar infrastructure. The pattern we see is that every time a new road is built, utilization increases and congestion comes back again. We realized that to have a long-term impact on the problem, we needed to be smarter about how we manage our traffic flow.”

To tackle this problem, in early 2007 Queensland Motorways embarked on the largest bridge and road upgrade in Queensland’s history. The Gateway Upgrade Project, which will cost AU$1.88 billion (US$1.45 billion), will see the creation of a second Gateway Bridge, doubling capacity to twelve lanes, a new 7km section of motorway north of the bridges, and upgrades to 12km of motorway south of the bridges.

Improving traffic flow
While investigating ways to transform traffic management processes, the Queensland Government, together with Queensland Motorways, identified the toll plazas on the Gateway and Logan motorways as a major pinch point. The need to have vehicles either slow as they passed through the toll plazas using electronic tolling or to stop and pay with cash at a toll booth was significantly slowing the speed of traffic.

“Free-flow tolling was seen as beneficial for two reasons,” explains Phil Mumford. “First, if we could automate the tolling process and eliminate the need for drivers to stop, it would immediately increase the average speed of traffic flow, improve safety and the traveling experience of motorists. Secondly, the solution would allow us to digitally capture and analyze information about the vehicles that use our roads, which would help us make dramatic improvements to traffic management in the future.”

Leveraging IBM industry expertise
Queensland Motorways began looking for a partner that could help to design and implement such a solution, and after a series of site visits and a tender process, drew up a shortlist of three business and IT consulting companies for the delivery of the central system.

“IBM Global Business Services is one of the few companies in the world that has proven expertise in delivering successful free-flow tolling projects, and we were very impressed with their work on congestion charging in Stockholm,” says Phil Mumford. “The ability to provide an end-to-end solution including hardware, software and services – and to work effectively with other key partners such as SAP and Thales – was a key factor in our favoring the IBM proposal.

“IBM focused on aligning the business and IT resources during the project, which led to its success. What you get is a more efficient process. The business knows what they want to achieve – it just needs help to define what is required and to come up with some innovative solutions along the way. A common understanding of requirements is critical, because it means that processes that would normally consume a lot of resources become streamlined, simple and easy to understand.”

The roadside solution replaces the traditional toll booths with a Thales/Vitronic road-side gantry that utilizes video cameras and dedicated short-range communication technologies to capture information on passing vehicles. Vehicles are identified either by an in-vehicle tag or by analyzing footage of their number plates using two optical character recognition (OCR) engines, one at the roadside and a Dacolian engine at the central system.

The vehicle data is then matched to the appropriate customer account, and an IBM-developed rating engine assesses how much money is owed. The billing information is passed to back-end SAP ERP Financials and SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, which either deduct the total from a prepaid customer account, or generate an invoice. Business reporting is handled by SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and integration by SAP NetWeaver Process Integration.

“The whole process is automated and instantaneous, and there is no need for drivers to stop to pay their toll,” explains Phil Mumford. “Moreover, except in certain cases where a vehicle cannot be identified by OCR, there is no need for manual intervention by our staff. This not only improves traffic flow – it also cuts down the cost per transaction, which will help us offer better value to our customers.”

Transforming customer service
More importantly, the introduction of the SAP CRM application is leading to a fundamental change in the way Queensland Motorways interacts with its customers. Now it can see what vehicles are using the roads and how often and at what times they use the roads. In the future, Queensland Motorways will be able to tailor its services to individual drivers – with a profound effect on both customer experience and traffic management.

“With SAP CRM, we have achieved a better understanding of who our customers are,” says Phil Mumford. “In the future we’ll be able to offer customers useful information about the transport network. For example, a customer making regular trips to the airport on a Monday morning may want to receive congestion reports direct to their phones. The whole experience has the potential to be much more personalized.

“The idea is to have ‘a motorway that thinks’ – a more intelligent solution that will give our customers a better range of options for their journeys.”

Some of these ideas are still on the drawing board, but with the launch of the free-flow tolling system, motorists, the paying customers, now have access to a wide range of information and features via a Web portal and SMS.

This enables them to review usage information, pay bills and top up credit online. Similarly, business users are able to obtain information on all the vehicles in their fleet, and pay for the total road usage from a single account.

Exploring the technical architecture
The infrastructure of the solution is split across three locations: the road-side systems, the primary data center, and a disaster recovery site.

At the road-side, all sensor equipment with integrated pre-processing systems – vehicle classification, vehicle imaging, DSRC beacons and the detection and tracking unit – are installed on a single accessible gantry with no in-road installation.

Data from each of the roadside subsystems is passed to a Toll Management Unit housed in a roadside shelter where it is combined to form individual passage reports which are then passed via IBM WebSphere MQ to an enterprise service bus (ESB) based on WebSphere Message Broker and SAP NetWeaver Process Integration.

The passage report is then passed to the identification and rating engine, which uses OCR technology from Dacolian to identify the vehicle and to verify the OCR result achieved by the roadside system.

Images which cannot be analyzed automatically with the required confidence level are manually processed in a manual image review application. From there, billing information is passed via the ESB into the SAP CRM and SAP ERP systems. The free-flow tolling system adheres to the latest Australian interoperability standards, and data is automatically exchanged with other operators.

The solution also includes an intranet portal built on SAP NetWeaver Portal, which is accessed by internal users. IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On provides secure, convenient access to the portal and to other resources: a single password is used to access all services, and users only need to sign in once. This helps Queensland Motorways safeguard sensitive customer and business data, without introducing a complex security infrastructure and reducing usability.

A self-service Web portal has been developed to provide access for Queensland Motorways’ customers to payment options, account status and other important information. IBM WebSphere Application Server provides the platform for the delivery of this portal.

Service-oriented architecture
IBM Global Business Services has designed and built the solution in accordance with the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Individual systems communicate via the ESB rather than specialized point-to-point interfaces. As a result, any component can be replaced or upgraded without affecting other systems, and components can be orchestrated in different ways to provide new services without the need for significant custom development effort.

“We know that our needs will change over time,” says Phil Mumford. “The beauty of the SOA solution is that we can change our components as needed, seamlessly. It might be about introducing a new piece of technology; it might be a business process or a whole new business model. It changes the way we think about our technology lifecycles.”

Central system servers and storage
The Dacolian servers, Web servers, and various other systems such as IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On, run on 25 Intel Xeon processor-based IBM HS21 blade servers in two IBM BladeCenter chassis.

Meanwhile, the SAP applications, identification, rating and interoperability applications, Internet Web portal and Oracle databases run on an IBM Power 570 server with 16 IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used as the operating system for the entire environment.

A storage area network, based on IBM System Storage DS8000 hardware, provides high-speed access to data. By using a combination of Fibre Channel and FATA disks, the company can obtain the most effective balance between high-performance and cost-effective storage.
The complete production infrastructure is mirrored with identical hardware at the disaster recovery site, which is used to run development, test and staging environments during normal operations. IBM Global Technology Services was responsible for designing, implementing and testing the entire infrastructure at both the primary and disaster recovery sites.

PowerVM and BladeCenter
The Power 570 servers leverage IBM PowerVM technologies to provide an autonomic, virtualized server environment. The SAP applications and databases run in separate logical partitions (LPARs) that dynamically allocate available processor resources to maximize overall system throughput and enable load balancing and peak load compensation.

As a result, Queensland Motorways has enough flexibility in its infrastructure to ensure its tolling service runs 24×7x365. Even when server maintenance is necessary at the main data center, workload can be moved to a standby server at the disaster recovery site until the production machine is back online.

