Intel and HP Customer Success Story:

Customer: Arabian Automobiles

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

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

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

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

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

Download the Case Study PDF at Intel.com

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

HP Customer Success Story:

Company: FarmaLink

Industry: Healthcare: Prescription Drug Administrator

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

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

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

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

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

Download the Case Study PDF at HP.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Tintas Iquine

Industry: Manufacturing: Paint and Tints

Geography: Brazil

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

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

Hardware: Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: India

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

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle DB

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS:

Company: Guangdong Telecom: BizNavigator

Geography: APAC: China

Industry: Telecom

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

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

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

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

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

Download the Full Case Study at Intel.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

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

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

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

Download the PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANIES: Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) and Optaros

CATEGORY: Extensive Ecosystem

INDUSTRY: Convention center management

GEOGRAPHY: Boston, MA

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Manual processes and siloed systems resulted in inefficient workflows that caused customer service to suffer.

MIGRATION PATH: From a Microsoft™ Windows – based client-server application to service oriented architecture (SOA) J2EE application based upon the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA, JBoss Messaging, JBoss ESB, JBoss jBPM, J2EE™, Google Web Toolkit™, Apache

HARDWARE: Intel Xeon™ – based x86 servers

BENEFITS: More efficient and timely access to data and an automated streamlined workflow that improved worker productivity and customer service levels and increased revenues. Approximately 90 percent of the MCCA’s day-to-day operations are run using open source technologies.

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) owns and oversees the operation of four major facilities, including the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCEC). The MCCA’s mission is to generate local economic activity by attracting conventions, tradeshows, and other events to its world-class facilities. The MCCA has generated $2.3 billion in economic impact over the past five years in the greater Boston area and is the eighth busiest convention center in North America.

Optaros is an open source consulting firm that specializes in the development of custom applications for clients through the Assembled Web. Optaros and MCCA staff worked together to rebuild the MCCA’s event management system. The product, known as ShowBiz, helps streamline the detailed process of setting up large-scale events, and is now completely run on an open source stack that was designed and assembled by Optaros. Approximately 90 percent of the MCCA’s day-to-day operations now run on open source solutions from Red Hat and JBoss.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The MCCA’s business model is based on the premise that it has an “inventory” of convention center space to sell – space that is used to host trade shows, association meetings, and other events. And despite being owned by the state government, the MCCA prides itself on operating like a for-profit business for the economic benefit of the City of Boston and Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In particular, the MCCA team strongly believes in providing an exceptional client experience, which means being able to rapidly configure its facilities and tailor its services to deliver whatever a particular customer wants.

To do this, the MCAA required an IT structure that was fluid, flexible, and scalable. But the application the MCCA was using to manage the sale of space was antiquated and difficult to use. The biggest challenge was that personnel did not have ready access to data. Without this data, users couldn’t make the kind of smart, real-time decisions needed to optimize service delivery and revenues during each stage of an event’s lifecycle. Important business decisions were being affected by the antiquated software, often relying on intuition and guesswork rather than facts. Everyone in the organization was affected by the system’s faults – from the executive suite down to contract electricians.

For example, because the financial database had been separated from the event management system in 2006, all accounts receivable and event creation information had to be manually entered in both applications, creating duplicate work for all involved as well as introducing errors into the databases. Additionally, managing service delivery to the large number of exhibitors was primarily a paper-based manual process that didn’t support online ordering and payment. And then there was scalability. The MCCA realized that its systems were a serious impediment to its ability to grow as planned.

Because of the MCCA’s unique, multi-facility business structure and complex business processes, a commercial off-the-shelf application wouldn’t do. MCCA senior executives knew they needed a new, custom-built solution that was designed to support the specific needs of their business.

Moreover, such a solution needed to provide MCCA employees with more efficient, timely access to data. It had to automate workflows. It had to minimize manual processes and eliminate redundant data entry and utilize technologies that would provide flexibility and scalability for the future needs of the business. Finally, it had to deliver an easy-to-use and elegant user experience that the MCCA could eventually extend access to the application to clients and customers.

