FAST FACTS

Company: Alpine Electronics

Industry: Electronics: Consumer

Geography: United States

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

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

Hardware: Systemx: System x3850

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

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

Download the case study from the IBM website [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Banco Pastor

Industry: Financial Services Banking

Geography:Spain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Queensland Motorways

Industry:Travel & Transportation

Geography:Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

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

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

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

Download the PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Construction & Engineering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Airlines/Travel

Geography: The Netherlands

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: YPF SA

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Argentina

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach

Industry: Healthcare

Country: Germany

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

Business Partner: IBM, SAP, EGT InformationsSysteme

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

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

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

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

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing a SAP application landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on BladeCenter

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

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

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

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

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

Medical imaging database

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

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

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

Improved performance and reliability

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

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

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

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: 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

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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.

Airport migrates servers and desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network

Raleigh, NC – August 6, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Munich Airport, recognized for three consecutive years as Europe’s “Airport of the Year” by air transport research company Skytrax, has migrated a large portion of its UNIX servers and desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Airport has since realized heightened performance, cost savings and reliable support.

After experiencing consistent performance issues, Munich Airport conducted detailed cost-analysis research on alternative technology solutions that could boost performance for its IT systems. Results revealed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, already in small use in the Airport’s IT systems, could provide both the savings and performance benefits desired. In 2005, Munich Airport migrated a portion of its servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and in March 2006, it also migrated most of its desktop workstations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. Since September 2006, Munich Airport has equipped more than 30 servers and 40 desktops to run using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat-based systems are also used by Airport’s external mail gateways providing anti-virus and anti-spam functionality.

Munich Airport’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop solution plays an important role in airport operations, providing the control tower with technology to ensure smooth, automated aircraft dispatch and passenger-handling sequences. The system coordinates aircraft parking spaces, taking raw data from the radar system as input, and using this data to calculate aircraft arrival times and coordinate logistical activities on the ground.

For server and desktop administration, Munich Airport also uses Red Hat Network in conjunction with Red Hat Satellite Server. “Red Hat was also able to score with Red Hat Network against other Linux vendors, who had nothing comparable to offer at the time when the decision to select Red Hat was made,” said Hubert Bosl, Unix system administrator at Munich Airport and a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). “In the mid-run, we will also use Red Hat Network to manage the systems which still run on proprietary Unix. Moreover, this management tool was extremely important for our ISO 20000 certification.”

In 2007, Munich Airport served 34 million passengers and was ranked the 28th busiest airport worldwide. It aims to become the most efficient and attractive European airport hub by 2010 and expects that the implementation of Red Hat solutions will help expedite this goal. Currently, Munich Airport is also running another large-scale project together with Red Hat solutions. The main components of the Universal Display System in the Airport’s Terminal 1 has more than 1,400 display devices providing passengers with up-to-date information on arrivals and departures, and these servers are now running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Munich Airport is a worldwide market leader in many respects. We are therefore especially delighted that it deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly on its traffic-critical systems,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president, EMEA at Red Hat. “We are proud that the reliability, manageability and security of our operating system have contributed to the airport’s top rank for service and customer satisfaction.”

For more news 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 the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at 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.

FAST FACTS

Industry:Local government

Geography: Florida

Business Challenge: Running on a costly AIX server that required an expensive maintenance contract and was close to end-of-life, frustrating OCPS’s IT department and draining taxpayer money

Migration Path: SAP on AIX to SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Domain Name Server on Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: SAP running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: HP Superdome and HP BL460s and BL860s

Benefits: Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run business-critical SAP solutions gave OCPS a cost-effective, stable operating system that requires less maintenance and increases security

“Deploying Red Hat alleviated our concern about viruses and the number of penetration points, allowing us to focus on more productive IT initiatives. Running SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has given us the more secure and scalable operating system that we needed to stay within budget without sacrificing performance”

-Thomas McNabb, assistant director, device management, Orange County Public Schools