This flexibility is complemented by the highly scalable IBM BladeCenter platform, which allows Queensland Motorways to upgrade its processing capabilities simply by plugging additional blade servers into the chassis. For example, if the company decides to extend the free-flow tolling solution, and this requires more Dacolian OCR servers to be installed, the BladeCenter infrastructure will enable rapid expansion at minimal cost.

This dynamic infrastructure gives Queensland Motorways the flexibility to extend and grow the solution to meet the changing demands of the business.

Looking to the future
The free-flow tolling solution is on course to deliver rapid benefits for both Queensland Motorways and the motorists of south-east Queensland – increasing the reliability and safety of travel on its motorways, and significantly improving operational efficiency, which should help the company to deliver improved services and better value.

Looking at the big picture, Phil Mumford believes that the best is still to come: “Under our old systems, we didn’t have the flexibility to obtain some of the data that will greatly assist us make better business decisions. We now also have a system that will enable us to offer tailor-made solutions to our customers – total flexibility, total mobility.”

“Moving forward our customers will have access to information such as projected travel times, and our systems will help them to make informed travel decisions.”

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: Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation (OL&T)

Industry: Transportation: Managed logistics services for the chemicals and process industries

Geography: Headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut with international offices in North America and Europe

Business Challenge: Needed to cost-effectively scale its infrastructure to meet exponential growth in the business

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle Database, Oracle ProC

Hardware: 33 multi-core Intel® Xeon® based IBM xSeries servers

Migration Path: HP-UX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and multicore Intel Xeon processor based servers

Benefits: Ability to add transaction processing and storage capacity quickly and cost-effectively as business continues to expand. Ensures uptime and reliability to customers relying on Odyssey Logistics & Technology to run mission-critical supply chain operations

“Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat. Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”
– Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services, Odyssey Logistics & Technology

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Odyssey Logistics & Technology provides global logistics management services to the chemical industry and other process manufacturers. OL&T delivers a comprehensive portfolio of logistics services to the chemicals and process industries so that clients’ products are delivered safely, reliably and economically, with the advantage of shipment visibility and actionable data across all modes.  

OL&T presents a unique scope of industry knowledge, experience and technology, applied to client supply chain operations in two distinct outsourced logistics contexts: Managed Logistics Services and Third Party Services. The OL&T team of chemical engineers and logisticians brings unparalleled expertise—they are chemical and process industry insiders, intimately familiar with the supply chain complexities and hazardous materials requirements. Its technology backbone, the Odyssey Global Logistics PlatformSM features a net-native transportation management infrastructure that supports highly integrated, flexible and data-rich service offerings.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2005, OL&T ran its business primarily on HP-UX and Windows systems. But that infrastructure simply couldn’t support a business growing as fast as OL&T’s. First, there were cost issues. Adding proprietary RISC/UNIX hardware to handle its rapidly rising transaction volumes was prohibitively expensive. “So we began looking at ways we could handle growth by using standard based servers rather than simply buying more UNIX boxes,” said Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services for OL&T.

Then there was reliability. As OL&T’s customer list grew to include some of the largest and most recognizable names in the chemical industry, it simply couldn’t afford any downtime. “UNIX and Windows are not the friendliest environments to operate,” said Massey. “With the growth we were experiencing, we had a lot of concerns about the stability and scalability of our systems. We needed to make sure we could handle all of the new customers we were implementing.” According to Massey, the impact of downtime would be serious to OL&T’s customers. “We’re integrated right into our customers’ supply chain operations, and have to respond in real time to their needs 24/7,” he said. “We’re mission-critical to them, which means that having a stable infrastructure is mission-critical to us,” he said.

Over the past three years, OL&T has seen an 83% compounded growth rate in transactions through the system. Given the firm’s rapid rate of growth, the ability to scale was critical. OL&T decided it needed to implement a virtualized environment so that it would be able to scale on-demand.

SOLUTION
To address all these challenges, OL&T decided to do a complete infrastructure “refresh” that involved migrating all of its HP-UX and most of its Windows systems over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers. Today, OL&T deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM xSeries servers and virtualized on IBM 3850 M2 servers. It also implemented Red Hat Satellite to manage provisioning and administration of its Red Hat systems. “Through our use of Red Hat Satellite, Odyssey has realized: centralized configuration management and compliance, faster patch deployment and more streamlined server deployment,” said Massey.

On the decision to move to Red Hat over other Linux distributions, Massey said there was hardly any discussion at all. “Red Hat is the market leader, period,” he said. “Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat.”

Though the majority of the company’s mission-critical systems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the deployment is “ongoing,” Massey said. “We started with our Oracle database, and our HP-UX batch processing, and were so pleased with the results that we have continued to progress toward making as much of our infrastructure as possible run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

BENEFITS
The migration went extraordinary smoothly, and was accomplished “virtually painlessly,” said Massey. And, the cost savings were immediate. There were direct savings, as OL&T was able to keep up with its exponential growth by replacing its proprietary RISC/UNIX boxes with virtualized x86 based systems. And because it had deployed Red Hat Satellite, these virtual machines could be provisioned in a matter of just minutes rather than the hours it previously took to get a new server up and running.

Then there were indirect savings due to increased IT worker productivity. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just so much easier to manage than either UNIX or Windows,” said Eric Brown, database administrator. As a result, OL&T can do more with fewer people. “Even with our tremendous growth, we’ve been able to continue to manage our IT operations with a reasonable staffing level,” said Massey. “And given the kickstart and configuration management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite, our workers can add a lot more value to our organization

About the quality of the support OL&T receives from Red Hat, Massey said it’s a moot point. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux just works,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it.” He said he can count on one hand the number of support calls he’s had to make – but stressed that those support calls were promptly and professionally dealt with. “The attention and care that Red Hat provides to its customers is truly enterprise-class,” he said.

As far as the workloads that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is capable of supporting, Massey said that it’s been able to handle everything OL&T has thrown at it. “We’ve migrated our Oracle databases over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Windows and our mission critical batch services for planning and rating from HP-UX over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he said. “In fact, we’ve completely eliminated UNIX from our environment.” OL&T is currently also in process of moving its Java workloads from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Gap Inc. Direct

Industry: Clothing Online Retail

Geography: San Francisco

Business Challenge: Ensuring security and payment card industry compliance while managing system level access across the enterprise

Migration Path: UNIX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Likewise Enterprise

Hardware: 1,500 Intel-based IBM blade servers

Benefits: Savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on reduced administrative and hardware costs associated with compliance and security requirements. Compliance with PCI and SOX requirements through automatic authentication of users across a mixed systems environment.

“The ROI [return on investment] of the Red Hat-Likewise solution is up to several hundred thousand dollars annually once you add all of the hardware and software savings to the reduced costs associated with manually auditing the systems. Likewise Enterprise’s compliance enhancements allowed us to control user access and permissions, thus enabling us to grow our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.”
– Jeff Arcuri, senior manager, IT for GAP Inc. Direct

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Gap, Inc. is a specialty retailing firm that operates more than 3,100 retail and outlet stores within the United States and internationally. Founded in 1969, the Gap sells casual apparel, accessories and personal care products for men, women, and children under the Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Piperlime, and Athleta brands. Through its Gap Inc. Direct line of business, it also offers its products through gap.com, bananarepublic.com, oldnavy.com, piperlime.com, and recently launched athleta.com Web properties. Headquartered in San Francisco, the Gap currently employs more than 150,000 workers around the world, and generated $14.5 billion in revenues in 2008; online sales through Gap Inc. Direct Web sites accounted for approximately seven percent, or $1 billion.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In late 2003 the Gap Inc. Direct needed to revamp its entire end-to-end business technology platform – from the customer-facing front-end system, to the back-end order management application, to the business tools that supported the company’s long-term growth strategy. Previously, the Gap Direct’s e-commerce platform was largely built on Microsoft Windows. The need for new features – as well as concerns about the platform’s ability to scale given the retailer’s ambitious growth plans drove Gap Inc. Direct to evaluate alternative solutions to the Microsoft platform.

