COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

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

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geography: Republic of Korea

Business Challenge: Searched for a reliable, high-performing alternative to reduce server failure, optimize resources, and enable faster response times

Migration Path: From UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization technology, Oracle database

Hardware: Dell PE2950/ PE1850, EMC CX3-10

Benefits: Achieved significant cost savings by deploying a reliable, open source virtualization solution with Red Hat, reduced maintenance costs with hardware integration and clustering, acquired operation flexibility, and experienced ease of use and ease of management

“By deploying Red Hat’s open source-based virtualization solution, we were able to receive the proven stability of the platform and Red Hat’s reliable support and services.”
Hwang Sae Yong, assistant manager of Computer Operation Team for Korea Federation of Banks

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Korea Federation of Banks (KFB), a non-profit organization founded in 1928, plays a role in the development of the Korean finance industry. Its members include all commercial banks, special banks, and provincial banks, while its associate members include all Korean branch offices of foreign banks. It promotes the development of financial industry through cooperation between financial institutions, R&D of financial issues, and improvements of business practices of banking industry. It also establishes healthy credit transaction order with centralized management of credit information and evaluation about financial institutions clients.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
KFB faced the challenge of unreliable systems that could not meet the organization’s performance needs. Its previous server system lacked resources and often experienced failures that resulted in delayed response and availability of its mission-critical systems. In addition, the usage of the overall system was not balanced, causing some servers to be under-utilized.

It was important to KFB to integrate its many physical servers into a virtualized environment to benefit from ease of management, cost savings, and for the ability to configure multiple guest operating systems. It also wanted to increase system availability.

SOLUTION
To address these challenges, KFB decided to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for its integrated virtualization technology. By duplicating the configuration of existing systems to server virtualization from Red Hat, KFB was able to leverage a reliable solution that provided no downtime.

“We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advance Platform after considering maintenance cost reduction, support, and manageability,” said Hwang Sae Yong, assistant manager of Computer Operation Team for Korea Federation of Banks.

“By deploying Red Hat’s open source-based virtualization solution, we were able to receive the proven stability of the platform and Red Hat’s reliable support and services. This also resulted in ease of management for our solutions. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, we are able to leverage our full hardware capabilities and cannot tell the difference between our physical and virtual systems.”

BENEFITS
In addition to integrated virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) technology for no additional cost. With these solutions, KFB was able to achieve high availability, maximizing availability by minimizing service downtime, and significantly increased reliability and availability of service.

“In addition, with Red Hat virtualization, we were able to reduce the number of servers we were maintaining, and were able to innovatively reduce operation costs including server and power costs,” said Yong.

“After implementing Red Hat virtualization technology, our systems are running much more smoothly, and we are able to achieve flexible service operation through online migration.”

FAST FACTS

Company: CQUniversity Australia (Central Queensland University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: Australia

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

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

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

Hardware: HP 7000c Blade System and BL460c Blade Servers

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: 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: Tourism and hospitality

Geography: Spain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

This case study is available in the following languages: HERE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Utility

Geography: Italy

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

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

Solution:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Utilities, Government

Geography: Western Australia

Business Challenge: Decrease technology costs by avoiding expensive hardware replacement fees and improving performance and manageability

Migration Path: Tru64 Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, Oracle 9i
Hardware: 30 x HP DL385 (AMD Opteron)

Benefits: Increased performance by nearly 500 percent, achieved significant cost savings of approximately $140,000 per machine and gained reliable support from a trusted vendor

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Western Power is an electricity networks corporation owned by the Western Australian Government. It transports electricity from power stations to towns and cities and then distributes it to homes and businesses. This is done via a large network of power lines known as the South West Interconnected System (SWIS), designed to meet the needs of customers and developers and to bring electricity to new areas.
While companies that produce electricity as generators, and companies that sell electricity as retailers, have access to the network, Western Power is responsible for maintaining this network and restoring power after interruptions.

“Western Power supplies energy to more than 840,000 households and businesses throughout the state,” said Julian Rouse, systems administration manager, Western Power.
“Our mission is to conduct a safe, efficient, and importantly reliable operation. As the backbone of the business, our technology infrastructure is paramount to that.”

CHALLENGE
Western Power had been a long time Compaq Tru64 Unix user, but with HP’s acquisition of Compaq, the organisation was prompted to re-evaluate its existing server environment. It was faced with aging hardware, but needed to keep server replacement costs to a minimum.
In designing a new strategic platform for the long term, improving current software performance and improving manageability were key priorities for Western Power.
“Reassessing our strategic platform initially involved a comparison between HP-UX and Compaq TRU64 offerings, but when we looked at what our major energy application provider was doing, our attention quickly turned to Linux,” said Rouse.

Western Power’s ENMAC energy management solution, developed by GE, is responsible for providing centralized, controlled, secure, safe access to the distribution network, in real-time, for maintenance and fault restoration purposes. With GE testing and then porting the software application onto Linux, it made perfect sense for Western Power to consider Linux for its new platform. This would ensure that it could achieve the best possible performance from the solution.

SOLUTION
Western Power investigated Novell SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its infrastructure upgrade. With the knowledge that GE was already testing ENMAC on Red Hat, the organisation soon realised that only Red Hat could guarantee optimum performance, ease of management and first-class support.
“While we evaluated the leading Linux offerings on the market, Red Hat had already established itself as the enterprise Linux market leader, and that gave us a great deal of confidence,” commented Rouse.
As Rouse recalled, another factor in choosing to work with Red Hat was Red Hat Network, an easy-to-use systems management platform that brings greater efficiency to package updates and other ongoing maintenance tasks.

“With Red Hat, we also knew that we had instant access to the right support if and when we needed it, rather than being referred to downloads from a public website. Plus, the power of the developer community meant that the Linux kernel was constantly evolving and being further improved – and that was an attractive proposition.”

By August 2007, Western Power commenced its migration to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform as part of an overall ENMAC update. The migration started with 18 HP DL385 (AMD Opteron) test and development servers and extended to a further 12 production servers, running a mix of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1. A total of more that 30 servers in development, test and production.
Through its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Western Power became one of the first GE customers to run the ENMAC energy management solution for distribution on Linux.

BENEFITS
For Western Power, the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux resulted in a migration to higher performance and lower running costs. Unix loads typically run on Linux using commodity-class hardware that costs up to 75 percent less than what is required by Unix systems. Through experience, Western Power has been able to realise these cost savings.

According to Rouse, “Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more cost-effective commoditised hardware has seen the kernel outperform any previous build. This is great because the difference in cost between the HP servers we’re now able to use, compared to TRU64 Unix servers, is in the order of several magnitudes.”
“Furthermore, we’ve been able to halve our hardware cost per node, because the 64-bit kernel has enabled us to tune our hardware for both excellent memory and disc performance, allowing us to be able to run both Oracle and EMAC on the same box, whereas previously this required separate tiered machines” Rouse added.

Rouse estimates that, to date, Western Power has experienced CAPEX cost savings of approximately $140,000 per machine, along with a 50 percent increase in total system headroom due to an average CPU usage drop and an impressive performance gain of 500 percent.
Western Power also looks forward to further savings on an ongoing basis. With the move to commodity hardware and virtualisation, it will be able to decrease annual hardware maintenance costs by up to 80 percent.

“There’s no doubt that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is our operating system of choice, and as we embark on overhauling our middleware application, our next focus will be on extending our investment in open source with the introduction of JBoss into our environment,” said Rouse.
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Superior Alternatives

Winner: Booz Allen Hamilton

Submitted by: Christopher Dale

Vertical: Government

Geography: US

Website: www.boozallen.com

Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm with more than 18,000 employees serving government clients from more than 80 offices and has been recognized by major publications as a best place to work. Integrating the full range of consulting capabilities, Booz Allen is the one firm that helps government clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology. Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton was asked by a federal government agency to develop a Microsoft Windows-based proof of concept for a document management system. The initial prototype consisted of both hardware infrastructure design and software development, but as the system’s user community grew, the newly promoted operational proof of concept quickly proved inadequate for handling the increasing volumes of data. After a budget for a “technology refresh” was approved, the Booz Allen Hamilton team decided to redesign the software architecture using JBoss Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Oracle 10G Real Application Clusters (RAC), and enterprise integration best practices. The system was transformed from a two-tier architecture to an event-driven Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) approach, but although the software redesign greatly improved the system’s ability to handle the increasing volumes of data, the physical infrastructure was still a bottleneck that prevented the system to scale as needed. Simply adding servers was not a viable solution because of space and energy constraints. The solution needed to be exceptionally efficient in terms of floor space, power, cooling and total cost. It also had to be easily leveraged for use in other Booz Hamilton consulting engagements.

“It wouldn’t be enough to just show that we had high server utilization,” said Christopher Dale, an associate at Booz Allen. “We had to get a ton of work out of our investment, with enough spare resources to be able to respond to new mission demands at a moments notice.” To do this, Booz Allen Hamilton needed a solution that would allow it to scale its CPU and memory resources independently of its network resources. In turn, network resources would have to scale independently of system storage capacity and throughput. “Finally, we needed to be able to dynamically allocate all available resources to the task du jour without jeopardizing the ongoing mission,” said Dale.

Vendor Selection Process

For the proof of concept, Booz Allen Hamilton needed to configure both an Oracle 9i meta data database and an Oracle 9i Text Index database. As it turned out, the federal agency client already possessed an Oracle site license. Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to “harvest” several Red Hat Enterprise Linux entitlements from a previous client project. “The icing on the cake was that I had experience installing Oracle on Red Hat Linux as a hobby,” said Dale. Once Red Hat Enterprise Linux passed security tests, it was viewed as the clear first choice for the project.