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND:Orange County Public Schools (OCPS), the public school district for Orange County, Florida, is the twelfth largest school district in the county and the fifth largest in Florida. Nearly 180,000 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade attend the district’s 180 schools. OCPS, which continues to be one of the fastest-growing school districts in the country, employs more than 25,000 faculty and staff members. In addition to traditional K-12 education, OCPS also offers an adult education system with six dedicated campuses, four special education-focused centers, a hospital/homebound program, and several alternative education centers. In total, OCPS boasts 190 locations across the county.The Information, Communications, and Technology Services (ICTS) department within OCPS is responsible for the entire school district’s computing and IT functionality, and must ensure that operations run smoothly, even on an increasingly tightened budget. The department runs and maintains about 1,100 servers spread out over 20 square miles and ensures that Web-based and client/server applications are accessible for students, parents, and staff.

OPPORTUNITY:Originally, OCPS almost exclusively utilized a mix of Microsoft Windows and an IBM mainframe. In 1998, the ICTS department migrated to SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions on AIX for administrative and operational processes and simultaneously brought in Red Hat solutions to run the domain name system (DNS).Shortly after going live with SAP 4.0b on AIX and Windows, the OCPS ICTS department ran into challenges with load balancing, viruses, and integration issues that had potential to cause greater problems. “If we had stayed with the mixed AIX and Windows environment, we would have been forced to rewrite a large amount of custom code,” said Thomas McNabb, assistant director, device management with OCPS. In addition, ICTS noticed memory leaks that caused application failure and unexpected downtime, and identified security weaknesses in the form of several penetration points where unauthorized persons could access data. The high cost of the required AIX hardware and software added to the level of frustration and led OCPS to search for a new operating system solution.

SOLUTIONS:deploying Red Hat Linux 9, and later Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on its DNS server, OCPS was fully satisfied with the benefits provided by the open source solution. Using Windows, the DNS server had to be rebooted every Tuesday with the latest Microsoft patches. With Red Hat solutions, few updates were needed and the server ran much more smoothly.This first deployment of Red Hat solutions in OCPS’s IT environment was so successful that ICTS decided to replace its troublesome AIX servers with two Linux servers to run SAP. When selecting a Linux solution, OCPS evaluated Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE. Ultimately, the ICTS department selected Red Hat solutions due to the company’s early success with Red Hat, and because the internal staff was comfortable using the solution.

“The migration from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was painless and seamless,” said McNabb. “In the previous environment, we were constantly concerned about making sure we had regular updates to protect against viruses, but with Red Hat we have no concern about that and we’ve had no issues with downtime.”

The smooth migration meant that end users were not impacted and were able to keep working effectively while the environment was migrated. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment allowed OCPS to migrate off costly AIX hardware and smoothly run SAP solutions, including human resource functions, purchasing, e-recruiting, and almost all other business functions for the district.

BENEFITS
OCPS’s ICTS department has enjoyed numerous benefits since migrating from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition to hardware cost savings, the department has saved valuable manpower resources in troubleshooting time, allowing IT professionals to work on other projects to maximize resources. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its DNS server, OCPS was able to save money by using a more energy-efficient box. Both the cost and time savings have been critical as the district is faced with a shrinking budget.

Another example of OCPS’s success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the district’s HP Superdome. The Superdome is partitioned into two portions – one that runs on Windows Data Center and one that runs an Oracle database with SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Windows side costs more than $25,000 per year to support and maintain, while the Red Hat side requires just one license and little necessary maintenance.

Red Hat’s patching system, which requires no reboots, has given the district a more stable operating system with less maintenance troubles. With no memory leaks and fewer restarts, the environment has been beneficial to both ICTS staff and end users. “We feel much more comfortable and secure in this environment,” said McNabb. “Deploying Red Hat alleviated our concern about viruses and the number of penetration points, allowing us to focus on more productive IT initiatives. Running SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has given us the more secure and scalable operating system that we needed to stay within our budget without sacrificing performance.”