SOLUTION
After performing a thorough analysis of its needs, the MCAA brought in Optaros, a Boston-based professional services firm that designs, assembles, supports, and monitors custom Web applications using open source software. “Steve Snyder, the CIO and CTO of the MCCA liked the freedom and the choice that open source offered,” said Errol Apostolopoulos, a management consultant at Optaros, who managed the project. “The fact that we could build him an application based on industry standards was very attractive to him. There were the lower acquisition costs, of course. But then there was also the fact that all the open source technologies, tools, and platforms integrated together so well.”

The MCCA was looking for a scalable solution that could grow with the company — exponentially in regard to data structures. They determined that a SaaS, software as a service, type architectural model, allowing for plug-and-play, iterative updates would offer technology that could evolve and grow along with the organization.

From the beginning, it was clear that Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was going to play a large role in the solution. “Part of our process is to go out and comb the open source community to find the best technologies we can leverage to build our solutions,” said Apostolopoulos. “JBoss was the absolute best choice for the MCCA.”

The MCCA solution contained three pairs of JBoss instances. The first pair was used for the online customer-facing site. By hosting JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in a clustered environment, the MCCA allows exhibitors to purchase services and materials online. Previously, they had to fax in their orders, which then had to be entered into the old event management system manually.

The second JBoss pair also involved using JBoss in a clustered environment, and was used for the MCCA’s internal event management site. This new event management application allowed MCCA personnel to manage all aspects of the event lifecycle – from sales, to event and space setup and configuration, to exhibitor services, to all financial aspects of the event. This application uses JBoss jBPM as the workflow engine for the initiation, review, and approval of space booking throughout the sales cycle, from pre-sales through confirmation upon receipt of the signed contract.

The last JBoss pair hosted the Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This ran all services for executing transactions such as auditing, issuing notifications, and integrating with external organizations’ systems such as PayPal for credit card processing.

Optaros selected Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as the front-end of the system. Business services were developed using Hibernate frameworks to handle queries and transactions.

All JBoss applications and ESB servers were configured to run on Intel Xeon-based hardware under Windows Server 2003. The applications run on a cluster of SQL Server database servers configured for replication and failover. Today, the MCCA employs 10 production servers; four servers for quality assurance (QA) and testing; and two for developing enhancements to the system to run the application.

BENEFITS
MCCA personnel now have ready access to real-time data, as opposed to running reports and requesting information that was often hidden within the old system. Streamlined processes enabled by the new architecture have allowed staff to redeploy time previously spent on unnecessary manual and paper processes to focus on customer service. Overall, employees are much more efficient, and the corporate culture is much more customer-centric than under the previous system.

This tiered architecture is not only secure, but is also scalable, reliable, and available. For instance, the deployment manager can scale the three clusters independently based on their respective usage in terms of number of concurrent users, transactions volume, and more. From a security perspective, the ESB servers act as reverse proxies to a back-office financial management system and PayPal’s credit card processing network.

The fact that Optaros designed the applications using service oriented architecture (SOA)-based plug-in/plug-out framework means that the MCCA’s own IT team can integrate other external services into it as needed going forward. This gives the MCCA the flexibility and scalability to meet its growth objectives while keeping the main application stable.

From a financial perspective, the new applications have been a tremendous success. Employees are no longer wasting time manually inputting duplicate content into multiple systems, but can focus on higher-level tasks. As a direct result of this, the MCAA has been able to collect more than $500,000 in outstanding accounts receivables over the past six months.

And the new applications have allowed the MCCA to deliver a premiere customer experience. Under the old systems, work orders were comprised of 50- to 100-page documents that included details such as the number and location of chairs, the timing of food service, electrical needs, and everything else that impacts the success of an event. Today, all data related to an event is searchable, and MCCA customers are now able to order and update space, tables, internet access, electrical outlets and other services online rather than using the outdated paper faxing process. MCCA personnel are then electronically notified when there are any changes to work orders that affect their roles in an event, and the event system can be trusted to contain the most recent information.

These conveniences are only the first step. The MCCA wants to extend accessibility and transparency to the applications even further. For example, the MCCA hopes to eventually give taxi drivers access to the system so they can see in real time the transportation needs of people attending an event.

Finally, credit card processing is now completed automatically and in real time, instead of manual batch processing at the end of each business day.