Solution

The solution consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network Satellite and soon Red Hat Directory Server, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, JBoss Operations Network, and, most recently, Metamatrix. The deployed environment consist of a seven-node Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) grid (five Dell 2950s and two Dell 6850s all with maxed-out memory running Red Hat Enterprise Linux housing multiple Oracle RAC databases that performed data warehousing functions, online transaction processing (OLTP) functions and multi-language text indexing functions. There also is an eight-node (Dell 2950s with varying amounts of memory) services grid that acts as a clustered Xen host. The Xen machines on the services grid include a clustered JBoss application server, a Metamatrix node, and many other Xen machines that perform various mission-specific tasks. Both the database grid and the services grid can leverage the storage on the Fiber Channel fabric backed with multiple storage area networks (SANs).

Benefits

By implementing the new hardware and software architecture, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to transition its client from the initial proof of concept system-which had grown to a five-lab, two-building deployment that housed a single system, to an ultra-compact, highly available, high performance environment that enables three complete systems to reside in 1.5 labs. “We now have the capability to use spare capacity for the evaluation and hosting of new commercial off-the-shelf software, government off-the-shelf software, or custom software that previously would have been too expensive to implement even if the software was free,” said Dale. Additionally, using GFS to pool storage resources, Xen and Cluster Suite to pool processing and memory resources and using a bonded, link aggregated, VLANed, Xen-bridged network configuration to pool network resources, “we had successfully delivered to our client an environment that surpassed our goals in compute resource and software development agility,” he said. “In the Federal space, ROI doesn’t really have meaning, but our client was getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

Additionally, the enterprise-class system was capable of handling data volumes that commercial enterprises rarely see. “We can add new capabilities without the purchase of additional hardware, and, because we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we leverage unlimited virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. Indeed, many capabilities can be made available in hours instead of weeks or months. “This is how we delivered 10 pounds of capability in a two pound bag,” said Dale.

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

One of the best value decisions Booz Allen Hamilton made was to establish a subcontract for its government client with Red Hat Global Professional Services group. “Through that subcontracting arrangement, we were able to use a full-time employee slot to bring in a number of highly skilled Red Hat, JBoss, and Metamatrix professionals who accelerated our work at critical junctures,” said Dale. Additionally, as a result of the successes the team experienced in terms of capability delivery, many team members sought out Red Hat, JBoss and Metamatrix training and certification on their own, which further benefited the client in terms of day-to-day value enhancement.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Be aware of all the possibilities. “Looking back to the beginning of the effort to re-engineer our legacy environment, I still cannot get my head around all that has been accomplished,” said Dale, who said that if he had been told a year ago, “This is the list of things your team needs to get done in the next year,” it would have been “soul crushing.” But now, having been through it, he is now finding it difficult not to look at any opportunity without thinking, “No problem, we have an answer for you and it isn’t going to cost you half of what you think. It’s also going to take less time, fewer people and be more capable and agile than you can imagine.”

Delivered Value Winner: Nortel

Submitted by: Ernest Szeideman

Vertical: Telecommunications

Geography: International

Website: www.nortel.com

Company Background

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

Business and/or Technical Challenge

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

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

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

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

Vendor Selection Process

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

Benefits

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

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

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

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

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

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

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

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

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

Leading Nordics IT company runs its critical in-house business applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM System z mainframes
Raleigh, NC – May 14, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that EDB Business Partner, one of the largest IT services companies in the Nordics, has implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframe technology to run its business-critical applications and underlying Oracle database. Today, EDB offers its customers Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the standardized operating system for all of its Linux-based IT services, crossing a wide variety of industries, including financial services, retail, telecommunications and the public sector.

“There are clear advantages to mainframe computing including high reliability, security and resource savings in the amount of energy and cooling capacity used to run an application,” said Helge Forberg, section chief for Application, Automation and Support Systems at EDB Business Partner. “We now utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for in-house mainframe computing and we’ve experienced a rising demand among customers to whom we can offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z.”

The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframes offers customers compelling security advantages, including the use of virtualization technologies such as logical partitions (LPARs) that divide the extensive resources of the mainframe between workloads, while securely isolating each application from the others. Additionally, the combination offers the superior physical security associated with centralized mainframe servers and storage installation. Effective security regimes require comprehensive auditing, which both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the System z hardware deliver, so that organizations can assess the goals of their security policies.

“Enterprise Linux is the mission-critical operating system of choice for many organizations worldwide. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM System z enables customers to securely run diverse applications and processes,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. “Customers are able to leverage shared System z resources like memory, storage and I/O and the impressive reliability and performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com. About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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

Corte dei Conti relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to safeguard public finance and maintain jurisdictional order in Italy

Raleigh NC – January 15, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Corte dei Conti, an Italian government institution that safeguards public finance and guarantees the respect of jurisdictional order in Italy, has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its server farm, consisting mainly of HP BL20 G3 and BL20 G2 blade servers. Corte dei Conti’s Red Hat solution is integrated with multiple different internal systems, including Oracle software largely used in the Court’s IT system.

Corte dei Conti pursues its roles of safeguarding public finance and guaranteeing the respect of jurisdictional order through two functions: the audit function and the jurisdictional function. It is also responsible for the “a priori” audit of the legality of Government acts and for the “a posteriori” audit of the State Budget’s management.

Corte dei Conti maintains an extensive number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers that run many of the Court’s most critical systems and applications. These systems include SISP, an integrated system for sections and proxy; SIRTEL, a digital reporting system for local entities; a proxy farm based on Squid with three balanced servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux; an Oracle Collaboration Suite for workgroup and email systems; and a database farm and application server farm for centralization.

“We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux because we wanted to combine the flexibility ensured by open source with high-level services delivered by a solid and reliable company with a strong local presence,” said Dott. Ing. Leandro Gelasi, Corte dei Conti – U.R.S.I.A. – Area Sistemi, Network e Centro Unico dei Servizi (CUS). “Red Hat solutions integrate perfectly with our existing Oracle systems and guarantee performance and reliability without impacting our bottom line.”

“Being selected by Corte dei Conti confirms the value of our strategy for public administration, investing in human and logistics resources to better satisfy the specific requirements of this market segment,” said Gianni Anguilletti, country sales manager at Red Hat Italy. “Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform again confirms its ability to provide performance and reliability for systems that are absolutely mission-critical for our institutions.”

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

About Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Raleigh, NC — September 10, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Spanair, one of the largest air carriers in Spain, has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform of choice for its recent IT initiatives. With Red Hat solutions, Spanair is experiencing increased performance and cost reduction.Spanair is utilizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux in two of the company’s major projects. The airline is running its Carmen crew optimizer software, providing the airline with settings for crew managing, fleet scheduling and timetables, on three Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. The Red Hat platform is also used in several of the airline’s optimization stations that receive information provided by the central server to execute a number of processes. Additionally, Spanair runs its Oracle 10g R2 database server on HP Proliant servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to host its data warehouse.

When we began considering Linux within our infrastructure, we were looking for solutions for two main concerns: cost reduction and performance improvement. Currently, Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers on an Intel platform provide good performance when connected to modern fibre channel drive arrays HP Eva 4000, said Joan Pons, Spanair systems manager. We are assessing the possibility of increasing the number of Linux servers in order to install other Oracle databases and new applications.

Spanair has achieved significant cost savings with Red Hat solutions and through the Red Hat subscription model. With its use of Red Hat Network for support and updates, it has reduced the time and resources spent maintaining its systems. The company has drastically reduced both hardware and software costs and has enjoyed great flexibility in tweaking its own solution and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Another reason for selecting Red Hat solutions is the local technical support the company provides 24 hours per day, said Pons. Some of the issues that have emerged during the commissioning and daily operation of the machines have been resolved immediately by the Red Hat Support staff. They have shown consistent professionalism and creativity.

For more information about Red Hat, visit http://www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Spanair: Spanair, founded in 1986, offers more than 600 daily flights operated with a fleet of 64 aircrafts in shared code with associates, to 150 destinies. From April, 2003 the company is member of Star Alliance, the largest global and prestigious network of airlines of the world. http://www.spanair.es.

About Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Industry: Higher Education

Challenge: Quick deployment of servers in an ever-growing network

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Edition with Red Hat Network; Hardware: IBM xSeries servers; Software: Oracle 9i Enterprise Database central administrative computing conversion in the university’s history. Closely tied to the Oracle installation, Program Link is the cornerstone of the University’s initiative for a totally integrated digital campus, so it was imperative that Wake Forest find an operating system that integrated cleanly with Oracle’s total product line.

Download the case study [PDF]

Why Red Hat?

The Wake Forest team spent months evaluating different alternatives based on cost, performance, support, manageability, and security. They considered other operating systems, but according to Miller, “In the end, Red Hat proved to be the better option in terms of all our needs.”

Security

Security was top priority for both the DEAC computer cluster and Program Link. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux, combined with Red Hat Network Satellite Server, allowed us to readily secure our systems,” said Seth Stein, Systems Analyst for the Wake Forest UNIX/Linux team. “It is essential that we get updates in place quickly and efficiently to keep the systems and users secure. If we had to compile everything from source, it would be a major drain on our time. With RHN we have all the updates we need. It saves us time because the packages have been compiled and tested. As a result, we can provision a server in 30 minutes.”