The use of Red Hat solutions at OCPS has been so successful that the district is looking to move as many systems as possible to Red Hat. Many applications are being re-implemented so that they can be redesigned to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Applications, including spam filters and Web filters, now run on Red Hat. “Whenever someone wants to run a new piece of software, we ask if it runs on Linux. If the answer is no, we try to find an alternative so that we can stay Linux-based,” said McNabb. “When it comes to infrastructure systems that just have to run, we run it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Food retailer selects Red Hat Enterprise Linux as platform of choice; adds Red Hat Satellite Server, Red Hat Global File System and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Raleigh, NC — September 12, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Axfood, one of the largest food retailers in Scandinavia, has decided to standardize its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Axfood will use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a platform for its strategic SAP environment and will also use the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in the company’s core production environment.

Axfood has very high demands on availability and performance, said Rolf Berge, production manager at Axfood. We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is a cost-efficient and safe platform for us to grow on.

Axfood is also utilizing Red Hat Satellite Server and Red Hat Global File System. With Satellite Server, Axfood can administer and manage all of its systems centrally, reducing maintenance time, resources and costs. Updates and patches ensuring security and timeliness are also automatically sent to all systems through Red Hat Satellite Server. Axfood has also chosen to implement Red Hat Global File System to ensure high availability on its mission-critical systems.

“We are excited that Axfood has chosen Red Hat solutions,” said Magnus Svensson, Nordic manager for Red Hat. “Axfood is on the forefront of both business know-how and technology. This investment demonstrates that the company clearly understands the value of open source and Red Hat as a partner.”

Axfood has also implemented JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, used in the company’s core production environment. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is built on open source Java standards and is compatible with most operating systems, providing Axfood with a better in-depth view, and control over its development platform. Axfood has signed a subscription agreement with Red Hat which provides service, support and updates for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

For more information about Red Hat, visit http://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 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.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Application Server create ideal combination for SAP and other business-critical applications

RALEIGH, NC — August 14, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Swisscom IT Services, a subsidiary of the biggest Swiss telecommunications provider, is relying on the full suite of Red Hat solutions for its standardized Linux infrastructure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite, JBoss Enterprise Platform and additional Red Hat technologies are currently used by Swisscom IT Services as the platform for its “Simply Managed Linux” (SIMLUX) infrastructure, the highly flexible and effective infrastructure for the company’s data centres. Using SIMLUX, Swisscom supplies outsourcing services to more than 50 customers.

“We compared Red Hat and Novell solutions when searching for the best platform for SIMLUX,” said Bertrand Dafflon, Head of Linux and Middleware Engineering at Swisscom IT Services. “Red Hat’s open source strategy and focus on the reliability of its software tipped the scale in favor of Red Hat solutions. Also, our clients depend on the SAP installation in our Linux environment and with SAP’s certification on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, no alternative could really be seriously considered.”

“Xen-based virtualization is a good example of a feature that other vendors released prematurely without being able to provide the necessary stability and integration,” said Thomas von Steiger, System Engineer for Swisscom IT Services.”We, to the contrary, want to optimize our hardware utilization without endangering the reliability for our customers. Red Hat’s virtualization solution makes this possible.”

SIMLUX is a flexible IT infrastructure that Swisscom IT Services centrally manages using Red Hat Satellite Server on IBM blade servers. Swisscom IT Services has assigned data storage and the operating systems to a Storage Area Network (SAN) and enables the diskless blade servers to boot directly from the SAN, ensuring reliability and hardware independence. All software is installed in the RPM-format, developed by Red Hat, allowing Swisscom IT Services to set up a new website, application or database server in less than 30 minutes.

Currently Swisscom IT Services runs approximately 70 SAP, 40 Oracle, 90 Web and 100 application servers within the SIMLUX environment. The IT service provider also uses Red Hat Cluster Suite as a basis for 20 cluster nodes. Swisscom is now working on a SIMLUX extension, building a cluster of JBoss application servers in virtual machines on Red Hat Enterprise Linux so that systems are provisioned as virtual machines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Server enable architectures in a virtual infrastructure at an attractive price.

“The acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat was a stroke of luck for us,” said Dafflon. “This way we profit from the same outstanding price-performance ratio at the middleware layer as well as on the operating system level.”

