Dubai, U.A.E. – – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Emirates Group IT, operating under the brand name Mercator, a global provider of business technology solutions, delivering business transformation, process improvement and return on investment to more than 100 customers in over five continents, has standardized its IT operations on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware after a three month pilot program..

In an effort to simplify its datacenter and reduce the total cost of operations for web server technologies, the Emirates Group migrated approximately 80% of its comparable servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat’s middleware solution portfolio offers a certified and supported platform for other open source technologies, a critical factor for the Emirates Group when deciding to standardise on open source technologies.

“Migrating to a new standard can be highly complex in an organisation the size of the Emirates Group/Mercator,” said Patrick Naef, Divisional Senior Vice President, Emirates Group IT and head of Mercator said. “Change management and confidence in vendor support are critical factors to successfully adopt a new standard- this is why we chose Red Hat.”

The Emirates Group IT/Mercator supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies.

The Emirates Group IT / Mercator strategy to migrate to JBoss was to first divert new applications for deployment on this platform. This allowed Emirates Group IT to quickly build capability, before applications were promoted to the production environment. The migration occurred seamlessly with Red Hat providing training and support to the Emirates Group IT department to ensure a more gradual adoption process.

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

About Emirates Group IT / Mercator
Emirates Group IT supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies. The IT infrastructure supports a diverse and complex business from the Airline, to Cargo Handling, Hotels, Travel Agents, Tours and Catering.

© 2009 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the Shadowman logo and JBoss are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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

COMPANY: Whole Foods Market

CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Consumer

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

HARDWARE: 75 HP x86 servers, 16 virtual servers

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation of Peru Implemented Zimbra Collaboration Suite on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Achieve Greater Scalability, Security and Productivity

FAST FACTS

Company: Ministerio de Vivienda: Peru’s Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation

Industry: Government

Partner: Software Libre Andino

Geography: Peru

Business Challenge: Needed to replace the existing client/server e-mail and collaboration platform to achieve improved scalability, security, productivity, and to reduce costs

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Alfresco Zimlet, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Dell Quad Core Server, 3.0 Ghz, 8GB ram, 1.5 Tb. Fully redundant

Migration Path: From a client/server system running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise to Zimbra Collaboration Suite, a Web-based email technology, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and utilizing Alfresco Zimlet

Benefits: Improved communication and collaboration among users and provided a single integrated calendar and email solution; increased access to e-mail, agendas, and documents independently from physical equipment; reduced IT administration and support costs by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

“The high level of know-how and expertise of Red Hat’s consultants, coupled with Red Hat’s local presence, were decisive in making the decision to secure consulting rather than performing these tasks internally.”
– Jaime Honores Coronado, managing director of the General Department of Statistics and Information Systems, Ministerio de Vivienda.

Download the case study PDF

BACKGROUND
Ministerio de Vivienda, Peru’s Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation, is a government agency whose goal is to promote and improve the development of housing, water, and sanitation services throughout Peru by facilitating access to adequate housing and basic services, facilitating the management, growth, preservation, maintenance, and protection of population centers.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Building community in Peru is a key objective for the Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation. And technology—in the form of email, calendaring, messaging, and collaboration solutions—has become an essential tool in achieving that objective. The Ministry realized it was outgrowing its communications infrastructure, and the IT team began planning for the task of replacing its aging client/server email and calendar systems.

The Ministry’s aging and limited email communications platform was based on SUSE Enterprise Linux with Postfix and Horde for Web customers. Users relied on different versions of Microsoft Outlook to check their email, resulting in challenges due to the platform age and configuration. The platform also caused the need to add an exclusive server allocated to this service. The Ministry’s main problem consisted of the lack of scalability and security, and limited flexibility in management and constrained the user interface.

SOLUTION
In early 2009, the Ministry made the decision to evaluate solutions to replace its expensive proprietary software with lower cost, open source alternatives for a Web-based email solution with integrated email, calendar, and messaging.

The Ministry worked with Software Libre Andino, a Red Hat and Zimbra partner in Peru, in the evaluation process to replace its outdated systems.