Vendor support

Wake Forest gained more confidence when they saw that industry-leading vendors backed Red Hat. “The relationship between Red Hat and Oracle is very important to us,” Stein said. “With Oracle’s total product offering supporting Linux, we can make the case to our managers for deploying the entire Oracle environment on a more easily maintained and secured operating system. In the end, that means we save money by reducing administrative time and maintaining longer uptimes for university business. This produces a major benefit in that the students, who access services and data from those databases, have a much better user experience.”

On the cluster side, research revealed that many cluster vendors actually developed their software on Red Hat products, which created additional stability for the environment. Miller said, “Since the DEAC cluster supports multiple research groups, we use a wide range of software: Gaussian, CHARMM, VMD, NAMD, MEAD, Matlab, BLAST, and ClustalW. Some groups maintain their own software analysis packages and utilize freely available libraries, such as ATLAS, BLAS/LAPACK, MPICH and GSL.”

Cost

The final compelling reason in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux versus another Linux distribution was cost. “The new licensing costs for many of Red Hat’s competitors were more than we wanted to spend,” Miller said.

Impressive results

“The University has an extensive collection of computing facilities that serve both academic and business needs,” said Jay Dominick, Assistant Vice President for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer. “Red Hat has played a critical role in the upgrade of our information infrastructure from proprietary Unix-based servers to open source-based computing and the deployment of a cluster-based supercomputing facility. It has also allowed us to standardize our computing support-both scientific and business computing-around one operating system. The advantages for us in terms of support, availability and disaster recovery are substantial.”

Use of Linux and other open source solutions have grown rapidly across Wake Forest as the choice for not only high-performance computing and enterprise infrastructure, like Blackboard, Banner, and Oracle, but also for online and network services like email, DNS, LDAP, and library search engines.

In production now for two years, DEAC serves as the primary research computing resource for Wake Forest’s main campus, heavily utilized by the Biophysics, Physics, Computational Chemistry, and Biomedical Engineering departments. Researchers from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine also rely on DEAC.

And through their Red Hat academic site subscription, Wake Forest students and faculty have unlimited access to the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family, including client, workstation, and server products.

Advice for getting started

Miller offered this advice for companies contemplating a migration to Linux: “Make sure you attack the problem in a structured manner. Plan your deployment and realize the full potential in Linux as it tends to really outperform in areas you least expect. Start with an architectural approach and test your replication plan to make sure it really works. You’ll save yourself a headache later on.”

“Keep an open mind. The perception that open source is not supported, not ready for mission-critical applications is not accurate,” advised Richard Ray, Systems Analyst for the WFU IS UNIX/Linux team. “The community model is much better. Open source has so many eyes looking at it that it is pretty solid. It just grows and evolves over time.”

The future is open

In regards to future plans with Linux, Miller has at least three upcoming projects that will be based on open source solutions. The first will be a grid-based, web infrastructure compatible with the MCNC statewide efforts (http://mcnc.org) using the Globus Toolkit (v4) and various web technologies including Tomcat, XML, and SOAP. “The second project is to evaluate the Red Hat Global File system (GFS) as a potential GPFS replacement,” he said, “and the third is to convert our custom, home-grown post-imaging environment to cfengine.”

“Our experience with open source and Linux has been extremely positive,” adds Dominick. “Because of the support from Red Hat, we will continue to always consider it as a viable option for our infrastructure. We consider Linux as our primary option for our computing resources. The support from Red Hat makes this an easy decision.”

Kingfisher, Europe’s leading home improvement retail group and the third largest in the world, switches to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its 240 Castorama and Brico-Dépôt stores.

RALEIGH, NC – February 20, 2007 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Kingfisher Group, Europe’s leading home improvement retail group and the third largest in the world, is migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle databases for all 240 of its Castorama and Brico Dépôt stores because of Red Hat’s superior stability, service and support. Red Hat has enabled the company to reduce the number of servers it requires by half and make a return on its investment in just eight months. At the same time, Kingfisher is benefiting from a ten-fold increase in performance.

Due to the mass and complexity of information relating to the logistics and commercial activity handled in each store, system reliability and availability are essential prerequisites for the Kingfisher Group’s IT system.

Since 1997, Castorama and Brico Dépôt stores have been running an IT system comprised of two servers. One of the servers was a Digital UNIX Alpha server supporting production tools and commercial applications, as well as an Oracle v7 database and FORMS application. The second was an NT server for the infrastructure, covering the network, domains, printing and file server. When Kingfisher learned that support would soon be ending for both the UNIX and NT servers, it was faced with the challenge of renewing a vast IT architecture for its Castorama and Brico Dépôt stores.

Kingfisher made the strategic choice to use open source solutions because the open source platform’s maturity and reliability allowed the Group to plan a migration with full confidence. When selecting a Linux distribution, the choice was simple for Kingfisher. Stability and support were of prime importance, and the Group decided Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the only option.

“Overall most of the open source distributions contained the features we needed, including infrastructure services,” said Bernard Grulois, Architecture and Infrastructure Manager at Kingfisher IT Services, the Group’s worldwide IT organization. “But only Red Hat offered a business-ready Linux distribution with the level of service, guarantee and support that we required for the mission-critical information system that is needed for the smooth operation of Kingfisher’s Continental Europe DIY stores.”

The architecture was designed to include production tools and the database comprised of Oracle AS10G with an Oracle 9i database and WEBFORMS for the technical building blocks (functional iso-perimeter). Every outlet in France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia is now equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on an HP ProLiant ML 370 G4 server with 8Gb memory, Intel Dual-Core processors and 5X140 Go disk in RAID 1.

After a three-month test phase in Spain, the servers were deployed in French, Italian, Polish and Russian stores. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kingfisher IT Services found a solution that allowed all of Castorama and Brico Dépôt’s requirements to be satisfied with a single server, and the ability to run both production tools and infrastructure services on the same box. This has translated into large cost-savings and even faster deployments and updates. “We are extremely satisfied with our choice,” said Grulois. “We have achieved a return on our investment in less than eight months and we continue to benefit from the advantages Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers, in terms of maintenance, cost savings and high security. In addition, we have seen an impressive improvement in performance. We have increased the speed of our system ten times and also improved the quality of overall service. As for delivery at the user level, it is excellent.”

“The success of the Kingfisher Group and its astonishing results, not only in terms of the return on investment, but also in improved performance, clearly demonstrates the many benefits of Red Hat and open source solutions,” said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at Red Hat. “We are pleased that Kingfisher has unlocked the value of our support and services, and we look forward to continuing our work with them.”

To learn more about Red Hat solutions and to read the entire case study on Kingfisher’s implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, please visit http://www.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat the most valuable software vendor for three years running in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high-quality, low-cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides an operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, along with applications, management, and middleware solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat is accelerating the shift to service-oriented architectures and enabling the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, secure open source platform. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat’s open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with a focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com

Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Florida Hospital

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Orlando, Fla.

Business Challenge: Design a new disaster-recovery system that would ensure seamless business continuity for the hospital; determine a solution to aid in delivering high-performance, secure, cost-effective systems to ensure optimized patient care; identify a solution to enable internal hosting and support for the growing number of external websites

Migration Path: IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite; Red Hat Network Satellite; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform; JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Consulting; MySQL, Oracle, Caché, FoxPro, and Postgres databases; proprietary applications for reporting and management of patient data and for mail, security, and virus protection

Hardware: HP and IBM servers

Benefits: Streamlined disaster recovery and gained higher system availability and resource efficiencies that translate into better patient care; achieved 35 percent growth in its datacenter without needing to expand its hardware footprint or internal resources through its use of virtualization; gained expertise through the knowledge transfer resulting from virtualization and clustering-focused engagements with Red Hat Consulting

“Our first priority is security and our second is performance. When you can get security and performance needs met, and it costs less than the alternative, you go for it. That’s the quadrant that Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays in.” — Barbara Schleider, director of Technology Services, Management Information Systems (MIS) at Florida Hospital

Download the case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
With eight facilities, 18,000 employees, and over 3,000 beds throughout Central Florida, Florida Hospital is the largest hospital and is the second largest employer in the state. Florida Hospital sees more patients through its Emergency Room than any other hospital in the U.S. Established in 1908, the hospital provides care to more than one million patients each year and is part of the Adventist Healthcare System—the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in the nation. Florida Hospital’s MIS Department, which includes approximately 100 developers, manages one centralized datacenter for all of its facilities, making it one of the busiest centers in Central Florida. Its over 500 servers and 350 applications are responsible for the life-critical healthcare-delivery machines that rely on its systems. The hospital is also known for its excellent quality of healthcare. US News and World Report magazine has ranked Florida Hospital as one of “America’s Best Hospitals” consecutively for the past six years.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
o deliver the best patient care, Florida Hospital is constantly evaluating and improving its IT systems—ensuring the most reliable, high-performance infrastructure is always in place. In the mid 1990s, the hospital decided to undergo a new Web initiative to publish its internal applications to the Internet, but the project soon became cost-prohibitive.

Additionally, Florida Hospital’s IT infrastructure was becoming extremely complex with over 300 different places where patient records could be stored. Data stored on the system must be instantly accessible in locations across the hospital, mandating a high-performance and scalable platform for its IT infrastructure.