“Customers like Swisscom IT Services provide magnificent proof that our long-term focus on reliability and manageability of our solutions pays off,” says Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager EMEA at Red Hat. “We are very pleased that our solutions meet Swisscom IT Services’ tough criteria in choosing its IT platform and that we can support the company in its continuing expansion of the SIMLUX-platform.”

To learn more 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 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, 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; 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: 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: Media

Geography: Germany

Goal: Migrate to Linux from UNIX and Windows NT in order to reduce costs and increase stability and performance

Solution: Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Software: SAP Applications & SAP Database
Hardware: Dell multiprocessor servers

Benefits: Lower cost. Impressive stability. Central systems management. Professional support.

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With a workforce of over 11,500 and revenue of more than 2.44 billion Euro in fiscal year 2004, Gruner + Jahr is Europe’s largest magazine publishing house. They have achieved this status by creating high quality products, and therefore will accept nothing less than the highest quality from their IT infrastructure.

Like most companies, Gruner + Jahr is faced with the challenge of having to achieve ever greater performance with ever fewer resources. Attracted by the low-cost of Linux, they began experimenting with Linux for web servers in 2000. Now they are operating numerous business-critical applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including e-procurement applications, SAP application servers, and database servers.

Certification of applications used by us as well as professional support are essential prerequisites for operating system platforms in our company. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also offers excellent performance. That’s what made our decision in favor of Red Hat easy.

– Achim Woost, Group Leader

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers benefits over both to UNIX and Windows NT

Prior to the introduction of Linux, Gruner + Jahr’s IT infrastructure was built around UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT. It soon became obvious that a migration to standards-based hardware and Linux would offer decisive benefits. Intel-compatible hardware from Dell and Linux offered a considerably lower price than their UNIX systems, while maintaining impressive performance. Additionally, Linux offered stability and security benefits when compared to Windows NT.

The decision over which Linux vendor would be best for Gruner + Jahr underwent careful consideration and passed through several stages before Red Hat was chosen. One of the main reasons Gruner + Jahr chose Red Hat was the high number of ISVs who had certified their applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Certification of applications used by us, as well as professional support, are essential prerequisites for operating system platforms in our company. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also offers excellent performance. That’s what made our decision in favor of Red Hat easy,” said Achim Woost, Group Leader at Gruner + Jahr.
SAP applications and databases port easily

Woost further explains, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a further advantage–we were able to transfer the scripting and monitoring systems from existing UNIX installations. Red Hat is clearly orientated towards business use.”

Gruner + Jahr first started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP on application servers in 2001. They chose applications servers as the first area of deployment because, even though they are mission-critical, a system failure could be tolerated more easily there than in database servers. However, the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux impressed the IT team at Gruner + Jahr, so they felt confident in porting their mission-critical SAP database servers to Enterprise Linux. More than ten Dell multiprocessor servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS are in use at Gruner + Jahr for SAP applications.

In order to keep their systems as efficient and reliable as possible, Gruner + Jahr makes use of Red Hat Network’s (RHN) Update Module, which is included in every subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHN makes it possible for Gruner + Jahr to maintain individual systems via a simple graphical user interface, prioritised messages, errata information, RPM dependency tests, and automatic updates.

Red Hat, Gruner + Jahr relationship is exactly right

Overall Woost sees his experience with Red Hat as extremely positive and plans to continue expansion of the existing installation. “We are very pleased that Red Hat is working hard on functions which are important for enterprise deployment. We have enough UNIX know-how in our team to basically run and maintain our Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation without a system house partner. If we do have problems, we are protected by our Enterprise Linux subscription, which includes support from Red Hat,” Woost explains. “All the advice we have received from Red Hat up to now has been extremely efficient and supportive, not to mention unbureaucratic. That’s how we like our relationships to our technology suppliers to be.”