“The competence of Red Hat’s consultants and support personnel clearly contributed to the application development team’s overall success,” said Apostolopoulos. “Their support enabled the project team to deploy systems more effectively with the assurance that additional assistance was only a phone call away. The Red Hat team went above and beyond our expectations.”

Apostolopoulos said that he recommends JBoss to its customers whether they are building new applications from scratch or migrating existing applications from proprietary hardware and software to an open source platform.

“We’re finding more enterprises choosing open source – not just because of its low cost and ability to scale, but also because of the flexibility it gives them to choose components that plug and play into their systems as their needs change,” said Apostolopoulos. “And JBoss is clearly the industry middleware standard for these increasingly strategic open source projects.”

“Our customers will soon have access to the same data the staff does, so people can order more services directly through the system,” said Steve Snyder, chief information officer for the MCCA. “The shopping cart and credit card processing for basic client needs are only the first step in offering more accessibility and transparency for customers to directly access data. The MCCA has hopes of allowing more constituents to access pieces of the system. The technology and system that was built, the cooperation between the JBoss, Optaros, and MCCA teams, the full buy-in from MCCA executives to end-users, and everyone being involved in the whole process truly made this deployment a resounding success.”

COMPANY: American Family Mutual Insurance Company

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Property and Casualty Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

MIGRATION PATH: ad hoc monitoring solutions to JBoss Operations Network

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

HARDWARE: Intel based Dell x86 commodity servers

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANIES: Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Rivet Logic

CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Publishing

GEOGRAPHY: Cambridge, Massachusetts

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The JBoss Seam intranet application allows enterprise users to:

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

- Create and enter new content and associate metadata and relationships

- Manage digital rights of product-related media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Companies: University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Zimbra

Industry: Higher education; technology (software)

Geography: Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Sunnyvale, California

Business Challenge: The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee needed to replace an aging email system with a new platform that would provide innovative collaboration solutions to their 50,000 accounts

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Zimbra Collaboration Suite

Benefits: Reduced IT administration and support costs by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as primary campus operating system; By migrating the existing email system to Zimbra Collaboration Suite, UWM improved communication and collaboration among students, faculty and staff and provided a single integrated calendar and email solution; increased focus on student retention by providing tools to manage their academic and personal schedules and stay connected with faculty.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the most requested OS today, primarily due to its stability and performance. It was the obvious choice as the primary deployment platform for Zimbra.”
—Ramesh May, Senior Manager, Marketing and Products, Zimbra

“When evaluating integrated email and calendar solutions, we focused on the total cost of ownership—that is, the lifetime cost, not just the purchase cost—of the applications. Zimbra running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux emerged as the clear consensus choice.” —Bruce Maas, chief information officer, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Download the case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
Located in Wisconsin’s largest city, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) serves as academic home to nearly 30,000 graduate and undergraduate students and an employer to more than 3,500 full-time staff and faculty. Formed in 1955 by a merger between the existing University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Wisconsin State College of Milwaukee, UWM encompasses 12 schools and colleges, and offers 156 degree programs. Just five blocks from the shores of Lake Michigan and a 10-minute drive from downtown Milwaukee, the campus spans 93 acres, with satellite facilities located throughout the Milwaukee metropolitan area.

Founded in 2003 (and purchased by Yahoo! in 2007), Sunnyvale, California-based Zimbra is the creator of leading open source email and collaboration software. Zimbra’s state-of-the-art application integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, voice over IP (VoIP), and online document authoring into a single application with a rich browser-based interface. Deployed by more than 500 academic institutions around the world, Zimbra Collaboration Suite is compatible with all standard email clients, features over-the-air mobile sync to iPhone and BlackBerry, and integrates easily with third-party applications. As of March 2009, Zimbra had more than 40 million paid mailboxes.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Building community among students, faculty and staff is a key objective for most universities. And technology—in the form of email, calendaring, messaging, and collaboration solutions—has become an essential tool in achieving that objective. At the turn of the century, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) realized it was outgrowing its communications infrastructure, and in 2004, the IT team began planning for the vital task of replacing its aging and disparate email and calendar systems.

The first step: to perform a “needs analysis” based upon what the community of students, faculty members and staff desired. This was no small task: with more than 50,000 accounts, it took a full year to gather input about what would be required from an email/calendar system capable of meeting UWM’s needs. And it wasn’t until the end of this long process, that the UWM IT staff realized that what community members really wanted was an integrated email, calendar and messaging solution.