“We needed a quick-to-deploy and easy-to-manage solution. We assessed several proposals from various vendors, among them, SUSE Linux and Microsoft Windows-based solutions, but we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and Alfresco, for the cost savings, simplified administration, reliability, and quick implementation,” said Jaime Honores Coronado, managing director of the General Department of Statistics and Information Systems, Ministerio de Vivienda.

The entire project consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Zimbra Collaboration Suite, including the migration of each account, installation, configuration, start-up, technical, and end-user training. Email accounts were configured with a 900 MB per user quota.

With Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as the primary development and deployment platform for the open source email platform. Zimbra Collaboration Suite integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, voice over IP (VoIP), and online document authoring into a single application with a rich browser-based interface, and is compatible with all standard email clients, and integrates easily with third-party applications.

The Ministry was able to deploy the Alfresco Zimlet, a tool created by Zimbra community members to allow a simple way for employees to store email attachments on the Alfresco server, and in turn select documents from the Alfresco server and attach them to a Zimbra email. This tool created by the open source community makes it easy for government agencies or companies to invest in multiple open source products to meet their needs.

Although the Ministry’s technical staff had minimal experience with a web-based email technology, Red Hat Consulting facilitated a faster implementation and provided the technical staff with the knowledge and tools to effectively manage the new platform.

“The high level of know-how and expertise of Red Hat’s consultants, coupled with Red Hat’s local presence, were decisive in making the decision to secure consulting rather than performing these tasks internally. Red Hat, through partner Software Libre Andino, contributed to service deployment, technical, and end-user training, and the migration of old e-mail accounts, allowing our team to quickly become experts,” said Coronado.

BENEFITS
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite e-mail platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux immediately improved the productivity and coordination of the Ministry’s employees by enhancing collaboration and sharing of work agendas.

“We have achieved a larger physical distribution of our users who are now capable of accessing their e-mail accounts wherever they are. Our investment project coordinators can perform Web queries of their local e-mail, manage their work agendas, and refer to the document management system, all in one single platform,” said Coronado.

During the evaluation, the Ministry weighed Microsoft Exchange against Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and determined that the latter would account for 30 percent savings compared with the former. Zimbra’s own studies show similar TCO savings.

Saving the government money is definitely one reason for the switch to Zimbra, but another important factor in its decision to deploy open source solutions is that open source platforms allow users to easily integrate and build new solutions.

The Ministry’s future plans contemplate expanding the use of the solution by integrating it with other applications and platforms. Engineer Honores Coronado said, “We hope to continue our commitment to open source solutions and trust in Red Hat as the ideal partner for our projects.”

“The Zimbra and Red Hat solution provides a cost-effective platform that allows for greater efficiency and a unified email and collaboration platform,” said Coronado. “And we also benefited from significant cost savings with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Reduced Costs By Migrating Its Web Application Platform and Building a Customer Information Portal on JBoss Enterprise Middleware

FAST FACTS

Customer: Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg)

Industry: Printing & Publishing, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering

Geography: U.S., EMEA

Business Challenge: Establish a new customer specific portal to enhance its customer relationship and provide internal business units with valuable customer insight; Evaluate and deploy an application server platform for its Java-based environment

Solution: With the help of Red Hat Consulting, Heidelberg built an interactive customer portal using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle 10g database, SAP R/3, Autonomy search engine, Interwoven TeamSite 6.5 (CMS), Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-Bit

Hardware: Virtualized servers and F5 Load balancer

Migration path: Proprietary portal platform and application server to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Benefits: Improved customer web presence with a central portal that increased services and information available, provided ability to use applications based on open standards in order to interact better with customers, suppliers and partners, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

Download the PDF

BACKGROUND
Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg), the world’s leading solution provider for the print media industry, built an interactive customer portal, www.MyHeidelberg.com, using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to create an interactive site to enhance its customer relationships and provide a unified global brand presence. With the successful portal project, Heidelberg has since migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, in order to reduce costs, and increase the performance of its web applications.

Based in Heidelberg, Germany, with development and production sites in seven countries and around 250 sales offices across the globe, the company supports around 200,000 customers worldwide. Heidelberg’s printing products and software enable its customers to print high volumes, quickly, at high quality and in color at an affordable price and convert the printed material into the desired format.