Leading Natural Gas Distributor Achieves Impressive Performance Increase with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Spain, South America

Challenge: To simplify their multi-platform IT environment. To create a highly-scalable yet cost-effective environment in support of corporate-wide goal for massive growth. To quickly improve performance of mission-critical data warehouse system

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle 9i RAC, SAP BW, SAP SEM

Benefits: Reduced response time for user queries from minutes to seconds. Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) by a 4x factor. Reduced price per transaction by a 10x factor. Increased data warehouse performance as much 5,214%.

Founded in 1843, The Gas Natural Group distributes natural gas and generates electricity for more than 9.6 million customers in Spain, Latin America, and Italy. It is their goal to reach 13 million customers by 2008. The Gas Natural Group has multiple approaches for achieving this goal, but there is a common thread that runs throughout: They must maintain a solid financial position that will allow for profitable growth and shareholder renumeration.

The Gas Natural Group’s recent migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has had a major impact on this goal. There are now a variety of systems within The Gas Natural Group running on Enterprise Linux, including one of the most business critical systems: a corporate data warehouse powered by Oracle® Database 9i RAC and SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), and another system running SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM). The overall TCO (total cost of ownership) of their IT infrastructure has been reduced by a 1:4 factor and performance gains in their data warehouse have been as high as 5,214% in some queries.

Impressive Growth Creates Technology Problems

1. Complex Environment

In order to achieve their goal of 13 million customers by 2008, The Gas Natural Group knew that their IT environment must be easily and, perhaps more importantly, cost-effectively scalable. “With our highly varied infrastructure, our growth would have been vertical, which would require expensive, high-range machinery,” Checa explains. “We wanted to try a growth solution’s model based on cost-effective, flexible, horizontal growth software. We were very interested in the Grid computing model.”

2. Growth of Current Environment = Vertical = Expensive

In order to achieve their goal of 13 million customers by 2008, The Gas Natural Group knew that their IT environment must be easily and, perhaps more importantly, cost-effectively scalable. “With our highly varied infrastructure, our growth would have been vertical, which would require expensive, highrange machinery,” Checa explains.”We wanted to try a growth solution’s model based on cost-effective, flexible, horizontal growth software. We were very interested in the Grid computing model.”

3. Obsolete Data Warehouse System

At the same time, the data warehouse that The Gas Natural Group relied on was quickly becoming obsolete. “Answering time started to be excessive. We had to improve the platform performance because the current state not only created immediate problems, but also compromised future growth,” Checa said. “We had a whole list of projects related to the Data Warehouse that were stalled because of these performance problems and any type of future load increase was impossible.”

The choice of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was an easy one. Not only were they fully supported by Oracle and the main hardware vendors, but Red Hat also had a strong reputation of being focused on enterprise issues. We need a stable distribution with regular updates and top-level support. We found all that in Red Hat.

Linux Emerges as the Best Solution

In searching for a new solution, The Gas Natural Group needed to address all of these issues. “Our long term goal was to quickly implement flexible solutions in a Grid computing model and to utilize platform-indifferent environments throughout The Gas Natural Group,” Checa explains

The Gas Natural Group’s evaluations initially spanned a wide variety of environments, including UNIX® and Windows. However, they quickly determined that these solutions would not meet their requirements of flexibility, low-cost, and high-performance. A clustered Linux system represented a much lower cost than any other solution with a clear parallel in performance improvement. “We saw that Linux systems reached an excellent answering time, and to improve it, we would just be required to add more low-cost machines to the cluster,” Checa says.

“Linux also allowed us to avoid any sort of technological dependence on hardware and software providers,” Checa explains. “We try not to depend too heavily on any single thing, and that was one of the major attractions of Linux – we wouldn’t be ‘controlled’ by anyone. This allows us to maintain independence in our solutions and to modify the underlying layers without changing our critical applications.”

Oracle Support and Enterprise Commitment Make Red Hat an Easy Choice

Checa knew that Oracle would remain a constant in The Gas Natural Group’s IT environment, so he needed a Linux distribution that was highlycompatible with and fully-supported by Oracle. Similarly, Checa wanted a Linux provider that had close ties with the hardware community.