“Our growth was very strong and projected to continue for the foreseeable future, and we needed to scale to meet that growth,” said Jeff Arcuri, senior manager, IT for Gap Inc. Direct. “We knew we wouldn’t be able to do that cost-effectively with our existing systems and tools.”

GID’s team performed in-depth testing of three different platforms for the revamped infrastructure: UNIX, Linux, and Windows. The decision turned out to be an easy one. Linux outperformed the other platforms.“We were seeing a lot of momentum in the retail industry toward leveraging open source in general, and Linux in particular,” said Arcuri.

Once Linux was chosen as the operating system, his team put all the different flavors of Linux through testing using five key criteria. “It had to meet our performance objectives; it had to be secure; and it had to be scalable and manageable within a large enterprise-class implementation, and fit within our budget,” he said. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the clear winner.”

Although Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the new standard operating system across the enterprise, Gap Inc. Direct still had systems running UNIX platforms IBM AIX and Sun Solaris, as well as Microsoft Windows. As with all retailers, Gap Inc. Direct needed to perform audits to meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance requirements.

Gap Inc. Direct uses Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) for administrative tools to grant and control end-user permission, but AD by itself doesn’t support Linux or Unix, this resulted in the need for several systems administrators and analysts to analyze all of the logs of hundreds of servers every time an audit needed to be performed – a task that took IT employees away from their day-to-day responsibilities. With the implementation of Likewise Enterprise, GAP Inc. Direct has reduced the time commitment to approx. 40 hours per quarter.

SOLUTION
The Gap Inc. Direct needed an identity management solution that would communicate between Active Directory and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to automate the control of user access and permissions throughout the company.

To automate more of the process and free up systems administrators for more valuable work, as well as make user access permissions in this mixed operating environment simpler, Arcuri deployed an identity management tool from Likewise Software.

Likewise Enterprise, built with Red Hat technologies, enables enterprises to securely authenticate users in mixed operating systems environments that include Linux, UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows systems, with Microsoft Active Directory, and includes world-class migration, group policy, audit, and reporting modules.

The Gap Inc. Direct has set up group profiles for several different kinds of employees, so administrators don’t have to configure profiles individually. Likewise Enterprise also produces reports by user, by date, and by server.

BENEFITS
Today, Gap Inc. Direct is a Red Hat shop and “proud of it,” said Arcuri. “We run the majority of our systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and utilizing Likewise Enterprise has enabled us to control and manage system access for identity management, and has enabled us to increase the number of Red Hat systems,” he said. The support Gap Inc. Direct has received from Red Hat and Likewise to make this run smoothly has been superb, said Arcuri. “Whenever we have a high-impact issue, both Red Hat and Likewise are there for us – through upgrades and patches – even with us pushing the operating system to its absolute limits,” he said.

As far as benefits go, first and foremost, Gap Inc. Direct has realized tremendous cost savings. “The ROI [return on investment] of the Red Hat-Likewise solution is hundreds of thousands of dollars annually once you add the hardware and software savings to the reduced costs of manually auditing our systems. Likewise Enterprise’s compliance enhancements allowed us to expand our use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Arcuri.

The scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also been more than what Arcuri had hoped for. Gap Inc. Direct recently added a new brand of women’s sporting apparel – Athleta – which involved creating another Web site in addition to the existing gap.com, bananarepublic.com, oldnavy.com, and piperlime.com sites. “Building out another brand was easy, because we were able to leverage the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure, plus with Likewise we had all of the access policies and permissions in place,” said Arcuri.

Finally, the reliability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers has been exemplary from the start according to Arcuri. “By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Likewise Enterprise, everything just fell into place,” he said. “Once we achieved compliance and realized just how stable, reliable, and high performing the operating system was, we were free to concentrate on getting the applications themselves developed and out the door. Our need to support five world-class brand names requires a world-class infrastructure, and that’s what Red Hat and Likewise have provided.”

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

Industry: Airlines/Travel

Geography: The Netherlands

Business Challenge: Renew, update, and unify the heterogeneous IT infrastructure created by the merger of Air France and KLM to create an affordable and scalable platform

Migration Path: IBM AIX and Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5; IBM WebSphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, SAP, KARMA, (KLM-Air France Revenue Management Application), Alfresco Document Management System, TIBCO, Oracle

Benefits: Delivered reduced costs expected to amount to approximately 11 million Euros by the end of 2011; a homogeneous, universal platform; an open architecture with impressive performance and reliable support

Download the case study [PDF]

“There is no internal discussion. The best product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux: End of story. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we work more effectively and productively and we save significantly on manpower and continuity.”
— Rene Matla, ICT production manager Linux at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

BACKGROUND
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is a worldwide company based in the Netherlands. It encompasses the core of the KLM Group, including KLM Cityhopper and Transavia airlines. In 2004, KLM and Air France merged to create the Air France-KLM holding company, creating the second largest airline partnership in the world in transported passengers. It is also the world’s second-largest cargo transporter.

KLM’s core businesses are passenger transport, cargo shipment, and aircraft maintenance. Its cargo activities have been fully integrated with those of Air France since 2007. The two transfer airports are Air France’s home base, Paris Charles de Gaulle, and KLM’s home base, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

In the fiscal year 2007-2008, running from April 1 to March 31, the KLM Group transported approximately 23.4 million passengers and 657,022 tons of Air France- KLM cargo. Today, the KLM Group has a modern fleet of 203 aircrafts, and employs 33,002 staff (FTEs). With more than 1,000 business applications, the company supports more than one million customers and 50,000 desktops. It maintains three datacenters located in Valbonne and Toulouse, France and Schiphol, the Netherlands.

CHALLENGE
When Air France and KLM merged in 2004, the unified company faced a heterogeneous IT infrastructure that presented a complex cost burden. Both of the airlines used a different operating system for their midrange systems. KLM was utilizing IBM AIX, while Air France was deploying Sun Solaris. Because of the tremendous prior investment by the respective companies in these IT systems, cost considerations made it difficult for the unified company to migrate completely to either Solaris or AIX.

In the face of its IT challenge, Air France-KLM chose to focus on a joint IT future. It decided to phase out Solaris and AIX and migrate the IT systems of both Air France and KLM to a Linux alternative. The organization wanted a more universal and flexible solution that could reduce costs without compromising on performance. It established the internal project BLUEhat with the goal of UNIX-to-Linux migration, including a middleware solution shift from WebSphere to JBoss.

“Linux is made for and by a large open source community. It is a proven platform that offers reduced costs in comparison to AIX and Solaris and allows us to purchase, deploy, and manage many Linux servers at a fraction of the cost of our previous solution,” said Rene Matla, ICT production manager, Linux at KLM.

SOLUTION
To gain synergy between Air France and KLM, the unified airlines began planning for a UNIX-to-Linux migration. “As there was no flexibility in our legacy solutions, we decided to open up our systems. The step toward open source was logical, and our selection of Linux was a very important move. Open source offered us the possibility to innovate from the bottom up with no vendor lock-in and significantly reduced costs thanks to less-expensive hardware and no licensing costs associated with Linux,” said Matla.

The airlines considered open source vendors SUSE and Red Hat during its evaluation of open source operating systems. The choice to deploy Red Hat was obvious.

“Red Hat is one of the biggest players in the open source industry and is a great innovator in the community. It has a worldwide network and a big user base. And its work, such as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, is a very important and transparent part of the innovative open source model. Red Hat has a strong product portfolio, including both Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions,” said Matla. “The support we’ve received from Red Hat has also been irreplaceable. “To us, Red Hat is a trustworthy partner. We chose a supplier who can cover as much of our portfolio as possible.”