“As our environment grew, we couldn’t afford to use an expensive proprietary operating systems anymore,” said Jack Velazquez, Sr. Systems Engineer for the Open Systems Team at Florida Hospital. In addition, the hospital began reevaluating its disaster recovery system. As part of the patient-care continuum, Florida Hospital’s IT must be highly available and highly recoverable. “Because of the way our disaster recovery system was designed, it could have taken up to two days to restore our file systems and data if anything went wrong. We knew we needed to deploy a smarter system that would provide seamless business continuity for the hospital,” said Velazquez.

“With the highly transactional nature of Florida Hospital’s business and our need to access patient data with immediacy, we needed a solution that could provide high performance, reliability, and secure backup and recovery,” said Barbara Schleider, director of Technology Services, Management Information Systems (MIS) at Florida Hospital. “Our first priority is security and our second is performance. When you can get security and performance needs met, and it costs less than the alternative, you go for it. That’s the quadrant that Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays in.”

SOLUTION
Initially, Florida Hospital turned to Red Hat because it provided the combination of high performance, security, and cost efficiencies it needed for its Web initiative, but it quickly found many more advantages for its disaster recovery project. “We realized that using Red Hat in our data warehouse would help us resolve hardware-software compatibility issues that can cause unnecessary system downtime. Red Hat’s large network of certified vendors ensures that most drivers are built into the operating system kernel, resulting in smoother operations,” said Velazquez. Florida Hospital also chose to use the Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Cluster Suite, and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) to restructure the way its disaster recovery system was designed and managed.

Today, 116 HP and IBM servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, which runs a number of databases, including the hospital’s eight-terabyte Oracle data warehouse. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also runs JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the hospital’s proprietary applications, which include patient care, financial, and data management solutions. A group of servers is also dedicated to communication and system protection applications, such as authentication, user ID management, mail, and virus scanning.

To protect all of this critical information, the Open Systems Team created a unique disaster-recovery system by offloading all applications and data to the Red Hat Global File System running on the SAN. Using Red Hat Cluster Suite, the team created a six node cluster. Each of the clusters shares two volumes on the GFS: one for the applications and the other for data. “With Red Hat GFS, we no longer need to replicate data or applications if a server goes down,” said Velazquez. “The servers simply provide CPU and power. Everything else runs from GFS. Though millions of transactions are processed each day at Florida Hospital, today it only takes minutes to back up the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.” To upgrade or restore a machine in the cluster, the team simply installs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and attaches the computer to the SAN. Within minutes, it’s ready to go.

As part of its evolutionary partnership with Red Hat, Florida Hospital also implemented the virtualization technology delivered as an integrated part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform operating system. “With Red Hat virtualization, we’ve been able to manage 35 percent growth in our datacenter without augmenting our hardware infrastructure or staff. We’ve done some exceptional things with virtualization,” said Schleider.

To date, Florida Hospital’s servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux have produced over 1,200 days of solid uptime, thriving despite a number of serious datacenter challenges, including air conditioning malfunctions that caused the server room to overheat. “Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems have been very resilient and have survived the most catastrophic conditions with great stability. We’ve never had a problem with our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers – it’s really a self-sufficient datacenter,” said Velazquez.

The Open Systems Team also implemented Red Hat Network Satellite to facilitate infrastructure management, security compliance, and new system deployment. “Red Hat Network Satellite makes system management easy, enabling us to deploy new applications and security patches to all servers at once,” said Velazquez. Florida Hospital’s data security office continually conducts security audits, and Red Hat Network Satellite tracks all system activities, making it possible for the Open Systems Team to provide detailed reports for HIPAA compliance.

To provide expertise during its virtualization and clustering deployments, Florida Hospital relied upon Red Hat Consulting. “The knowledge transfer that resulted from our work with our Red Hat consultants was extremely valuable,” said Velazquez.

“As a mission-oriented, non-profit organization, we’re conscious of financial stewardship and had not used outside consulting previously,” said Schleider. “We saw the value of investing in Red Hat Consulting and we made the right decision – the expertise we gained from the Red Hat Consulting experience helped us achieve our goals and work toward our mission.”

BENEFITS
As a result of deploying Red Hat, Florida Hospital streamlined its disaster recovery processes and gained higher system availability that translates into better patient care. “Red Hat solutions enabled us to create a highly efficient disaster-recovery system that expedited restoration time from days to seconds. This means we make patient data readily available and provide the highest level of care at all times,” said Velazquez. Average recovery time now takes between 30 seconds and five minutes to sync the data and one hour to recover.

Having faced the challenge of growing numbers of external websites being developed by third parties that translated into mounting expenses, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization technology, the team was able to start migrating these sites to internal hosting. To date, 89 websites have been migrated in-house, providing expanded security and reduced costs for the hospital’s IT infrastructure.

“The strength of Red Hat virtualization for us has really been through paravirtualization,” said Velazquez. “It blows the performance of other virtualization solutions on the market away.”

Florida Hospital also experienced significant efficiency gains from its Red Hat deployment. “Red Hat Network Satellite makes it possible for us to manage 110 servers with only two engineers. Provisioning systems only takes minutes when it used to take us hours or even days,” said Velazquez. With the new Red Hat disaster recovery system, the hospital continues to save on resources. “Red Hat GFS enabled us to create an innovative design that saves on storage costs, network bandwidth, and processing power,” he said. In addition, Red Hat Consulting helped the Open Services Team to implement the Linux disaster-recovery system, helping them build and break clusters during on-site training. “Thanks to Red Hat Consulting we were able to deploy the system within a couple of weeks,” said Velazquez.

Red Hat also helps Florida Hospital maintain a technological and competitive edge. As the largest hospital systems within the Adventist Healthcare System, the hospital strives to stay ahead of the curve. “With 100 developers on our team, we rely on Red Hat to save us time on everyday management issues so we can focus on creating new solutions. Our parent company has been impressed by our efficiency, ROI, and performance gains from using Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it possible to meet cost pressures, but also still meet mission-critical demands,” said Velazquez.

“There’s nothing more critical than lives at risk, so our systems must be highly recoverable. Having highly available systems means that Florida Hospital can deliver the quality care that our patients need,” said Schleider.

Category: New Generation Technology
Winner:Lexicon Genetics
Submitted by: Buckley Kohlhauff, Mark Ma, Jason Williams
Industry: Biotechnology
Geography: The Woodlands, Texas

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss Seam to glue together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBoss jBPM to dramatically simplify their development process and create a robust platform that can deploy mission-critical applications for the Texas Institute of Genomic Medicine.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Download JBoss World Las Vegas Presentation

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Lexicon Genetics is focused on the discovery of breakthrough treatments for human disease. We use our proprietary gene knockout technology to systematically discover the physiological and behavioral functions of genes to identify potential drug targets. We have advanced more than 70 knockout-validated targets into drug discovery programs.
Lexicon Genetics employs over 700 people between our two sites in The Woodlands, TX and Princeton, NJ. Lexicon’s revenue for 2005 was $76M

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The challenge was to re-engineer a legacy production system that has been running for five years. The business logic for the system was spread among various layers and components. Most of the documentation that existed was outdated. We had less than a year to redesign and implement the core architecture and workflows. In addition the new system needed to address the fundamental problems that were present in the existing system and be flexible enough to support the same goals with different business processes.

We needed to reengineer a legacy application from php/apache to an enterprise platform in order to support our major involvement in the recently established Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine (TIGM). We have implemented other projects on the JBoss platform and have been pleased with the results. JBoss is a powerful and stable application server and we feel that the JBoss Seam framework will revolutionize Java Enterprise development.

3. What was the desired solution?
Our guiding philosophy was to select a group of frameworks that prevented us from writing a lot of non-business code, but at the same time allowed us to make modifications quickly if we needed to. In addition we always want to leverage standards in the industry. We have utilized J2EE for 3 years so our solution needed to stay within that context to leverage our internal knowledge and skills.

We selected JBPM in 2005 as our solution for modeling our business processes. We selected JSF as our UI framework since the application needed to be accessed from a browser. The introduction of seam excited us because we felt that too much time was spent on connecting the backend layers in previous JSF applications we had written. We had some internal solutions that were built upon codegeneration, but they weren’t flexible and couldn’t help us with JBPM integration.

The Mouse production software encapsulates a complicated workflow covering many scientific and business processes involved in the production of genetically-modified knockout mice. It has to be flexible enough to meet the needs of a large user-base comprised of many distinctive roles. It also needs to be scalable and configurable enough to be used by other organizations involved in TIGM that may need customized workflows.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
We already had selected JEMS as our stack for enterprise applications in 2004 after reviewing alternatives from BEA, IBM, and Oracle. That decision was based upon a matrix of feature requirements, cost, support options, references, and published data.

We also evaluated other application servers and frameworks such as Oracle JDeveloper/BPEL, JRun, and Spring. JBoss proved to be the most cost-effective and robust provider. JEMs allowed us to quickly adopt SOA-based development, increasing the reusability of our code. It enabled us to break our company’s scientific and business processes down into granular projects that fulfill specific needs and adapt to changing requirements in our fast-paced software development lifecycle.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
JEMS is our platform for application development. The trend we see is tighter integration with the JEMS suite, therefore we lean towards selecting tools from within the suite.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

The Seam framework significantly reduced development and deployment time by gluing together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBPM. It enabled us to focus solely on our complicated scientific and business logic without having to put together the pieces of the enterprise framework ourselves. With the traditional Java Enterprise architecture there are so many tiers that have to be explicitly implemented, configured and glued into place. Seam makes all of that transparent to the developer.