“The choice of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was an easy one,” he says.”Not only were they fully supported by Oracle and the main hardware vendors, but Red Hat also had a strong reputation of being focused on enterprise issues. We need a stable distribution with regular updates and top-level support. We found all that in Red Hat.”

We saw that Linux systems reached an excellent answering time, and to improve it, we would just be required to add more low-cost machines to the cluster.

Testing the Waters

“Because of problems with the data warehouse, we knew that the time was right to begin a major overhaul in that area. We had an open door and a perfect situation in which to carry out a concept trial,” Checa says. “To be clear, our interest in a Linux migration was not focused solely on the data warehouse project. It was simply a perfect place to start.”

One of the key things The Gas Natural Group needed to determine was that point at which adding more machines would not increase the system performance proportionally. So The Gas Natural Group performed an extensive concept trial in which various tests were run to assess the viability of this new system in terms of performance and strength. The trial was as close as possible to a true replication of a production environment, including the same data volume and identical queries, but without using indexes. Tests were conducted to validate the following points:

• The feasibility of a Linux multi-node environment display
• Basic Oracle Database 9i RAC functions
• Involvement of software and hardware settlement.
• Platform scalability model according to CPUs scalability per node and number of nodes
• Private interconnected channel: Gigabit.
• Identification of management tools
• Linux and Oracle Database 9i RAC technology knowledge by hardware manufacturers and possible channel support
• Determination of our current queries model parallel level
• Versatile disc shared to data replacement

The introduction of open source elements into The Gas Natural Group IT environment was gradual and not without some bumps. “We started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.2.1, and due to the high requirements of our environment, we experienced some problems with supported memory, number of CPUs, number of discs, and discs room management,” Checa says. “Fortunately, these limitations were resolved by a simple reconfiguration. Now, the distribution has matured a lot, and we have no problems with releases right out of the box.”

In addition, The Gas Natural Group delivered Linux-specific training to the teams in charge of Linux platform management. This has allowed them to solve the majority of issues quickly in-house, and according to Checa, has proven invaluable.

Our TCO has been reduced by a 1:4 factor and transaction prices have been reduced by a 1:10 factor.

Results Leave No Room for Doubt

Following 2,318 database consultations, The Gas Natural Group concluded that their Linux based systems would scale both horizontally and vertically, and would do so best with a heavy load. They found that two-CPU machines performed best and that stagnation during linear scalability was not an issue.

Performance results were more than impressive – the data warehouse solution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle9i RAC reduced the answering time by 5,214%! Regarding SAP SEM, Checa’s team realized a 2x factor improvement. This increased performance was coupled with cost benefits. “Our TCO has been reduced by a 1:4 factor and transaction prices have been reduced by a 1:10 factor,” Checa boasts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Offers Endless Possibilities

When asked about the future, Checa says, “We are currently thinking about converting the Linux/Oracle environments into an adaptable and flexible data processing center, which would be as close to Grid computing as possible. Within this framework, Red Hat and other open source technologies will play a leading role.” Much of the upcoming growth at The Gas Natural Group will be based on an acquisition of small machines whose role may change depending on the business necessities. Checa believes that open source technology will be essential to The Gas Natural Group’s ability to properly manage, supply, monitor, and display their IT environments.

“We are committed to the openness provided by our Linux environment, in which stability and reliability are inherent. The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems allows us to maintain the highest technical performance with great financial reductions,” Checa says. “The general feeling at The Gas Natural Group is that Red Hat offers a properly supported, solid product, suitable for the most demanding enterprise environments.”

IT management simplified at Polish coal mines

Industry: Technology, specializing in mining
companies

Geography: Poland

Challenge: Outdated and disjointed IT infrastructure created performance and maintenance issues for Polish coal mines. COIG needed to renew the aging IT infrastructure based on SCO Unix across 50 remote locations, while increasing functionality and reducing maintenance downtime.

Solution: Centralized server, hosted at single location and containing shared database.
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Applications: Oracle database, SZYK and SAP ERP applications, Apache Web server and Zope application server

Benefits: The move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered reduced maintenance and purchase costs, greater functionality, simpler system management, and increased and faster performance.