KLM also selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware for both its mid-level and low-level web environments. KLM has one million bookings and 40 million customer check-ins per year, and 50 million hits per day on our systems. With more than 350 web applications covering everything from booking to check-in, including luggage handling, marketing, and customer relations programs, the KLM web environment is critical.

The migration is not focused on speed, but rather on steady replacement of aging systems as they approach the end of their lifecycles. “We just turn off something if it is at the end of its lifecycle, and then make the move to Red Hat. Our plan is to migrate slowly, and with each new release, we’re one step closer to homogeneity,” said Matla.

Currently, the airlines run a combination of three systems for its web applications, including AIX/WebSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/WebSphere, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, with the goal of standardizing on the Red Hat and JBoss combination.

“During the past years, Red Hat and KLM have created a strong relationship and partnership that has resulted in the creation of the first Red Hat Enterprise User Group. This group allows companies like KLM to share experience, knowledge, and best practices. Discussions focus on technology and future needs to share with Red Hat, but also includes a focus on the procedures and organisational changes needed to best work with open source. KLM truly understands the value of open source,” said Robert Molijn, key account manager at Red Hat.

BENEFITS
By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, KLM has significantly reduced IT costs.

In terms of manpower, the new team is 60 percent of its original size. Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, have delivered heightened performance and the Linux environment has given the IT team more flexibility and more effective performance results.

“Also, we are extremely happy with Red Hat’s support and responsiveness to our specific needs. If we have problems, we discuss them directly with knowledgeable Red Hat experts. In a complex environment with a great number of suppliers, is it great that Red Hat is also able to help us with problems that can fall between two suppliers. To have a company on whom we can rely reduces the amount of complexity we must deal with. The process is smooth and gives us a reliable platform to build up our Linux infrastructure to its current state,” said Matla.

To gain further Linux knowledge, KLM’s IT teams have also invested in Red Hat Global Learning Services. “The excellence of the Red Hat Training program is that it is practice-based. As far as I know, it is the only certificate program that is so thorough. Somebody who is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) actually knows how to run a Linux environment. He is able to solve certain problems in the specified amount of time. You also see this excellence in the quality of people who have gained the certification,” said Matla.

Red Hat customers also have access to the open source user and developers community, which is a valuable resource that helps drive quality products that are delivered rapidly to customers. “This could be the model of the future. You make it open to the community and you become less dependent on one solution provider. With Red Hat, we trust in this model and its reliable products and support,” said Matla.

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.”

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

FAST FACTS

Company: YPF SA

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Argentina

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Aviza Technology

Industry: Electronics

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning

Business Partner: IBM

Migration Path: Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun SPARC to IBM System x

Business Need: When end-of-life issues on the company’s existing Sun hardware began impacting the availability of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), Aviza sought a cost-effective systems solution from IBM.

Solution: Aviza implemented a two-tier Oracle configuration, with Oracle EBS v11.5.10 on one IBM System x3850 4-socket server and Oracle Database 10g on one IBM System x3950 16-socket server—both running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. IBM System Storage N5200 provides 2.4 TB of data storage. The development environment has six test instances running on five x3850 servers, with a second N5200 providing 7.2 TB of data storage.

Benefits: Aviza Technology achieved a multifold increase in solution performance, enabled new levels of systems scalability and flexibility across the company’s global IT infrastructure, and better positioned the company to meet unforeseen IT system challenges.

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview
Aviza Technology designs, manufactures, sells and supports advanced semiconductor equipment and technologies for the global semiconductor industry. The headquarters office in Scotts Valley, CA, provides IT services to approximately 700 employees in the U.S. and in 9 counties across Europe and Asia.

Running a global business is no small feat in today’s competitive environment. But Aviza Technology has been rising to the challenge since its founding in 2003. With approximately 700 employees worldwide, Aviza designs, manufactures, sells and supports advanced semiconductor equipment and technologies for the global semiconductor industry.

“Our biggest challenge is serving the world 24×7 with reliable hardware and software,” says Dale Spencer, vice president of information technology and corporate services at Aviza. From the company’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, CA, Aviza provides IT services to offices in 9 countries across Europe and Asia.

Aviza had been running Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) on Sun Solaris-based systems, but end-of-life issues began affecting the company’s ability to meet its service and availability goals. “We started having some errors and unexpected failures that resulted in downtime,” Spencer explains. “When you have a worldwide business, you have to resolve these issues around the clock.”

A cost-effective solution
Aviza was looking for a cost-effective solution that would resolve the reliability issues, provide better performance and enable new levels of flexibility across the company’s global IT infrastructure. To meet those goals, the company chose an IBM solution that includes IBM System x3850 and System x3950 servers with the high-end IBM X3 chipset, and IBM System Storage N5200.

“We evaluated a number of other vendors, but we were concerned about uptime, maintenance and the need for specialized skills,” Spencer says. “We were comfortable working with IBM. They were very informed, and they did a good job of laying out the options for us.”

Aviza has a two-tier Oracle configuration, with the production application running on one x3850 4-socket server and the database running on one x3950 with 16-sockets—both driven by Intel® Xeon® dual-core processors. An N5200 provides 2.4 TB of data storage. The development environment has six test instances running on five x3850 servers, with a second N5200 providing 7.2 TB of data storage. IBM Premier Business Partner Sycomp provided installation and support services.

Exceeding expectations
Aviza saw immediate benefits from the solution; in fact, Spencer reports, “IBM System x has exceeded our expectations around reliability and performance.” Spencer and his team are also pleased with the scalability that the System x technology enables. “We may end up with three or four tiers at some point,” he explains, “and this equipment lends itself to that.”

Spencer says the migration from Sun to IBM System x went extremely well. In addition to migrating from Sun to IBM and from Solaris 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Aviza upgraded from Oracle EBS 11.0.3 to 11.5.10 and from Oracle Database 8i to 10g. Aviza runs a full complement of EBS components, including all financials, manufacturing, order management and service modules.

Although the reliability and performance improvements are felt across the company, Aviza’s finance group in particular appreciates the new systems. The department’s monthly cost roll-ups used to take anywhere from eight to 18 hours to run, and now they take less than four.

“We’re getting positive comments from everyone,” Spencer says. “And with the IBM solution, we’re a lot more flexible than we were before.”

For more information about Aviza Technology, visit: www.aviza.com

FAST FACTS

Industry: Hosting and Internet services provider

Geography: Offices in Spain, France, and Portugal with customers in more than one hundred countries

Business Challenge: Unifying Linux distributions and offering customers a reliable, certified, and supported platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: IBM System x 3250 and 3550 servers

Benefits: Improved quality and reliability of the company’s Internet services, reduced the complexity of its IT system, and simplified its IT maintenance process

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

BACKGROUND
Arsys is Spain’s leading Internet services specialist, providing domain name registration, hosting, housing, and online applications. With more than 650,000 domain names registered and more than 220,000 customers, Arsys holds the top position in the Spanish ranking of domain name registration and web hosting, and is one of the industry leaders in Europe. To reach this leading position, Arsys has won its customers’ trust by providing high-quality services while offering rapid and reliable solutions to meet its users’ needs.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Every day, more and more of Arsys’ customers demand Linux as the platform for implementing diverse technologies such as: databases, portals, web applications, etc. The company started offering these services in 2002 on a variety of Linux distributions, which included free distributions such as Fedora, without certification or official support.

In time, Arsys identified the need to improve its existing Linux platform offerings and integrate support and certification in order to provide its customers with a stable and high-quality service. It was important to Arsys to provide services to its customers that included a wide network of certified hardware and software solutions.