“From the moment calendaring entered the picture, deploying a holistic communications solution that would allow us to stay in better touch—especially with new freshman—became our key goal,” said UWM chief information officer Bruce Maas. “Most students that drop out do so during the first semester of their first year. We realized that if we could strengthen students’ connection to the University community in those crucial first six to eight weeks, we could improve our student retention rates significantly.”

By soliciting input from its faculty, staff and students, the University had developed a long list of requirements—more than 40—to drive the selection of the email and calendaring system.

Three of these emerged as absolutely critical elements in evaluating the new solution: 1) The University needed to employ a single email, calendaring and messaging environment to serve all members of the campus community (students, faculty and staff) replacing the previous distinct systems for different departments; 2) The environment needed to be user platform-independent and provide the same level of service regardless of desktop or laptop computer; and 3) The environment should be able to scale to 50,000 accounts.

SOLUTION
With its requirements defined, UWM embarked on a lengthy selection process that involved sending requests for proposals to virtually every vendor in the email and collaboration software business. In the end, UWM received proposals from five vendors—Microsoft, IBM, Sun, CommuniGate, and Zimbra—but the Zimbra solution quickly rose to the top of the list.

The No. 1 reason: the low total cost of ownership (TCO) while meeting all requirements. Said Maas, “We focused on the TCO—that is, the lifetime cost, not just the purchase cost of the application—and Zimbra emerged as the consensus choice.” Indeed Zimbra’s own studies show its TCO to be 20 percent to 30 percent lower than that of Microsoft Exchange, according to Ramesh May, senior manager of marketing and products for Zimbra.

Another critical element in the decision was the fact that the University had standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux several years earlier. With close to 400 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux—which also serves as Zimbra’s primary development and deployment platform—the UWM team felt confident that Zimbra Collaboration Suite would be optimized for the UWM environment. Add to that Zimbra’s rich feature set, open source technology, administrator-friendly architecture, compatibility with campus systems, and ability to synchronize with other desktop clients, and the choice was clear.

In 2007, UWM inked a contract with Zimbra, and by the summer of 2008, it had migrated both its email and calendar functions to the new system.

BENEFITS
Today, UWM is employing Zimbra Collaboration Suite to support the email, calendar, messaging, and collaboration needs of the vast majority of its 50,000 accounts.

“We’re looking to help students get through a life transition and stay in school when they’re dealing with many more degrees of freedom than they’re accustomed to,” said Maas. “We view the calendar as a way to achieve this because it helps them better organize their multiple roles, whether academic, student life, or personal.”

According to Maas, feedback from the campus community has been very positive. “The fact that we can automatically populate calendars with key dates such as financial aid and tuition payment deadlines, or class schedules and exam dates, and then make it easy to subscribe to these calendars, is a major service enhancement to those using the service, and this level of interaction will improve communications with our students at UWM,” he said.

With a pre-negotiated long-term contract and annual maintenance fees locked in, the TCO estimates have been spot-on. As a result, “we’re delivering an integrated calendaring and email solution at a total cost of around $10 per account annually,” said Maas, “Which is cost-effective for the business and academic value, and greater efficiency we receive from a unified environment.”

On top of the cost savings associated with Zimbra, UWM also benefited from significant cost savings with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And Red Hat Enterprise Linux played a major role in the success of the project. Not only did standardizing on it allow UWM to increase IT worker productivity and reduce its support and overhead costs, but Zimbra chose it as a development platform because of its reliability, performance, and scalability.

“Because Zimbra is a highly sophisticated product, we needed a rock-solid development platform,” said May. “The stability and performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the best in the industry. It was the obvious choice as a development platform for Zimbra.”

David Crass, UWM’s chief enterprise architect, echoed May’s sentiments: “We have a relatively complex environment, and we’ve found the tools included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux suit our environment well,” he said. “What’s more, due to Red Hat’s enterprise class support, we know we can rely on them to provide service when needed.”

As for the future, UWM has big plans for Zimbra. For starters, the school is looking to integrate its homegrown tutoring and mentoring system.