This story is available in the following languages: [  ] 

Background

COIG is a major outsourcing company and independent software vendor (ISV) in Poland, responsible for managing several major IT contracts. Among these contracts, COIG maintains the IT infrastructure for Poland’s entire coal mine network. The company is based in Katowice and operates with 500 employees as a limited company and with majority ownership by the government. In addition to providing IT consultancy and administration services, COIG is also an ISV developing its own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.

There are approximately 50 coal mines in Poland administered by COIG. This includes Kompania Weglowa, Poland’s largest mining holding and the biggest mine in Eastern Europe.

Opportunity

For the last ten years, each coal mine has had its own separate network with individual IBM servers running SCO Unix, IBM AIX and Informix databases. In the past couple of years, the mines have experienced serious stability issues, making the application servers extremely unreliable.

The infrastructure also required that all IT administration, including system updates, maintenance, and support, had to be done locally at the coal mines. With servers in remote locations, any maintenance problems required an engineer to travel between the sites, resulting in long downtime and costly repairs.

The mines were dependent on an outdated and disjointed IT infrastructure that created performance and maintenance issues. The situation degenerated to the point that the coal mines had no choice but to increase functionality and reliability by upgrading their systems. They needed to renew the ageing IT infrastructure based on SCO Unix across 50 remote locations, while increasing functionality and reducing maintenance downtime and costs.

Solution

VDEL Ltd., based in Vienna, Austria, is a Red Hat dedicated channel partner serving customers throughout Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia (CER). Since April 2005, the master distributor has supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions with services and training. VDEL has been working with COIG for a number of years, and was in a position to advise them about the lower cost, scalability, and reliability benefits of deploying an open source solution instead of Unix. VDEL’s technology understanding and experience, coupled with a strong understanding of the local market, enabled the outsourcing company to take full advantage of the opportunities created by the implementation of a new infrastructure based on open source technology.

After looking at all the major Linux distributions and an holding an intensive evaluation session, COIG opted for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Having evaluated other Linux distributions, it was clear that Red Hat provides extensive and probably the best support to its customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a proven track record with stability. Red Hat also has an established ecosystem in terms of partner support, which is very important for us,” said Piotr Kral, IT Manager, COIG.

To simplify the maintenance of differing IT systems, COIG chose to host a central data center for the entire coal mine network at its head office in Katowice. The central server system runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a combination of 20 IBM xSeries and BladeCenter servers, and will soon be extended to include an additional five IBM Open Power blades. The deployment is managed by the Red Hat Network, currently running as a hosted service with the Management Module enabled.

Benefits

The Red Hat Network Management Module supports the enterprise administration of the whole Linux infrastructure at COIG. It features highly scalable system grouping facilities for management tasks, and role-based administration for policies and permissions. It also features scheduling of actions, such as software and security updates for specific time windows, for easy manageability as the organization grows. The Management Module provides the functionality needed to help COIG lower costs and increase productivity immediately.

The new servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux are able to host a range of business applications, including SAP, Oracle, Apache web server, Zope application server, and SZYK. SYZK is an ERP application developed by COIG and used by the coal mines for a number of operations, including stock control, accounting, sales support and purchasing.

The users at the coal mines connect to the centralized server to access these shared applications and databases. Having a centralized server enables COIG to administer its Red Hat deployment easily and reduces time spent on system maintenance. Tracking stock in the databases created an unexpected cost saving. The new system more accurately tracks and accounts for coal, significantly reducing theft and loss.

COIG is looking to further expand its Red Hat deployment by upgrading its Red Hat Network subscription to the Satellite Server, which will provide even greater functionality and customisation. COIG also plans on expanding its SAP deployment by installing the SAP portal.

“We had major stability issues before, and the application server was not functioning properly at all,” said Kral. “We have experienced significant improvement in the performance at our new centralised data center. The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux went very smoothly, and when we realized that the Linux systems reached an excellent response time, we just had to match that with low-cost hardware.”