Furthermore, the frequent changes and the short life cycle of other open source solutions required large time investments by Arsys technicians, who also worked with nine different distributions, adding to the complexity of their tasks. This resulted in two main challenges. First, it increased costs and the technicians’ workload. Second, it generated greater non-predictable risks.

SOLUTION
Arsys decided to unify the different Linux versions used within the organisation under one sole certified distribution, thus facilitating the technological management of the platforms used in hosting services, corporate applications, and in certain internal company processes and services.

Additionally, by implementing a more stable and certified Linux platform, Arsys aimed to facilitate the work of its technicians and reduce the number of hours devoted to the maintenance of platforms. As a result, Arsys deployed hundreds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions, thus enabling the unification of the Linux platform offered to its customers.

Moreover, a large part of the company’s internal processes are based on Red Hat solutions, such as its domain name registration system, its MySQL databases, and its electronic mail. Today, most web applications that enable customers’ interaction with Arsys run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In order to ensure its personnel’s technical efficiency on a documented and well-known standard platform, as well as be able to guarantee its customers the most qualified resources to manage their technology platforms, Arsys opted to certify its technicians with Red Hat Training certifications, and to update their knowledge on a regular basis.

BENEFITS
By using Red Hat solutions, Arsys incorporated the support and certification that guarantees its customers security and reliability for its hosting services.

At present, approximately half of the customers using Arsys hosting services operate directly through Red Hat technology. More than 220,000 of the company’s customers benefit indirectly from Red Hat platforms because a large part of Arsys’ daily operations, such as the domain name registration system or the e-mail system, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Through Red Hat solutions, Arsys has achieved significant improvements in the quality of its services and security, two vital requirements for the company and its customers. Stability of the IT system is crucial to Arsys’ business. Red Hat is capable of providing high availability, reliability, and expert technical support.

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified by the industry’s leading hardware and software providers, providing an extensive ecosystem of certified hardware platforms and applications for customers running the Red Hat platform. With this broad ecosystem, Red Hat customers are provided with flexibility and freedom from vendor lock-in.

The stability of Red Hat solutions, combined with the possibility of automating many tasks involving the operating system, along with the expert knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux obtained through the company’s Red Hat Training courses, have significantly reduced the time resources dedicated to the maintenance of the Arsys’ platforms.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Arsys is able to deliver reliable Internet services to its worldwide customers.

Lower costs and increased sales with a comprehensive call center solution

FAST FACTS

Customer: PRO BTP

Industry: Insurance

Deployment Country: France

Solution: Unified Communications and Collaboration

Business Partner: IBM

Business Need: PRO BTP needed to improve the quality of its call answering service to better serve its members. It also wanted to find a solution that would reduce its communication costs.

Solution: PRO BTP engaged IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services to provide a comprehensive call center solution, unifying call answering among the company’s three call centers. The IBM team evaluated all the alternatives then selected an Avaya Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure using Text over IP (ToIP) and Voice over IP (VoIP).

The solution runs on a reliable, scalable IBM BladeCenter HS20 platform, housed in IBM BladeCenter (Chassis) and running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

Benefits: The company has enjoyed dramatically improved call answering service with 90% of 5,500,000 annual calls answered in three rings or less, and lower telecommunications costs in a secure solution, with automatic backup if one site fails.

BACKGROUND
PRO BTP offers auto, home and life insurance, health services, leisure and social activities, and product savings for its three million members. It employs almost 4,000 people and generates annual revenue of €4.7 million in retirement services, €1.5 million in health services and €240 million in insurance and financial products. It is a nonprofit organization controlled by AGIRC/ARRCO (a French organization of employers) and employees.

BUSINESS NEED
To better serve its members, PRO BTP needed to improve the quality of its call answering service. Because member call traffic has increased from year to year and is expected to continue increasing, PRO BTP also wanted to find a solution that would reduce its communication costs.

SOLUTION
Working with IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services, PRO BTP implemented a solution that aligned three call centers, unifying call answering among the centers. The IBM team compared the best Internet Protocol (IP) solution manufacturers, including Cisco, Avaya and Alcatel, and considered the different returns on investment (ROIs), architectures and migration plans before selecting the Avaya infrastructure.

The new call center solution infrastructure is built using Avaya Text over IP (ToIP) and Voice over IP (VoIP) products, including Avaya Convergence Solutions, Avaya Multimedia Contact Center Solutions, Avaya Self-Service Solutions, Avaya Telephony, Avaya Unified Communications and Avaya Virtual Contact Center Solutions. The solution is integrated into phones deployed at PRO BTP agencies and at the call center sites. The IBM team provided both the hardware and the software, deployed the solution and provided maintenance services. A Business Continuity and Recovery Services plan is included in the solution; if one of the three call centers fails, the other two facilitate business continuity.

Using the new solution, member information is automatically displayed at each of three call centers, meaning that service at each begins with a uniform knowledge of the customer. Additionally, the IP-based solution enables member callers to automatically connect with available call center employees skilled in the caller’s particular field of inquiry.

The solution runs on a reliable, scalable IBM BladeCenter HS20 platform, housed in IBM BladeCenter (Chassis) and running the Red Hat Linux operating system.

BENEFITS
With the new solution, 90% of the 5.5 million incoming calls per year are answered in three or fewer rings, dramatically improving the quality of PRO BTP’s call answering service.

By engaging IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services, PRO BTP has realized a secure and highly available ToIP and VoIP infrastructure in its call centers. The new environment has resulted in reduced telecommunication expenses. And the real-time information available as a result of the new infrastructure has highlighted the impact of call center service on sales, with sales increasing by up to 20 percent.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Sentry Data Systems

Industry: Healthcare

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Information Infrastructure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Server Consolidation, Virtualization

Business Partner: IBM

Business Need: Sentry’s core infrastructure required substantial computing power and high-speed storage. Four difficult-to-administer racks of large servers supported the company’s day-to-day business processes, costing much energy, effort and money to run. Sentry wanted to accommodate its growing business while simplifying the design and administration of its underlying IT infrastructure.

Solution: Sentry began by consolidating on an IBM BladeCenter® H chassis that supports 14 IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new solution greatly simplifies system administration by enabling the company to access and manage all hardware remotely from a single console. All cabling is integrated within the BladeCenter technology, reducing the amount of wires previously needed for power and remote access.

Benefits:

• Reduces operating costs and offers remote administration
• Increases storage capacity and performance
• Reduces server footprint and amount of cabling

“Besides consolidating our servers, we reduced our cabling significantly. Out of the box, the IBM BladeCenter required just a few uplinks—power, Ethernet and fiber channel—and immediately all 14 servers were connected.”
– Sentry Data Systems

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

OVERVIEW
Sentry Data Systems (Sentry), based in Florida, serves pharmacies and hospitals in over 20 states throughout the United States. From compliance and pharmacy transaction processing software to a healthcare business intelligence platform, its software focuses on easing healthcare specific processes and challenges.

CHALLENGE
Performing over 110 million operations per day, Sentry’s core infrastructure required substantial computing power and high-speed storage. Four difficult-to-administer racks of large servers supported the company’s day-to-day business processes, costing much energy, effort and money to run. As Sentry’s growth increased its data volumes, the resulting processing loads pushed the company’s storage environment to its capacity limitations. Sentry wanted to accommodate its growing business while simplifying the design and administration of its underlying IT infrastructure.

SOLUTION
Sentry began by consolidating on an IBM BladeCenter® H chassis that supports 14 IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new solution greatly simplifies system administration by enabling the company to access and manage all hardware remotely from a single console. All cabling is integrated within the BladeCenter technology, reducing the amount of wires previously needed for power and remote access.