“With Zimbra, we can let faculty, staff and students incorporate their personal lives into their calendars, and subscribe to a large number of academic and organizational calendars based on their personal interests, which helps them better able to juggle all of their responsibilities and in effect further connects them to the UWM community,” said Maas.

FAST FACTS

Customer: Monash University: Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

Industry: Education

Geography: Australia

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full case study at Dell.com

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

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.”

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

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

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

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

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

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

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Hong Kong

Business Challenge: Rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace website with an efficient financial information portal, and to leverage virtualization technology to reduce hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows and UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux AP with integrated virtualization

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate

Hardware: Intel Xeon based servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits: High-performance, flexible IT infrastructure delivered through the integrated virtualization technology in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 50-70% Reduction in software and hardware costs

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors. We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs.”
-Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Quam Limited serves both institutional and retail investors and provides an array of services supporting participation in capital markets and wealth management. The company’s history goes back to the founding of Quam Limited in 1986 and the listing of Quam Ltd on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1997. Today Quam Ltd is the holding company of a diverse financial services and wealth management group with a major and fast-growing stake in Mainland China through strategic alliances and intermediaries.

The Quam Limited used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with virtualization technology and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, to re-build its website, www.quamnet.com, as a high-performance information portal in three languages and serve several million customers. The new portal is designed to combine the financial services offerings with an online financial information and investment advisory portal, for retail clients and investor relations services for corporate clients.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 1998, Quam built the first financial services website in Hong Kong. However, by the spring of 2007, Quam’s rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace the existing website with an efficient financial information portal that would provide a much stronger link between the firm’s financial services and its hundreds of thousands of members.

Slow access time was becoming a problem with the old website. “In our business, users expect very rapid response time,” said Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited, “and our infrastructure was not able to handle the large user base that we had acquired.”

The financial information portal also has to process direct connections to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for stock announcements on listed companies as well as wire news services, including Xinhua and Infocast Financial news for news of Hong Kong and Asia.

“We have a very large number of active members, many of whom are involved in online trading,” said Choi. “We needed to provide them with market information, including financial news, reports, analysis and real-time stock quotes.” In addition, the financial information portal needed a redesign of its front-end, the Content Management System, and back-end, the Customer Relations Management System, in order to enable Quam to know and serve our members better.

Another problem with the old website was the inflexible infrastructure, which made updating web content a tedious business. “Our financial information has to be altered frequently, so we needed a fast, simple way of updating the site,” said Choi.

When Philip Choi joined Quam in May 2007, he was asked to completely re-build the website. “We were asked to totally revamp and restructure the website, so we basically did everything from scratch,” said Choi.

SOLUTION
The main operating systems used in the existing website were Windows and UNIX. “For the financial services industry, Windows may have some security issues,” said Choi. “UNIX is more costly, in terms of license fees and related hardware. I also had to consider the availability of skilled support labor.”

In his previous experience, Choi had used Red Hat Enterprise Linux successfully, so he decided to measure it against the existing alternatives. “One advantage would be that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can run on powerful and inexpensive servers, with a wide choice of hardware vendors,” said Choi, “So we would not be locked into any proprietary technology.”

Another factor in Quam’s decision was the wide acceptance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the leading platform within the financial services sector. Quamnet has the same demands for performance, availability and security as other major financial institutions, said Choi. “Like other players in the financial services market, we seek alliance with the leading vendors to optimize the performance and security of our operations.”

Today, Red Hat is a very mature OS, and the vendor provides high quality direct support. “I have confidence in the top management of Red Hat in Hong Kong and believe the company is a long-term partner for Quam,” said Choi.

Quam IT Department started the study project on the new financial information portal in May 2007, and the staff talked to several vendors. “We decided to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management, and flexibility,” said Choi.

Red Hat Consulting provided guidance and hands-on support to the Quam IT team, right from the planning stage. “Once our server hardware was installed, Red Hat Consulting certified the platforms as stable and scalable and carried out all the software installation work, providing a guarantee to remedy any platform issues,” said Choi.

Throughout the installation process, Red Hat helped Quam with the sizing and planning of how to configure the resources. “We gave them figures, such as the number of portal visitors and page views per day that we needed to support,” said Choi. “This helped us determine how many servers, how many CPUs and how much memory we needed. We have a requirement of so many transactions per second, and we need to guarantee the response time provided to end-users.”