We especially benefited from Seam’s introduction of the conversation context, as well as the integration of JBPM. The conversation context helped us resolve classic technical challenges such as users using our software in multiple windows. The JBPM framework allowed us to clearly define our business and scientific processes, and it provided a simple and efficient way of implementing the workflows, while implicitly maintaining the data integrity.

For user interface development, we have been using JSF for 2 years. Seam’s direct integration of JSF made it the perfect framework to allow us to reuse some of our existing custom JSF components that provide a rich user interface for our users.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
We have a clustered front-end and back-end running on Dell 2850 servers. We have 4 separate clustered instances of JBOSS spread on 3 servers. Our backend comprises of 3 servers running Oracle 9i RAC.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
We used JBoss support and training. The level of support and training is on par with what we receive from our other vendors. Early adopters clearly have an advantage to effect the direction of the product and therefore benefit from support.

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
Get support and training early in the process. The learning curve isn’t steep but it can be completely avoided by doing what you would normally do with other software purchases.

Industry: Hosting services

Geography: St. Louis, MO

Opportunity: Build a hosting business providing excellent value, support, and low prices; implement scalable backup and restoration solution that could support phenomenal growth rates

Migration Path: Novell Linux Enterprise SUSE to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite; Red Hat Network; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Hibernate; MySQL, Oracle, and Postgres databases; BakBone NetVault: Backup

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge Series servers

Benefits: Helped achieve phenomenal customer growth rates by facilitating sales and customer support and supporting scalability of new backup and restoration system

Opportunity

When Contegix decided to offer hosting services in 2003, the company required an enterprise-class, affordable Linux solution from the right vendor. “Hosting customers expect the utmost network reliability and protection from their service providers, and we wanted to create a completely worry-free data center experience for them. The operating system we chose would play a key role in that experience,” said Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix. Within a few years of deploying Red Hat, the company is now growing between 300 and 400% annually. To provide continued reliability and uptime for its quickly expanding customer base, Contegix required a more scalable backup and recovery solution. “Although we were running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 99% of our servers, our backup solution ran on Novell’s Linux Enterprise SUSE, which was difficult to administer. We knew we needed to find a backup solution that ran on Red Hat,” said Porter.

Solution

To help build its hosting business initially, Contegix chose Red Hat for its expert Linux knowledge and responsiveness to customer needs. “Red Hat really understands the hosting market and meets our customers’ needs for specific services such as indemnification protection. In addition, Red Hat’s subscription model is based on number of servers not license fees, enabling us to offer the best pricing to our customers,” said Porter. When it was time to find a new backup solution earlier this year, Red Hat played a huge role in the decision. “We chose BakBone because it enabled maximum scalability, provided excellent support, and offered Red Hat ready software,” he said.

BakBone worked closely with Contegix to design and implement a backup and restoration solution around its NetVault: Backup software, ensuring the new deployment was up and running within ten days. The choice to use BakBone enabled Contegix to transition its backup servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and improve system administration. “By implementing Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite we were able to overcome the clustering and file system issues we experienced with SUSE. Plus, Red Hat supports SAN as well as Fibre Channel SCSI devices, simplifying our backup processes even further,” said Porter.

Contegix operates thousands of Dell PowerEdge Series servers running RHEL 3, 4, and 5 and a variety of MySQL, Oracle, and Postgres databases. Three backup servers run the BakBone NetVault: Backup solution. Many customers also run a range of JBoss solutions including JBoss 3 and up and Hibernate on Contegix managed servers.

In addition, Contegix fully utilizes all Red Hat services including Red Hat Network, Red Hat Exchange, and the Red Hat Hosting Program. Red Hat Network notifies Contegix of new RHEL updates and patches and facilitates managing upgrades and configuration changes to customer servers. “Red Hat Exchange informs us of new applications tested on RHEL and delivers them through Red Hat Network. We then offer those applications to our customers as part of their fixed monthly cost. Thanks to the Red Hat Hosting Program, which specifically designed a subscription model for our needs, our customers pay a low price, yet receive extra value,” said Porter.

Benefits

Red Hat has helped Contegix cultivate its commitment to excellent customer support since the start of the company. “We answer every support ticket in five minutes, so it’s critical that the vendors we choose have the same level of commitment to us. Red Hat has always provided the support we needed when we needed it,” said Porter. With the company’s rapid growth, Red Hat’s understanding of the hosting business has proven even more essential. “Every one of our customers is unique, so the support experience of our vendors has to be very broad. Red Hat and BakBone are not only responsive, but also have a deep understanding of a wide variety of user environments, helping us resolve even the most difficult technical issues,” he said.

Red Hat plays a significant role in expediting the Contegix sales process. Most engineers are familiar with the reliability and support benefits of working with Red Hat, alleviating any concerns they might have regarding the management of their infrastructures. In addition, Red Hat’s wide network of certified vendors reassures customers that their applications will work smoothly with RHEL. Red Hat also provides ready-made FAQs and RFPs, which Contegix uses in its sales process when necessary. “Showing customers we use Red Hat makes for an easy sale. They know Red Hat means lower costs and better solutions for them,” he said.

Over the last four years, Red Hat has helped Contegix grow its customer base at phenomenal rates. “Red Hat enabled us to grow unbelievably fast by providing customers continuously with new solutions at low prices. We couldn’t have achieved our 400% annual growth rate without Red Hat,” said Porter. Today, the new backup system deployment provides Contegix with the scalability it needs to support continued growth. “Before our Red Hat-BakBone implementation, we were spending more than 40 hours per week managing backups and recoveries. The new system speeded restoration time by five times and eliminated the need to hire an additional engineer,” he said. In the future, Contegix plans to open its first data center outside of St. Louis, populating its servers with Red Hat and BakBone solutions. “We love Red Hat and BakBone,” said Porter.

Industry: State and Local Government

Challenge: Create a scalable, three-tier, web-based architecture under shrinking budget.

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat Network

Hardware: Dell servers
Applications: Oracle8i database, Juvenile Tracking System (custom, Oracle-based)

Benefits: Increased price/performance and stability at one-third the cost of legacy UNIX solutions

Their custom-built JTS serves as the back-bone of the department’s state-wide network for tracking juveniles through the justice system. Maintaining the system at its highest performance levels was crucial. “When we realized we only received one-third of the budget we hadrequested for the updated system, a UNIX server was out of the question,” said Kevin Ferlazzo, Data Administration and Security Manager for the department. “At that point, we concluded that a lower-cost, Intel-based approach was necessary.”

“We understood at the time, running an enterprise application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was considered ahead of its time. But knowing that Red Hat was backed by Dell and Oracle helped us make the decision to give it a try,” said Darrell Gasaway, the department’s InformationServices Director.

Their familiarity with UNIX helped in porting applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “If you are a Unix shop, my advice is to jump on in; the water is fine. Based on the hardware availability, extensive testing, and compelling price-performance, there is no reason not to evaluate and develop a Linux strategy,” Ferlazzo explained.

The department’s UNIX-to-Linux migration provided the advantage of newer, more powerful servers while also supporting the agency’s overall strategy to standardize on Intel hardware. By using the State of Virginia’s existing contract with Dell to purchase new servers pre-loaded with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, and by taking advantagof Dell support services, the department maximized their savings.

The scalability of the low-cost, three-tiered, Web-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux architecture, has help us meet the exploding information demands of the department’s programs while giving us the stability we need.

– Kevin Ferlazzo
Data Administration and Security Manager
Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice

In addition, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution provided plenty of room to grow. “Five years ago JTS had about 400 data elements and was running four application modules. Today we are tracking over 1,700 elements and running more than 16 modules.” said Ferlazzo. His teamnow runs the JTS application on a server farm using a Dell, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle solution stack.

“We’ve been able to support this major explosion of data and programs through the scalable performance of the Dell, Red Hat, Oracle solution. We are very happy with the outcome of the migration. The new system is rock solid,” said Ferlazzo. “We’ve gained peace of mind fromthe extended uptime and the steady, day-to-day performance,” said Lee Moore, Unix Systems component in a robust IT infrastructure, and whileFerlazzo’s team uses a number of techniques, they rely on Red Hat Network to manage their servers and deploy software updates to keep the systems secure.

Migrating to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Dell solution allowed the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice to upgrade its Oracle-based Juvenile Tracking System at one-third the cost of a similar UNIX-based solution. Furthermore, the Intel-based solution delivered tremendous gains in performance and stability and provides high levels of scalability to support the growing information demands across the Commonwealth.

Everything to gain and little to lose with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Higher Education

Challenge: Regain top notch performance

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Edition with Red Hat Network

Hardware: HP DL-series servers

Software: Oracle 9i Enterprise Database Server, Oracle 9i RAC, Oracle 10g RAC, Oracle 9i AS (J2EE), Blackboard Course Management System 6.1, Several custom-developed applications

Benefits: 60% cost savings over comprable HP-UX solution. Higher performance to keep pace with data storage needs increasing by 1000% annually. Easy transfer of strong Unix skills.

Download the pdf: [  ]

Technology and the Hallowed Halls

Ranked consistently in the top tier of U.S. colleges and universities, Vanderbilt University is internationally known for its cutting edge technology and research programs coupled with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University is not only central to the city it calls home; it is also central to the economy and cultural development of the entire state. This independent, privately-supported university of just over 11,000 students is the second largest private employer based in the state.