To boost capacity within its storage environment, an IBM System Storage™ DS4700 Express disk system offers better performance and 33.6TB of high-speed physical storage capacity to accommodate Sentry’s growing data volumes. And to consolidate its switch fabric and increase reliability, Sentry deployed redundant IBM SAN Switches.

BENEFITS

• Reduces operating costs and offers remote administration
• Increases storage capacity and performance
• Reduces server footprint and amount of cabling

FAST FACTS

Customer: The City of Burbank

Industry: Government

Deployment Country: United States

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning

Business Need: The City of Burbank needed to bring its multi-vendor infrastructure onto a scalable platform that supports multiple operating systems.

Solution: The City consolidated on IBM BladeCenter® and IBM System Storage™ DS4300 while migrating to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.

Benefits: As a result of the implementation, the City achieved better performance, significant space savings, and reduced costs for hardware, power, cooling, maintenance, monitoring and licensing.

“We’re running the complete Oracle ERP solution–the application and the database–all on one BladeCenter with four-processor blades.” That solution includes Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database 10g, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It’s easier to maintain, from an administrative perspective, and it’s less costly because we are licensing for only one production server.”
– Mahesh Saraswat, Lead Database Administrator, City of Burbank

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview
Three years ago, the City of Burbank was taxed with maintaining a complex mixed-vendor infrastructure that included Sun, HP and IBM, with applications and databases running on four different operating systems. The City began to consider a new approach for the data center—a solution that would provide the hardware scalability they needed as they began migrating to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. The City chose IBM BladeCenter® as the consolidation platform and IBM System Storage™ DS4300 for SAN.

When Mahesh Saraswat joined the City of Burbank three years ago, the organization’s data center was at a critical juncture. The IT staff was already taxed with maintaining a complex mixed-vendor infrastructure that included Sun, HP and IBM, with applications and databases running on four different operating systems. Soon the organization began facing hardware limitations.

“We needed to upgrade our Oracle ERP application from 10.7 to 11i.10, as well as upgrading other Oracle-based applications,” says Saraswat, the lead database administrator who manages a team of Unix® system administrators and database administrators for the City of Burbank. “But in order to do that, we needed more disk space. And we didn’t have the flexibility to add more disk to our big Sun boxes.”

A new approach
It was at this point that the City began to consider a new approach for the data center–a solution that would provide the hardware scalability they needed as they began migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After evaluating all the options available to a multi-vendor organization, the City of Burbank chose IBM BladeCenter as the consolidation platform and IBM System Storage DS4300 for the SAN.

Saraswat says there were a number of reasons the City chose IBM over other major hardware vendors, such as previous success with IBM hardware and confidence in IBM customer service. But as Saraswat explains, “We chose BladeCenter specifically because we still had applications running on IBM AIX® and Microsoft® Windows®. We can run everything we have on the IBM blades.”

The City currently has two BladeCenter chassis, each with 10 blades. One chassis is in the primary data center, and one is located off-site as part of a disaster recovery arrangement with the City of Burbank Police Department. They also have a DS4300 in both locations, including an expansion unit in the primary data center, giving them over seven terabytes of disk space.

Making the most of BladeCenter
According to Saraswat, the City is making the most of the BladeCenter, especially when it comes to their Oracle implementation. “We’re running the complete Oracle ERP solution–the application and the database–all on one BladeCenter with four-processor blades,” Saraswat explains. That solution includes Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database 10g, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It’s easier to maintain, from an administrative perspective, and it’s less costly because we are licensing for only one production server.”

Besides enabling a sleek Oracle implementation, the IBM solution has provided the City of Burbank with a number of key benefits, including reduced requirements for cabling and space. Saraswat says they’ve already consolidated from five racks down to two, and after the migration of a few remaining AIX applications, they’ll soon be down to one. The City is also seeing significant cost savings as a result of reduced power and cooling costs, reduced maintenance and monitoring costs, and reduced hardware and licensing costs.

But cost savings isn’t everything, which is why Saraswat has also kept a close watch on the performance numbers. “Performance-wise, we’ve definitely seen an improvement,” he reports. “And the feedback I get from the users is that it’s better than before.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Discount Tire Company

Industry: Consumer – Automotive Retail

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

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

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

Hardware: 50 Dell x86 servers

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Migration from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes

ARMONK, N.Y., May 21 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Gruppo Amadori, a wholesale distributor of quality food products in Italy, is rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based desktops running IBM email, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software to select employees.

About 1,000 of the company’s 6,000 employees access PCs to help manage the production, processing, and delivery logistics of its poultry products for customers within Italy and internationally. In 2009, some of these employees will move to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop client operating system and IBM Lotus Symphony, open standards-based word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

For its collaboration services, the company is moving from Microsoft Exchange to an IBM Lotus Notes and Domino environment hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The first users have moved to Lotus Domino and will continue rolling out to the entire company through the course of the year.

The benefits that drive Gruppo Amadori’s migration to Linux and IBM collaboration software are the lower acquisition and operational costs.

“Our strategy is to focus on Linux first and foremost, taking a practical and pragmatic approach,” said Gianluca Giovannetti, CIO and Director of Organization, Gruppo Amadori. “For us, the Linux environment is the right choice for very focused applications and is more cost effective than Microsoft.”

In the first migrations, the Linux desktops will run Lotus Symphony; IBM collaboration software including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM Lotus Quickr; and a Web browser to access an ERP application.

“Linux on the Desktop is providing great value and cost reductions to companies at a time when they need it the most,” said Bob Sutor, vp of Linux and open source, IBM Software Group.

IBM Lotus Symphony is software comprised of three core applications: documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The software is designed to handle the majority of office productivity tasks that workers typically perform. Lotus Symphony supports Linux, Macintosh and Windows desktops and multiple file formats, including Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office; and also can output content in PDF format. For more information or to download Symphony at no charge, please visit, http://symphony.lotus.com

About Gruppo Amadori
Gruppo Amadori is a leader in the Italian food sector. Founded in San Vittore di Cesena 40 years ago, the company — with revenue of over one billion euros in 2008 — has 16 production plants and 32 branches and agencies. Underlying Gruppo Amadori’s success is its ability to manage all phases of production from the selection of raw materials, farms, hatcheries, feed mills, processing plants and distribution. Tradition and innovation are two elements that distinguish Gruppo Amadori. For more information, please visit, http://www.amadori.it/

For more information on IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/think

FAST FACTS

Customer: Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach

Industry: Healthcare

Country: Germany

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Optimizing IT, Supply Chain Management

Business Partner: IBM, SAP, EGT InformationsSysteme

Business Need:
Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, a hospital with 1,400 staff and an annual budget of around €100 million, wanted to improve both business and clinical efficiency. Users found that SAP applications were slow to respond to their requests, as the underlying database had reached its performance limit. The system could not be extended or developed, and the database had to be taken offline for maintenance.

Solution:
The hospital implemented the latest SAP applications and selected IBM DB2 running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the IBM BladeCenter platform. It also chose IBM System Storage and IBM System x hardware to support a new storage area network for clinical imaging.

Benefits:
SAP application and database response times have been cut by more than 30 per cent, and users gain rapid, reliable access to critical business data. Database maintenance can be completed online, avoiding interruptions, and a clustering solution ensures system reliability. The new SAN offers scalable storage up to 112TB, a tenfold increase in current capacity.

“Our 32-bit operating system was limited to 4GB of main memory, which was limiting our ability to improve performance. Running 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM blade servers immediately allowed us to increase system RAM to 16GB, and this alone produced significant improvements in performance.”
-Dieter Reichl, Head of Business Technology

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview

The Lörrach region is tucked into the south-western tip of Germany, bordering France and Switzerland. Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, based in the city of Lörrach itself, serves the local population with both in- and outpatient general healthcare. The hospital employs some 1,400 staff, with an annual budget of around €100 million, very largely generated by medical insurance payments.