Quam’s infrastructure includes server farms to support front-end users’ access and back-end service delivery with all Intel Xeon based servers on rack mounted blades. Quam relied on Red Hat for the majority of the sizing work on planning the financial information portal, server utilization, and connections to the database and application layers.

In the Red Hat Linux Advanced Platform, virtualization is more powerful than ever. Features such as distributed lock management, global file system, logical volume management, can now operate over multiple physical systems and guest operating environments.

Quam also uses Red Hat Network Satellite to help the company keep its open source environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and virtual servers. “The beauty is we can reassign memory and CPUs on-the-fly and whatever applications need more resources, we can provide them immediately,” said Choi.

Clustering is one of the elements of virtualization that Quam required. Red Hat Advanced Platform Virtualization Technology allows Quam users to easily move applications and resources between servers.

Powerful middleware: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
The financial information portal build was carried out at high speed, aided substantially by Red Hat Consulting, and was mostly complete in months. “My in-house programmers had to write a number of new applications from scratch, mostly using Java J2EE,” said Choi. “It was then subjected to extensive testing, after which we went live in mid-January 2008.”

To support the large number of applications on their financial information portal, Quam selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which it found to be the best platform for innovative and highly scalable Java applications. Integrated and simplified, it includes powerful open source technologies for building, deploying and hosting enterprise Java applications and services.

A key part of Quam’s use of JBoss Application Platform is Hibernate, a framework that
enables users to express queries in native SQL, an extension called HQL, or with an object-oriented Criteria and Example API. Hibernate provided a ubiquitous object-relational mapping and persistence framework which does not require hand-written SQL or stored procedures and this provides a significant increase in performance and scalability.

Another JBoss technology used was the JBoss cluster, which is a group of nodes comprising JBoss server instances within a server partition. “Individual nodes can be added to or removed from a cluster at any time,” said Choi. “JBoss Clustering provides high availability for J2EE applications running inside of JBoss.”

The use of JBoss middleware enabled Quam to speed up the creation of applications. “Our system is very stable, and that enables our IT team to concentrate on the programming operation,” said Choi.

BENEFITS
Quam has invested in multi-lingual market communications. “Our financial information portal provides both traditional and simplified Chinese language versions, plus English,” said Choi. “Our competitors have traditional Chinese only, some with English. I am proud of the fact that we were able to build a best-in-class information portal with Red Hat within six months, in three languages.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform provides integrated server and storage virtualization technologies. The virtualization provided is easy-to-deploy, simple to manage, flexible. “Red Hat Virtualization has enabled us to reduce the numbers of servers we need,” said Choi, “and that in turn has reduced the space, cooling and power consumption.”

For users, the new information portal provides a much faster response to queries, even at peak times during the stock exchange trading hours. It’s also much easier to update information on the new financial information portal. JBoss provides a programming framework which facilitates changes to business logic using minimum programming effort.

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors,” said Choi. “We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. But we are not locked in to any vendor. The beauty of open source is that it enables freedom of choice.”

Red Hat service team not only supported the financial information portal build, but also provided valuable information on best practices. This was vital in helping Quam to achieve an outstanding time-to-market for the project. “The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs,” said Choi.

The success of the project confirms the value of open source solutions as a long-term strategy. “Overall we made a solid decision in choosing Red Hat as our partner and our customer’s have benefited from our decision to use Red Hat and JBoss technologies,” said Choi.

“Our next project will be a financial information portal specifically for the Mainland China market and we will need to deploy servers on a larger scale,” added Choi. “We are committed to open source software over proprietary software, and we definitely plan to keep using Red Hat in future.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Information Technology

Geography: Australia

Business Challenge: CVSDude required a platform that was affordable, bullet-proof, and ensured scheduled release cycles

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Hardware: 24 x AMD and Intel servers, up to quad code 2.5GHz

Benefits:

• Stable and reliable platform with optimal uptime
• Superior security
• Affordable
• Built-in, scheduled release cycles

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Since 2002, CVSDude has served as the original provider of free and commercial Subversion hosting and CVS hosting for individuals, startups, and Fortune 1,000 companies.