For any world-class research institution, the need to stay at the leading edge of current technologies is paramount. At Vanderbilt, technology leadership permeates every business decision. Because open source technology is built with best practices of software development, it’s appealing to the University. A central MIS staff supports the University and Medical Center, so high levels of performance and reliability are critical to their continued leadership and long term success. That’s why Vanderbilt is migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Departing the 20th Century

Historically an HP-UX and HP3000 shop, Vanderbilt’s MIS department relied heavily on Unix and Oracle for its computing environment. Beginning in 2002, however, it became evident that their HP-UX systems were reaching the end of life in terms of maintenance and performance. The University’s needs for data storage alone were increasing by 1,000 percent each year, and the HP mainframe environment wasn’t keeping pace. In weighing the options, it was important that any new solution be compatible with the Oracle environment which had become a core competency of the MIS team. At the same time, Vanderbilt’s loyalty to HP prompted them to ask HP for pricing on two potential solutions for replacing their aging infrastructure: a newer HP-UX solution, and an equivalent 32-bit platform. The proposal for an Intel and Linux solution came in at more than 60 percent less!

Testing for Success

While Vanderbilt was looking to replace five HP-UX boxes, Oracle was making a big push toward Linux. “That was a factor,” according to Kevin McDonald, Program Manager for System Administration, “that really opened our eyes.” After attending a seminar with Oracle on their Linux-based offerings, “we immediately got four test boxes: three for data warehousing, and one for On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP),” says McDonald. Assistant Director for Architecture and Operations Darryl Boone adds, “One of our OLTP applications is a Java-based product called People Finder, which is becoming integral to the duties of a significant population among our user base. We put the OLTP database on a dedicated Enterprise Linux box running Oracle9i RAC, because high availability was crucial. Our testing went very well, showing us that we could get three times the server power and performance for the dollar, plus greater system availability.”

As McDonald puts it, “The cost advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Editions with Red Hat Network (RHN) are just too attractive to turn down. It’s a huge bargain, and when we considered the added benefits of Red Hat’s support assistance with patching, security, and the RHN GUI console, we felt we had everything to gain, and very little to lose.”

Building on Experience

As Vanderbilt researched alternate solutions, they found the skillsets of their IT staff securely entrenched in the Unix camp, another reason that a broad migration to Linux made perfect sense. “Following our successful tests, we made the decision to implement a broader migration. Looking back, it was a pretty simple task for our experienced Unix administrators,” McDonald remarks. “We took the Red Hat Certified Engineer Rapid Track course, and as soon as we returned to campus, we were able to hit the ground running.”

Since then, Vanderbilt has undergone a steady transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They now have over 30 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.2.1 servers supporting the University’s Finance and Human Resources applications, student applications, and alumni development infrastructure. Recently, a plan was put in place to migrate the Medical Center, which sees 300,000 patients per year, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux too.

The first to make the migration was a data warehousing system in the Alumni Development area. Then, finding Red Hat Enterprise Linux particularly well suited to J2EE applications, they also moved some Web applications from proprietary Sun hardware. More recently, Vanderbilt began implementing Blackboard, an application used to encourage online collaboration in teaching and learning, into their Enterprise Linux environment. It had previously been powered by Windows servers. Looking ahead, Vanderbilt has solid plans to transition it’s “bread-and-butter” PeopleSoft ERP system from the legacy Unix system over to Enterprise Linux.

“Ultimately it’s about performance and TCO. The performance is definitely there with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” explained McDonald. “We saw lower TCO in three areas: initial acquisition of hardware, software purchasing (which is usually priced according to platform), and system administration because our skills easily transferred. And with Red Hat’s Academic offering, we see a big future for Linux at Vanderbilt.”

Industry: Banking
Challenges: Customize CRM to a high degree. Handle a rapidly scaling call workload without any disruption in services. Allow call center agents to have an “always connected” view of the database
Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Software: Oracle 11i E-business Suite, Oracle 9i Database & Red Hat Cluster Suite
Benefits: Servers handle close to 7,000 calls a day with 99.99% uptime.
System can accomodate massive growth in call volumes over the next two years.
Complete freedom from viruses and security related risks.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

Introduction

UTI Bank was one of the first private banks to launch operations in the country in 1994, after the Government of India passed a resolution in favor of privatization. The bank today is capitalized to the extent of over $ 63 million USD.

An IT savvy bank, UTI Bank is a pioneer in adopting new technologies in the banking sector. UTI has a network of more than 350 branch offices and extension counters across the country. With over 1700 ATMs, UTI Bank has the largest ATM network of its kind in India.

Challenges

Privatization opened up the Indian banking sector, allowing a large number of players to offer retail banking services in the country. Using the latest technologies, UTI Bank introduced quality services to enhance the banking experience of its customers. As the services stack expanded, supporting customers became a challenging task. Efficient service and timely support were the deciding factors for customers to remain loyal to any particular bank, which brought Customer Relationship Management (CRM) into sharp focus.

UTI Bank wanted to establish itself as a customer focused bank and carve a niche for itself amidst the widespread competition. Setting up a state of the art call center facility that could provide quality support to customers across the country became vital to further this goal.

The call center was expected to eliminate the load of routine queries that branch operators had to handle. A dedicated response center would allow branch operators to divert all customers queries to the helpdesk number and focus on their core responsibilities instead. Also, a single window service with a populated knowledgebase would introduce a high degree of standardization in the replies given to customer queries.

The bank was also looking to avoid a situation where customers would be put on hold for long periods of time. A failover and redundancy solution was required to guarantee high availability of services and ensure uninterrupted call traffic. For handling large call volumes, the application infrastructure was also required to be perfectly scalable. The bank wanted a solution that could accommodate growth over a long period of time.

Solution

UTI Bank implemented Oracle 11i E-business Suite for its CRM needs. An IVR extracts customer data, which is populated on the call center agents desktop. With a browser based view of the customer’s record, the agent can process the customer’s queries faster, resulting in a higher throughput.

To host the mission critical database and CRM solution, UTI Bank needed an architecture that was based on open standards, as it was looking at customizing the Oracle CRM solution to a high degree. After an extensive evaluation, the bank realized that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with its transparent framework, was the perfect match. Moreover, it delivered the necessary performance, security, flexibility and scalability that was critical for the success of the project.

Today, six servers running the Oracle database and CRM application are powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 AS. Four servers run the Red Hat Cluster Suite for redundancy and failover services. The Oracle 9i Database, IVR, Oracle CRM application and cluster services all run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. The hardware infrastructure consists of HP DL 580’s, DL 380’s and HP EVA 5000 SANs.

Benefits

The total time frame provided by UTI Bank for implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux was 40 days. Red Hat’s Global Professional Services team finished the implementation in a record time, winning the confidence of the bank.

VK Ramani, President-IT, UTI Bank Ltd., says, “The scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is unmatched. Our servers handle close to 7,000 calls a day without any disruption in services. We are expecting the call volume to increase by 200 percent within the next few months. Customer service quality has shown substantial improvement with Enterprise Linux driving our infrastructure. We are confident that Enterprise Linux will be able to handle our growing call volumes effortlessly.”

With Enterprise Linux powering the call center on low cost Intel based hardware, UTI Bank has received immense freedom to dynamically scale up resources as the call volume expands. Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures the seamless transfer of services from one server to another. As a result, the possibility of an abnormal termination has been completely eliminated. The failover configuration allows the call center agent to have an “always connected” view of the database.

“Since the last 12 months that the project has been live, not a single failure has ever been reported on the OS or cluster,” claims Ramani.

With the underlying platform and clustering solution delivering consistent performance, the Bank has also been able to increase its productivity. Ramani explains, “A bulk of the calls that we receive usually fall under the bracket of ‘routine inquires’ like balance inquiries, cheque status requests, etc. It is critical for us that we process this daily inbound load in the shortest possible time frame. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux running our CRM and database servers, the query resolution speed allows us to balance our workload very well.”

UTI Bank also feels that security is one of the biggest advantages of using a Linux-based server. Ramani adds, “We were able to fully comprehend the reliability of Linux, only after the Code Red and Nimda era.”

Red Hat has been awarded a three year support contract from UTI Bank. Adds Pritesh Thaker, Assistant Vice President – IT, UTI Bank, “We are very pleased with the dedicated support provided by Red Hat. In fact, it was Red Hat’s strong support expertise that enabled us to eliminate all concerns surrounding Linux and take the Open Source plunge. It has been one year since the call center has been up and running, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has delivered 99.99% uptime so far.”

Future Roadmap

Open Source technologies are now finding their way into the banks capital market structure, and most peripheral applications have already been migrated. The Intranet and MIS are now powered by Red Hat and more applications on the mission critical end are expected to follow. With a significant TCO reduction on the server front, UTI Bank is closely looking at exploring the use of Red Hat Desktops on the client side as well.

Conclusion

UTI Bank has been turned into an Open Source believer after the success of its call center project. The bank has set the lead for the hundreds of BPOs and call centers in the country to follow. By running their CRM infrastructure on an open, standards based platform like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, BPOs can achieve significant TCO reduction along with high performance and security.

Industry: Education

Geography: Scotland, United Kingdom

Challenge: To significantly improve performance of legacy UNIX systems, while creating a compelling cost/benefit case for new systems.

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Software: SAP Enterprise R/3 with SAP HR/Payroll Public Sector version 4.70 on Oracle Database 9.2.0.5
Hardware: HP Proliant DL380, HP Integrity Servers (rx4640 and rx2600) based on Intel 1.3GHz Itanium 2 processors.