The Lörrach region is tucked into the south-western tip of Germany, bordering France and Switzerland. Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, based in the city of Lörrach itself, serves the local population with both in- and outpatient general healthcare. The hospital employs some 1,400 staff, with an annual budget of around €100 million, very largely generated by medical insurance payments.

Approximately 600 people require regular access to business and patient management systems. The hospital had been using SAP applications, supported by a Microsoft SQL Server database running on the Microsoft Windows platform. System response was slow and becoming slower, and the opportunities for database tuning – which required downtime – were limited. Additionally, healthcare legislation requires that medical records and images are retained for 30 years, contributing to a significant rise in storage needs.

Dieter Reichl, Head of Business Technology, comments, “The aim was to introduce the latest SAP applications, which would enhance our business processes and give us new reporting and control capabilities. The existing system landscape would not be capable of supporting the new applications.

“Ultimately this was a technical issue. Based on the 32-bit Microsoft Windows Server operating system, the MS SQL database had reached its performance limit. To meet our business needs, we wanted to shift to a 64-bit operating system and database, and looked for the best combination of software and hardware to give us high performance, high reliability and low operational cost.”

Choosing a SAP application landscape

Starting with the target SAP applications, the clinic selected the SAP for Healthcare solution portfolio, with the addition of specific financial accounting, asset management, materials management, project systems and project management applications.

“The SAP applications provide a powerful environment for all our hospital operations,” says Dieter Reichl. “We track every patient, procedure and process within the SAP ERP landscape. With a shared information resource for all our activities, the SAP applications help us to run a highly efficient healthcare service for the citizens of the Lörrach district.”

Knowing that database performance, scalability and reliability would be key to providing effective service to clinicians and managers, Dieter Reichl selected IBM DB2.

“DB2 offers key advantages for the hospital, particularly its close integration with SAP applications, its ability to complete administration tasks online, and its very high performance,” says Dieter Reichl. “The exceptional price-performance combination offered by DB2 met our desire to reduce operational costs, and simple administration means there is no need to employ a specialist database administrator.

“The migration process ran smoothly and efficiently, and we found that we needed very little training to transfer to the new DB2 environment.”

“The price-performance ratio lead us to the decision to select DB2. In addition, we have no time for reorganization runs of the database, which is not possible in our environment, and DB2 is able to handle these runs even during production.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on BladeCenter

Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach looked at possible 64-bit operating systems, including Windows Server, UNIX and Linux, and selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The next stage was to select suitable infrastructure, capable of delivering the promised improvements and offering a stable long-term solution.

The hospital chose to deploy an IBM BladeCenter with HS21 blade servers, featuring quad-core Intel Xeon processors, to support the SAP applications and DB2 database. IBM BladeCenter offers integrated servers, storage and networking systems in a single chassis. The BladeCenter’s future-proof design, with the emphasis on high availability, is the right solution for meeting the challenging demands of the hospital’s IT infrastructure.

“Our 32-bit operating system was limited to 4GB of main memory, which was limiting our ability to improve performance. Running 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM blade servers immediately allowed us to increase system RAM to 16GB, and this alone produced significant improvements in performance,” says Dieter Reichl. “We run the servers in a cluster, and the BladeCenter approach allows us to increase total compute capacity quickly and easily by adding another blade server to the cluster with minimum physical deployment effort.”

Implementation was completed in partnership with EGT, a division of DataGroup. Server clustering, using Veritas Cluster Server, ensures that should an application or physical server fail, the environment can be restarted on an available server and reconnected to storage and services – so users can continue working.

“The collaboration with EGT and Veritas was very good, and IBM completed the database migration effectively. The transfer to the new systems was completed on time and without a hitch,” says Dieter Reichl.

Medical imaging database

Medical images generated by x-ray, CT and similar scanning techniques, are retained in a separate database. Image storage and retrieval requests are generated by clinicians using the SAP patient management applications, and slow response time was becoming a significant source of frustration. Healthcare legislation requires 30-year retention of patients’ medical records and associated images, which means that image data could not be deleted to reduce storage needs or increase performance.

With some 12TB of live and archived images, existing storage systems were struggling to deliver image requests rapidly and reliably. The hospital replaced its direct-attached storage servers with a new storage area network (SAN), based on an IBM System Storage DS4700 Express, controlled by two IBM System x servers.

“The DS4700 offers very high performance, and total capacity of up to 112TB – almost ten times more than our current needs. It offers very cost-effective expansion opportunities, and is helping us meet our legal requirements with reliable, secure data retention.”

Improved performance and reliability

The new, fully integrated SAP and IBM solutions are already proving their worth at Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach. Clinicians and business users report that system response times have halved or are even faster. The Red Hat Linux cluster ensures that the SAP applications and DB2 database is always available, essential to hospital efficiency.

“Using SAP applications we have a fully integrated performance monitoring and communications system, and some 90 per cent of departments and services rely on this solution. Operating theatres, endoscopy and x-ray – and of course patients – all depend on IT reliability and performance, and without it the hospital stops working.”

Dieter Reichl concludes, “The SAP and IBM solution brings us low costs and high reliability, perfect for critical healthcare at Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Finance/banking

Geography: New Zealand

Business Challenge: Address environmental and space issues in the datacentre and achieve the corporate goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2010

Migration Path: From distributed Intel and SUN SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running under z/VM on IBM z9 and z10 mainframes

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Oracle database, WebSphere Application Server, ESB, Process Server, TX and MQ

Hardware: 1x IBM z9 and 1x IBM z10 mainframe (with 3 x IFL engines in each)

Benefits:

• Recovered 30 percent of datacenter floor space
• Reduced power consumption by 38 percent
• 20 percent return on investment (ROI) over the life of the platform
• Simplified, more efficient deployment

Download the Case Study [PDF]

Read More About BNZ in the press:
CIO Magazine
Computer Business Review
OS Today
Linux Today
Financial Extra
Banking Technology

BACKGROUND
For the last 150 years, BNZ (Bank of New Zealand), a subsidiary of the National Australia Bank Group, has helped individuals, farmers and businesses with their financial pursuits. Throughout this time, BNZ has evolved to meet changing customer needs and expectations, while continuing to deliver innovative new products and services.

BNZ is focused on empowering its customers and prides itself on its flexibility, innovation, and corporate responsibility. It is also leading the New Zealand banking and finance industry in developing, and benefiting from, a more energy efficient, ‘green’ IT operation.

CHALLENGE
Like a large number of businesses in New Zealand and around the world, BNZ was close to reaching capacity in its datacenter and needed to determine how to maximise space while keeping costs down.

The bank’s corporate values also have a carbon neutral focus, which it was keen to put into practice across all aspects of its business operations.

“The issues we were dealing with were not necessarily unique, but a reflection of the current business climate,” said Lyle Johnston, Infrastructure Architect for BNZ.

“BNZ had defined two important goals for the future, both of which relied heavily on IT. The first was for the organisation to become carbon neutral by 2010 and the second was to explore open source opportunities though the adoption of Linux.”

Another challenge BNZ faced was to create a disaster recovery solution. Its datacentres – one in Auckland, New Zealand and the other in East Melbourne, Australia – are separated by the Tasman Sea.

SOLUTION
In mid 2007, BNZ embarked on a bold mission to realise its corporate objectives. It overhauled its mission-critical front-end IT environment, including its Internet banking and bank teller functions through to core backend data. It migrated its systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running under z/VM on the mainframe.