CVSDude’s technology allows maximum availability to source code while ensuring its security. It delivers this service through dual CPU servers running hardware RAID-5, each connected by 6x redundant 10GigE pipes, and all housed in state of the art US-based data centres.

CHALLENGE
More than 65,000 users, including Government institutions, private enterprises, universities, and not-for-profit organisations across 110 countries rely on CVSDude to deliver a highly available solution for their mission-critical systems responsible for activities from hosting code to providing collaboration and project management.

One of Australia’s leading web design agencies depends on CVSDude to manage team-based development of client portfolio projects, and to distribute deliverables to Fortune 500 clients. Similarly, Zuora, a high-growth Software as a Service leader in the online subscription billing space, uses CVSDude to manage two China-based development teams and achieve rapid 4-week release cycles.

“Customers pay us to guarantee that we can provide 99.9 percent uptime, but we needed a rock-solid, reliable support system in place so that we had the foundations to deliver on that promise,” said Mark Bathie, CTO, director, and founder of CVSDude.

In order to offer a service that was fit for managing mission-critical workloads, CVSDude required a platform that was not only stable and affordable, but ensured scheduled, built-in release cycles.

“From the outset we knew we were looking for a Linux solution — we wouldn’t use anything else for what we are hosting — but we needed enterprise-ready Linux that would offer CVSDude and our customers absolute confidence.”

SOLUTION
With more than 15 years of Linux experience, CVSDude’s team was well aware of the cost efficiencies and security benefits that were possible with a commercial application of Linux.

“You can’t compare code that has been developed, reviewed, and tested by thousands of coders worldwide to closed-source code, which is generally developed by a much smaller team. The former is going to be far more resilient, secure, and more cost-effective than anything closed code can offer,” said Bathie.

Working with its US data centre providers, in 2005, CVSDude selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux over a variety of Linux alternatives, as the basis of its hosted solution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was deployed across the 24 servers that comprise CVSDude’s distributed development environment.

The decision to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux was based on Red Hat’s well-established reputation for enterprise-class Linux, its prompt release cycles, affordability, and first-class security.

“Our distributed development model allows for richer functionality along with the flexibility to evolve our business more rapidly. Enhancing that set-up with Red Hat Enterprise Linux just made good business sense,” said Bathie.

BENEFITS
Since deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux four years ago, CVSDude has acknowledged that without the backing of a reliable, secure platform like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it couldn’t have delivered the level of service customers have come to expect from its organisation. Bathie believes the business can’t afford not to work with Red Hat.

“It stands to reason that customers use CVSDude for the same reason we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux – it continues to provide a superior level of service for a better price and with better security,” he said.

The longer lifecycles of between six and 12 months have been of particular value to CVSDude, removing the need to change packages and enabling more effective planning for the future. According to Bathie, the guaranteed release cycles delivered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux are another way Red Hat has been good for business.

Today, CVSDude is continuing to grow exponentially, adding some 100 customers a month to its service.

“Around 10 per cent of new customers are coming to us from proprietary systems. People are looking to save money and benefit from more feature rich systems, and are therefore looking to open source solutions and to open source leader Red Hat,” said Bathie.

FAST FACTS

Company: Wall Street Systems

Industry: Financial Services – Software

Geography: Global

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

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

Hardware: Intel® Xeon® based x86 servers

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast Facts:

Company: SPH Search

Industry: Information technology

Geography: Singapore

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

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

Hardware: HP Intel Xeon-based servers

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Government, tax collection

Geography: Ecuador

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Car rental

Geography: EMEA

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

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

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

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate framework

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

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

Download the case study [<strongPDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Media

Geography: India

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Government

Geography: Italy

Challenge: One of the top fifteen software and services companies in Italy, CSI-Piemonte has been promoting the modernization of the local public administration for thirty years. Its specific objective was to develop an open source platform for the supply of business applications which offered a real competitive advantage for companies in Piedmont.

Solution:

• Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Application Server 4.0.5 with jdk 1.5 and mod_jk, configured in clusters. DB Server MySQL 5.0 and Web server Apache 2.0.
• Hardware: two Intel-based servers, dual core processors, 8 GB RAM

Benefits:

• CSI-Piemonte has experienced improved performance from superior service levels and high reliability since migrating to Red Hat solutions. Its new solution offers an efficient infrastructure with extremely competitive cost.
• The solution’s standardised and open platform is robust, reliable, and offers excellent performance with reduced development time.