Benefits: Three-fold improvement in system performance. Lower project costs (as much as half the previous system costs). Multi-platform support. Impressive reliability and stability.

• Download this success story as a PDF: Letter | A4

The University of Stirling in Scotland, UK was founded by Royal Charter in 1967 and has now established itself as a major center of education with remote campuses in Inverness and Stornoway. The University is organized academically into four faculties: Arts, Human Sciences, Management, and Natural Sciences. With a respected teaching reputation, supported by an active research culture, the University of Stirling has over 9,000 students and 2,000 staff.

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it offers a high level of support and stability for critical applications such as SAP.

– Brian Bullen,
UNIX Systems Administrator

Understandably, human resources and payroll are among the most critical systems supported by the University’s IT department. So when its systems began to lag, it turned to Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®. Not only did Stirling University more than triple its performance, it also cut costs by 50%.

Legacy UNIX creates performance problems

Since 1990, campus computing has been built around products from HP. Many of the original servers were HP9000s running HP-UX 11.0. When Stirling University decided to deploy SAP for human resources and payroll, it did so on this same system. However, performance began to suffer after several upgrades. At certain times of the month, when heavy reporting was taking place, the system ran very slowly, causing significant inconvenience to users.

We believe with the current configuration of the IT system the servers will pay for themselves over the next three years just by savings in ongoing support costs.

Utilizing a trusted business partner

Since the late 1990s, the University of Stirling has worked closely with Abtech Computer Services UK to develop and refine its IT strategy. Among other credentials, Abtech is a Red Hat Advanced Partner and an HP Linux Elite Partner. With Abtech’s expertise, the university introduced a Storage Area Network (SAN) and implemented a centralized backup strategy. Additionally, Abtech had helped Stirling migrate several applications to Linux. With these successful projects behind it, Abtech was in prime position to advise Stirling University regarding the performance issues it was seeing with its UNIX® systems.

Red Hat provides support for Itanium 2 microarchitecture and critical applications

After lending Stirling a couple of test systems, Abtech studied the performance statistics and demonstrated that successfully splitting the database and application layers could deliver significant cost savings and performance gains. Given its prior experience with Linux, the university was already familiar with cost and performance benefits of the operating system.

Initial data suggested at least a three-fold increase in performance.

Stirling University migrated to a two-tier system. The application tier is based Red Hat Enterprise Linux with SAP Enterprise R/3 with SAP HR/Payroll Public Sector version 4.70 and HP Proliant Servers (DL380). “We are particularly impressed with the Proliant DL380s. With dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces and six internal disk slots, a lot of our discrete services will fit neatly on one of these boxes,” said Brian Bullen, UNIX Systems Administrator at Stirling University. “We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it offers a high level of support and stability for critical applications such as SAP.”

The database tier is based on Oracle® Database 9.2.0.5 and HP Integrity Servers (rx4640 and rx2600) with Intel® 1.3GHz Itanium® 2 processors, as this offered better price and performance than alternative RISC-based servers. “With Itanium 2 we also maintain flexibility in choosing any operating system in the future, which will allow us to adapt to changing requirements in the years to come,” said Martyn Peggie, HR Information System Manager at Stirling University. All server backup was done via the SAN to a HP MSL tape library.

With Itanium 2 we will maintain flexibility in choosing any operating system in the future, which will allow us to adapt to changing requirements in the years to come.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers high performance and low cost

The solution was implemented in spring 2005 to immediate benefits. Reports can now be run while users are working on the system with no noticeable performance problems. “Initial data suggested at least a three-fold increase in performance. We had to do a bit of tuning on the client side, but the servers worked well beyond expectations,” said Bullen. The time taken to run payroll reports has been reduced from 80 minutes to 12 minutes.

In addition, the use of commodity servers means project costs are much lower. The previous system and storage cost £4,500 per year to support (£13,500 over 3 years). The university now has four systems at a cost of £2,600 per year to support (£7,800 over three years). That’s almost half the cost for four times the number of systems. “We believe with the current configuration of the IT system the servers will pay for themselves over the next three years just by savings in ongoing support costs,” said Bullen.

Industry: Travel

Geography: Australia

Challenge: Microsoft-based infrastructure could not scale to match Wotif.com’s 100% growth rate.

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
Software: Oracle10g Standard Edition, Java 1.5
Hardware: AMD Opteron
Systems Management: Red Hat Network

Benefits: Increased performance upto 500% peak load. Lower TCO. Simplified systems administration

• Download this success story as a PDF: Letter | A4

Wotif.com, founded in 2000, (www.wotif.com) is Australia’s leading last-minute accommodation website and the global specialist in its field. Its easy-to-use booking engine offers travellers accommodations within the next 14 days at competitive rates. Wotif.com’s portfolio includes over 6,000 hotels, motels, serviced apartments, resorts, guesthouses, and bed & breakfasts worldwide.

Wotif.com is headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, with offices in Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Properties listed with Wotif.com can be booked online or through the Customer Service Center, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We’re very satisfied with Red Hat and currently have no plans to change. While Red Hat continues to offer us an open architecture, transparency, strong relationships with tier one vendors and a quick resolution on any issues, we will see them as a strategic partner in our business.

Online travel booking sites have exploded over the past few years. Wotif.com’s website processes nearly 2 million user sessions per month, growing at more than 100% per annum. The site has more than 370,000 subscribers and makes more than 100,000 bookings monthly.

Explosive Growth demands better technology

When Paul Young, Chief Information Officer for Wotif.com, joined the company in 2002 it was essentially a Microsoft shop. Wotif.com was having enormous issues with performance, scalability, and system availability because of 80-100% yearly growth.

“Basically, the existing infrastructure just could not cope with the increasing demand being placed upon it,” explained Young.

Young’s job was to determine which solution would be able to address these critical issues over the next five to seven years.

Searching for vendor support

Young was very familiar with UNIX®, Linux®, and open source technologies, having used them for a long time as a programmer and later as a professional manager.

Young decided that Wotif.com’s overall architecture needed a solution that was scalable, open source, and UNIX-like. Buy-in and support from tier-one vendors like Oracle was also essential. The platform that best met these needs was Red Hat® Enterprise Linux.

I’m able to leverage off the best hardware and best processors available and find a Red Hat kernel that will run on it. With Red Hat I can port across to the hardware platform of my choice and off we go.

“When we were first researching solutions a few years ago, Red Hat stood out because of its partnerships with major vendors like Oracle and IBM. There is not much difference in terms of the operating system with the Linux variants on the market, but even now, I still believe that Red Hat leads the way with industry partnerships. It’s this vendor support that makes Red Hat a comfortable proposition to take to senior management,” said Young.

The Solution = Red Hat + Oracle10g + AMD Opteron

Wotif.com is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS on 64-bit AMD® Opteron® servers. The overall solution also includes Oracle® Database 10g® Standard Edition and Java® 1.5. Development is done using agile programming for rapid production of an application server with Java and J2EE™ on Fedora™ Core 3 machines.

Site architecture is based on open standards and utilizes high quality open source software where applicable. The Wotif.com site can handle all customer, supplier, and administrative requests, as well as integrated requests from third-party reservation systems.

Young appreciates the flexibility that Red Hat gives Wotif.com with its hardware choices. “I’m able to leverage off the best hardware and best processors available and find a Red Hat kernel that will run on it. In a business where hardware is changing rapidly, I don’t want to have to change all my operations, operating systems, processes, and procedures to get the best environment. With Red Hat I can port across to the hardware platform of my choice and off we go.”

Lower cost, Higher performance

Wotif.com has found numerous benefits from its Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration, in areas such as performance, cost, and ease of administration. For example, when running any enterprise application there are a number of jobs that need to happen around the edges, like running reports, processing web logs, and backup tasks. Using the tools available with Red Hat Network these tasks can all be done seamlessly in the Red Hat environment, something that was much more difficult in a Microsoft infrastructure.

Wotif.com has also found its Red Hat environment to be much more cost effective. “I find it astounding that anyone could say that TCO for Microsoft servers is less than Linux-based servers! I have seventeen years experience in this industry and I’ve never seen this to be the case — it’s all marketing hype. I think that there is a new group of more savvy IT professionals coming through, and the marketing and their real-life experience just don’t match up,” said Young.

I’m able to leverage off the best hardware and best processors available and find a Red Hat kernel that will run on it. With Red Hat I can port across to the hardware platform of my choice and off we go.

The core benefit for Wotif.com has been in performance and availability. As a global operation running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Wotif.com cannot tolerate downtime. They must guarantee customers the same experience, regardless offluctuating usage or system load, and especially at peak load.

Under Wotif.com’s current architecture, extensive load testing has found that the site can run at 500% peak load. According to Young, there was no way that would have been possible with the previous infrastructure.

“For us, performance management has a huge focus. One of the primary issues facing online businesses is the fluctuating nature and periodic bursts of traffic. It’s relatively simple to design a site that operates at speed for normal customer loads. However to handle peak periods when traffic can reach levels of 200-300% of normal loads a site requires a sophisticated and complex site architecture. Our continuing rapid growth compounds this issue. We’s relatively simple to design a site that operates at speed for normal customer loads. However to handle peak periods when traffic can reach levels of 200-300% of normal loads a site requires a sophisticated and complex site architecture. Our continuing rapid growth compounds this issue. We’ve invested a lot in ensuring a consistent positive customer experience on our site under varying load conditions and it’s essential that our IT infrastructure is able to back that up. At Wotif we want to ensure that our customers have an excellent experience every time they book accommodation with us,” explained Young.