BNZ purchased one IBM z10 system for use in production, as well as one IBM z9 system for use as a disaster recovery machine. Both mainframes exclusively run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, IBM WebSphere application and IBM Process server, along with customised JAVA applications written by BNZ. Combined, these power BNZ’s customer facing banking systems, including Internet banking and teller platforms.

The combination of z/VM and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 enabled BNZ to virtualise and consolidate a largely distributed SUN environment, which incorporates all of its front-end systems, down to just one box and run it in a manner that didn’t present a significant change for administration staff.

A critical component in the successful deployment and ongoing management of its new systems, BNZ also incorporated Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite. RHN Satellite provides BNZ with the ability to combine provisioning, updating, patching and maintenance into a single function for greater simplification. By utilising RHN Satellite, the bank was able to re-provision its entire Teller platform development environment in approximately two hours.

“When it came to selecting a Linux provider, the choice to invest in Red Hat was largely based on its commitment to the ongoing development of the platform and its strong support capabilities, particularly in reference to supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the mainframe,” said Johnston.

BNZ’s first production load on the new system went live in August 2008, with high visibility across the organisation.

“Deploying IBM mainframes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to address our carbon footprint and cost saving concerns was a very big deal, especially at the senior management level. It provided us with the opportunity to take a very serious leap into Linux, and that was exciting for everyone in IT and beyond,” said Johnston.

To date, the bank has consolidated 131 SUN SPARC systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z. These systems include v440s, v280Rs and E10Ks on the high-end.

BENEFITS
While a move to Linux on the mainframe represented a major shift from traditional banking systems, for BNZ the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z platforms produced impressive returns and exceeded expectations.

After just three months the project was ahead of schedule and on budget, and BNZ was already able to consolidate its servers and reduce its front-end systems datacenter footprint by 30 percent. Even in the project’s early days, the bank noted significant cost advantages with approximately 20 percent ROI expected over the life of the platform.

According to Johnston, “We have also managed to substantially reduce our front-end power consumption by nearly 40 percent, which means we were well and truly on our way to becoming carbon neutral by our 2010 goal.”

In fact, since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM mainframes, BNZ has recorded a 33 percent reduction in heat output and a 39 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, for its front-end systems.

The new virtualised platform has also boosted the speed and simplicity of new deployments. Instead of taking days, a new environment can be deployed in just minutes. Furthermore, with just one administrator needed per 100 virtual servers, BNZ can save on resources traditionally used to manage the platform, freeing them up to work on new innovative projects.

BNZ’s industry-leading move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has attracted plenty of attention, with a number of banking counterparts monitoring BNZ’s performance benchmarks with great interest.

“The fact is there are a lot of reasons to consolidate with Red Hat on the mainframe and as we were the first in New Zealand to do it, it has attracted a lot of interest from the banking world,” said Johnston.

Looking forward, BNZ has adopted a long-term, strategic view of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux will continue to deliver value.

“What’s been truly remarkable has been the fact that introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux into the organisation has breathed new enthusiasm and new life into the business and the people behind it,” said Johnston.

“This project has been a type of gateway for us, and working with Red Hat has opened our eyes to what’s possible with open source. From our perspective, the best is yet to come.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Tribune Company

Industry: Media

Geography: Chicago

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

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

Hardware: Commodity Dell and IBM x86 systems

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

Download [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Bank PHB

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

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

About Qrios

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Salt River Project

Industry: Utilities, Government

Geography: Arizona

Challenge: Searched for a replacement for proprietary software for its IBM mainframe servers that could provide greater flexibility, manageability, and utilization opportunities

Migration Path: HPUX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite

Hardware: IBM System z mainframe servers

Benefits: Experienced cost savings, boosted performance, stable and reliable management, consolidation, and valuable technical support after migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z

“Since we were already leaning toward Red Hat in our distributed environment, choosing Red Hat on the mainframe coincided perfectly with our desire to have one corporate standard for Linux.”
– Kevin Masaryk, senior Linux/Unix administrator at SRP

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As one of Arizona’s largest utilities providers, Salt River Project (SRP) has delivered low-cost, reliable power and water to Arizona customers for over 100 years. SRP includes two entities: the Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, a political subdivision of the state of Arizona, and the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, a private corporation.

The District provides electricity to more than 935,000 retail customers in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. It operates or participates in 11 major power plants and numerous other generating stations, including thermal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydroelectric sources.

The mission of SRP is to deliver ever-improving contributions to the people it serves through the provision of low-cost, reliable water and power, and community programs, to ensure the vitality of the Salt River Valley.

CHALLENGE
SRP’s Power division had been testing Linux in-house for approximately three years, but didn’t have any Linux solutions in production environments at the time. There was little experience with Linux within SRP’s IT team, though the utility company was interested in moving to a Linux-based environment in the future. In 2006, SRP upgraded its System z mainframe and IBM offered incentives for use with a Linux operating system. This prompted SRP to accelerate its investigation of Linux solutions.

“We had a long-standing desire to look for solutions outside of our current environment,” said Kevin Masaryk, senior Linux/Unix administrator at SRP. “We were very interested in Linux on the mainframe for the enhanced utilization, flexibility, workload consolidation, and management capabilities offered there. Above all, it could help us mitigate the risk of the server sprawl which had plagued us. In fact, whether on the mainframe or a distributed architecture, Linux would allow us to run more workloads per server than our traditional environment.”

SOLUTION
After deciding to evaluate various Linux solutions for the mainframe, SRP selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which the SRP IT team had been evaluating during its in-house Linux testing. SRP decided it would prefer to use one reliable Linux distribution in both its mainframe and distributed environments.

“When evaluating Linux mainframe solutions, we experimented with SUSE because it had an early relationship with IBM for that architecture, but Red Hat had become very mature in the mainframe environment, too. Since we were already leaning toward Red Hat in our distributed environment, choosing Red Hat on the mainframe coincided perfectly with our desire to have one corporate standard for Linux,” said Masaryk.

“The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our IBM System z mainframe was straightforward and didn’t take long at all,” said Masaryk. Today, SRP has nearly 50 Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers and the implementation is on-going. To manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, SRP utilizes Red Hat Network Satellite.

“We use RHN Satellite, which is a key component to the management of all of our Red Hat servers, whether on the mainframe or in our distributed environments. Our use of Satellite has grown with us and we’re pleased with how much time it has saved us and how efficient it has made our administrators. I’d recommend setting up RHN Satellite as soon as possible for others who want to go down that road; it pays off very quickly,” said Masaryk.

In addition, SRP has leveraged Red Hat Training offerings to expand internal knowledge of Red Hat’s products and solutions in production environments. “Red Hat Training has proven to be very valuable to us. Some of our system administrators who came from a more traditional mainframe background or proprietary Unix background, had little experience with Linux. The courses that Red Hat provided got them up-to-speed very quickly and easily,” said Masaryk.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframe servers has provided SRP with a very stable and predictable solution that can be easily managed via Red Hat Network Satellite. It has enabled cost savings through the elimination of licensing costs, and has also provided boosted performance for its servers.

“A key success for us is the ability to consolidate multiple workloads into one instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as opposed to running in our traditional environment, where each workload would have to run on a separate server; That’s a huge benefit for us,” said Masaryk.

With reliable Red Hat support offerings, SRP has also benefited from the ability to access support straight from Red Hat engineers and developers who have written the code behind its solutions. “The support that we’ve received from Red Hat has been very valuable, and we’ve been happy with it all along. As we continue to deploy more Red Hat solutions at SRP, we feel confident in the related support from knowledgeable professionals who know the products so well,” said Masaryk.

For the future, SRP has plans to continue to expand its use of Red Hat solutions. “We’re planning to move forward with implementing additional Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based machines as fast as we can. We’re also investigating the use of JBoss solutions,” said Masaryk.

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.”