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BACKGROUND
CSI-Piemonte is a consortium which has been developing IT systems for public sector organisations in Piedmont, Italy for 30 years. It’s now one of the top fifteen software companies in Italy and is a national and European benchmark in the Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) sector. The consortium creates products with a high technological content, designs IT applications and systems, and contributes to the creation of innovative services for citizens and businesses. It provides its clients with versatile work tools and processes highly advanced technological solutions for all public areas. CSI-Piemonte has annual profits of 178 million Euros, maintains more than 1,200 employees, operates in 8 regional centres, and holds over 50 consortium members.

CHALLENGE
CSI-Piemonte’s main activities include supporting the research sector and encouraging innovation within ICT and other businesses in Piedmont. The company is a benchmark in the region for promoting the adoption of technologies that guarantee real competitive advantages. CSI’s objective was to develop an open source platform to support business applications that offered a real competitive advantage for companies in Piedmont.

CSI wanted to create an industrial-level platform which was completely open source for the supply of application services.

SOLUTION
CSI-Piemonte has over 10 years of experience with open source solutions. It introduced PERL for web developments first, but truly became focused on open source in 2006 when it began research on the development of open source business services for local public administration.

After much research, CSI chose JBoss Enterprise Platform for its well-established reputation, for its professional support, and because of the rate of innovation that has always been typical of its community. The project began in 2006 and was carried out in-house with Red Hat and JBoss support. Called OASI (Open Available Secure Integrated), this infrastructure makes use of the best open source components on the market, is configured to be highly available in order to guarantee high service levels, and is integrated, tested, maintained, and documented.

“We developed OASI to offer ourselves and companies in our region a real competitive advantage and to have a concrete meeting point for the community,” says Luca Gioppo, Manager of the Open Source Area at CSI-Piemonte. “We had open solutions for some time already, but this time we saw the opportunity to make its use systematic within a more complete and structured platform.”

Available on the website http://oasi.csi.it, the solution will be issued with a General Public Licence (GPL). The site is also a community meeting point and users have access to collaborative development tools and documentation with a creative commons licence.

“Our objective is to create an OASI community with two important meeting opportunities: on one hand the companies involved in platform support and development and on the other hand, businesses who use the infrastructure for training purposes or to provide other businesses with services,” said Gioppo.

The OASI platform is a perimeter which outlines the limits and provides the references for operating. To be more specific, those involved in development will have the objective of making improvements and offering increasing levels of integration and completeness in order to comply with the various requirements of public administration. The results of these efforts will be made available to the community from a perspective that matches the philosophy which has always distinguished Red Hat and JBoss.

In accordance with the need for reliability and high availability, CSI-Piemonte has developed an administration console for the handling of the JBoss application servers which have been clustered on the same domain or on various different host domains.

BENEFITS
Created with the best open source components on the market, the OASI platform guarantees superior service levels and high reliability. CSI-Piemonte can now make use of an efficient infrastructure with extremely competitive cost savings. The platform comes in the form of a General Public Licence (GPL) and with the guarantee that it’s a standardised and shared platform. Now, client companies can concentrate on their core business.

With an open source solution, CSI-Piemonte will benefit from the continuous contributions of involved community members. The improvement of this infrastructure will therefore be constant and continuous, allowing companies in Piedmont to make use of a platform which is increasingly efficient, integrated, and modern.

The acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat has been received very positively by CSI. “We are very happy that the two companies are now one,” said Gioppo. “Red Hat’s decision to acquire JBoss is a further confirmation of the correctness of our choice and consolidates our long-standing relationship with Red Hat, a success which is also confirmed by the more than 80 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers we currently operate.”

CSI-Piemonte’s experience with Red Hat solutions has been very fulfilling. “I can happily say that JBoss fully meets our expectations in terms of reliability, robustness, and performance,” said Gioppo. “And the economic benefit is extremely plain to see, especially if we consider the support costs.”

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FAST FACTS

Industry: Travel

Geography: Global

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

Migration Path: Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Hardware: HPx86 and Intel

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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