Committed to excellence

Wotif.com sees Red Hat as part of an overall approach to nimble and flexible operation within the IT market. The business is committed to open standards, non-proprietary open source software and operating systems, and open architectures.

“We’re very satisfied with Red Hat and currently have no plans to change. While Red Hat continues to offer us an open architecture, transparency, strong relationships with tier one vendors, and a quick resolution on any issues, we will see them as a strategic partner in our business,” concluded Young.

Industry: Telecommunications

Challenge: Increase performance and reliability of billing system to ensure timely payments from growing customer base.

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
Software: Oracle Database
Hardware: HP

Benefits: Increased processing speed by 400% over legacy Sun Solaris environment. Cut costs by nearly 50%. Met TransACT’s ‘zero fault tolerance’ policy.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

TransACT Communications, based in Canberra, Australia, specialises in building and operating a fibre optic broadband network. It is capable of delivering a full range of communication services, including video on demand, pay TV, permanent high-speed-internet, and various mobile and fixed line telephone services.

TransACT operates a network reaching over 60,000 homes and 5,000 businesses and has announced plans to extend its network beyond the Australian Capital Territory.

The System

TransACT’s billing data system is linked with the company’s telephony switch. The system transfers data from the switch to the database. This information is then tested for accuracy and completeness before going to accounts payable. The information is critical as telephony accounts for a large portion of the company’s revenue. If the system is inaccurate or down—TransACT doesn’t get paid!

The Challenge

TransACT needed to increase the processing environment and data recovery platform for its billing data system because of a growing customer base and needed a reliable replacement system that could grow with the needs of the business.

The company’s telephony system runs an Oracle Database, so it was important that TransACT chose a platform that was certified to run with the existing system.

“Reliability and capacity are key virtues of the Oracle Database,” said Stephen Supple, Senior Oracle Analyst/Programmer, TransACT Communications. “The database processes hundreds of thousands of records a day very quickly and reliably with no margin for error. We needed to be certain that the underlying operating system could support this heavy work load.”

TransACT chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a number of reasons. “I had seen Red Hat in operation for a number of years and have a greater comfort level working with a Unix/Linux type system. In addition, the Oracle Linux certification meant we wouldn’t have database conflicts and the bottom line cost savings were impressive,” said Mr Supple.

The Solution

TransACT chose to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS on a HP Server in tandem with its previous billing data system.

The billing data system is fairly robust and has fail over systems, but processing lag can have a negative eff ect on billing cycles, revenue and cash fl ow. This system is absolutely critical to the bottom line of the business; as such TransACT has a zero fault tolerance.

For this reason, TransACT conducted extensive testing over a three-month period. The performance of its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers was a dramatic improvement over the older system.

“The processing time was cut down by 400%, so something that previously took us 20 minutes now only takes 5,” said Mr Supple. “That combined with the accuracy of the data – the system was audited by PWC and found to be correct– meant that our choice to move to full production with Red Hat was an obvious one.”

“Our decision to go with Red Hat as the Linux vendor was largely because they are a well-known brand and I am certain that they are a long-term enterprise player.”

The Benefits

Along with increased speed and accuracy, TransACT found the new system to be cost effective.

“We were at a point where we had to migrate the system. With our previous system we would have had to spend approximately $140,000 for one server and one terabyte of storage. With the Red Hat solution, we paid around $80,000 for two servers and 1.5 terabytes. It’s not hard to see why we went with Red Hat,” said Supple.

TransACT not only saved approximately $60,000 in set-up costs, but also will enjoy ongoing savings because the annual subscription for Red Hat Enterprise Linux license is less expensive than Solaris support annually. “The way I see it is we have a better system taking care of our billing data, more scope for growth and all for less cost,” Mr Supple concluded.

Industry: Entertainment

Challenge: To quickly and cost-effectively add email communications to their existing CRM solution.

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Software: StrongMail Enterprise; Oracle

Benefits: Deployment complete three months ahead of schedule. Significantly reduced project cost due to fewer required resources. Strong delivery rates. Increased control.

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Ticketmaster is the world’s leading ticketing company, selling more than 98 million tickets and serving more than 9,000 venue, promoter, sports team, and event clients worldwide in 2004. Ticketmaster scheduled eight months to add high-performance email to its existing CRM solution. It was operational in one month with StrongMail and Red Hat Enterprise Linux providing them unprecedented speed, delivery and control.

The problem: email today

Despite the business benefits of email, the technology itself has lagged behind the current demands placed upon it. As Frank Addante, founder and CEO of StrongMail Systems, points out, “The business use of email is in the dark ages. Most companies are developing their email infrastructure on twenty-year-old technology.” (To put this in perspective, twenty years ago Microsoft® released Windows® 1.0.)

Businesses relying heavily on email as their primary method of communication are discovering unfortunate problems. “It’s very complex and costly to develop innovative applications on such old technology,” explains Addante. “And if you do manage it, the applications won’t scale with demand because the outdated technology simply can’t handle it.”

By far, spam is the number one problem facing companies that rely heavily on email to conduct business. The United Nations estimates that spam costs the global economy approximately $25 billion annually1. Companies waste most of this money on lost productivity and increasingly ineffective filtering solutions. The flip side of this problem is just as troubling: 19% of legitimate business email never gets delivered due to overly aggressive spam filters2.

The solution: StrongMail Systems backed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux

StrongMail Systems provides a solution to these problems. StrongMail has pioneered an innovative email application infrastructure, that offers businesses a solid foundation boasting 99.5% email deliverability to the inbox. “We’re in the business of providing business users 100% visability and control over their email operations,” says Rod Butters, VP of Marketing at StrongMail.

StrongMail, founded in 2002, chose to build their solution on Linux because they wanted to offer openness, flexibility, and a minimal total cost of ownership to their customers. “Our mission is to make email as easy as dial tone,” says Addante. “It’s just not very reliable today, but the phone is, right? You pick up the phone and it just works. With that in mind, there are two critical aspects. One is making sure that our platform is open and easy to use, and the second is making sure that it’s high performance and rock-solid. So we have to use a platform that’s just as rock-solid and easy to use.”

StrongMail selects Red Hat after extensively testing other Linux platforms.

StrongMail tested and supported several Linux distributions–including Red Hat Linux 7.x–but ultimately selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their platform of choice. Becoming a Red Hat Ready partner was a logical and necessary step.

According to Butters, “The migration from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was very simple for us, primarily because of the flexibility inherent in Linux, but also because there was obviously a lot of care and focus on offering people a smooth migration to this platform.

“We see tremendous benefit in being on a platform that’s had over 700 commercial vendors provide insight, recommendations, and feedback on the right features and fixes” Butters continues. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the perfect combination of open source flexibility being commercially hardened. It’s positive for us and it’s positive for our customers.”

Ticketmaster looks to StrongMail and Red Hat

Ticketmaster operates one of the largest e-Commerce sites on the Internet. When the company developed its new e-mail-based marketing product, a reliable, robust delivery engine was critical to meet the ever-increasing business demands of its clients.

Ticketmaster’s success

“Our mission is to provide our clients with the best systems, products, and services to sell tickets” explains Sean Moriarty, Chief Operations Officer at Ticketmaster, “And for consumers, our goal is to offer an easy and convenient experience throughout the entire purchasing process–all the way through to the scanning of their ticket as they enter the venue.”

For Ticketmaster and its clients, email is one of the most effective ways to get the right message to the right consumer at the right time–which is crucial for effectively marketing event ticket sales. “We sell a tremendous number of tickets every day on behalf of our clients. Every transaction and every consumer interaction must be handled efficiently and effectively. Our clients rely on us for the responsibility of providing first rate ticketing services to their customers,” Moriarty says

Ticketmaster introduced its email marketing tool for clients last year. StrongMail serves as the email generation and delivery engine with Red Hat Enterprise Linux serving as the platform solution. The reliable, robust email system meets clients’ ever-increasing business demands and has been integral to Ticketmaste’s success with its email marketing product.

“It is critical that we enable our clients with the ability to interact well with consumers who are interested in the latest news about the events they care about” Moriarty says. “StrongMail helps us accomplish that objective”

Results for Ticketmaster

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and StrongMail Enterprise as its foundation, Ticketmaster was able to build and launch its new email marketing application three months sooner than anticipated. Since this solution required only one engineering resource, Ticketmaster also significantly reduced its project costs.

“Before our decision to deploy StrongMail, we considered developing this new application using custom code. We realized that would require more time spent developing the foundation than the application itself,” said Brian Pike, VP for CRM at Ticketmaster

With StrongMail’s easy-to-use SOAP/XML API and its anti-spam compliance features, Ticketmaster’s email marketing product has become far more efficient, with delivery rates growing steadily.

“The StrongMail solution provides an agile foundation, scalable to our needs, which allows Ticketmaster to focus on adding value to its existing applications. By doing so, Ticketmaster is constantly enhancing its reputation as a service provider on behalf of its clients, a role the company takes very seriously,” adds Moriarty

“We provide our clients with the best systems, products, and services to facilitate sales and we are strongly committed to utilizing the best technology solutions whether building internally or through strategic alliances with communities of development that share our mandate of excellence. The performance, reliability, and economic benefits of Linux, Red Hat, and StrongMail combined with their respective communities of supporting talent, present the best technology solution for our e-mail marketing product.”

1 http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=11315&Cr=internet&Cr1=
2 http://atlantaima.org/events/index.cfm?EventID=18