Heidelberg, with a global market share for sheetfed offset printing machines of more than 40 percent, develops and produces precision printing presses, units for imaging printing-plates, postpress equipment, and software for integrating all the print shop processes that produce everyday items such as brochures, magazines, folding carton boxes and product labels. It also provides general and consulting services ranging from spare parts and consumables to the sale of re-marketed equipment, in addition to education and training at the Heidelberg Print Media Academy.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Heidelberg launched a corporate-wide web initiative to develop a strategic architecture and customer-centric web portal, to strengthen customer relationships, consolidate information and services, provide easier access to information, and increase revenues through improved communications with customers.

“Previously, we had a solid web presence for our customers, but it was more of an online brochure and lacked interactivity,” said Mathias Berg, Director, Global Web Systems at Heidelberg.”

Heidelberg also anticipates the ability to lower its costs by offering more self-service options, reducing the effort and cycle time for developing and deploying new services and applications, and simplifying support and operation of its applications and infrastructure. It also wanted the new portal to provide its customers with a central and secure repository for sharing data and communication.

“With MyHeidelberg.com, we have created a unified, central customer portal that can be rolled out and adapted to local markets, thus increasing our interaction and providing us with valuable customer insight,” said Michael Neff, chief information officer.

SOLUTION
In order to further its edge in the market, provide customers with more features, and enhance its web-presence, Heidelberg decided to evaluate a number of proprietary and open source solutions for the customer portal project, MyHeidelberg.com, in addition to an application platform solution to set up and restructure its global web presence

“In addition to JBoss, we evaluated proprietary and open source solutions, but we selected JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform due to its ability to deliver an agile, reusable framework, coupled with the benefits of open source to reduce costs, and freed us from vendor lock-in,” said Berg, “Although we had limited open source experience, we made our decision confidently due to JBoss’ established technology platform, flexible architecture, highly regarded enterprise support, and the expertise of Red Hat Consulting.”

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, based on open standards, was selected for its ability to meet the key requirements of the project, including: the ability to integrate seamlessly into the existing infrastructure based on VMWare ESX 3.0 and Oracle 10g, and the content management systems: Windows Server 2003 and Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

The MyHeidelberg.com customer portal needed to be flexible and reliable in order to adapt to Heidelberg’s local websites requirements, while at the same time, it had to scale for a steadily increasing number of users, which initially tallied more than 5,500 registered users and has been growing monthly by approximately 5-10 percent.

At an early stage of the customer portal project, Heidelberg made the decision to work with Red Hat Consulting in order to facilitate knowledge transfer, have a closer relationship with JBoss, and to have access to the engineers and developers behind the open source technology. Heidelberg’s IT teams in the U.S. and Germany worked with Red Hat consultants to enable a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure.

“We had a great experience with Red Hat Consulting,” said Berg, “The Red Hat Consultants worked closely with our IT teams in the U.S. and Germany to ensure a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure, by mentoring our team, demonstrating product features, providing documentation, and ensuring our team was prepared for success after the engagement. We view Red Hat Consulting as a trusted advisor to our team.”

“The MyHeidelberg.com portal, based on JBoss, creates a true value-add for our customers, and has enabled us to grow our business and serve our customers in a better way. MyHeidelberg.com provides a centralized web portal with tailored information for each customer with one gateway, one URL, one password, and one login.”

After successful testing and fine-tuning, the production environment and infrastructure for the MyHeidelberg.com customer portal went live.

“We now offer our customers an interactive portal, that can be adapted to every local market and is integrated with more than 45 websites worldwide.” said Berg.

Through back-end integration with ERP and CRM systems, Heidelberg enables portal users to securely interact with their data, such as service information, view and retrieve brochures, product specs, and account data, easily through one gateway. Additionally, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform runs on Windows Server 2003 and collaborates with a content management system based on Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

Heidelberg decided to expand its collaboration with JBoss when it decided to migrate its complete internet presence, www.heidelberg.com, from a proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to set-up restructure its entire global web presence.

“Based on our successful deployment of JBoss Enterprise Portal for the MyHeidelberg.com project, and knowing that we had a stable, reliable, and fully supported solution, we quickly and confidently made the decision to migrate our global enterprise web applications from our previous proprietary solution to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform,” said Berg.

BENEFITS
Heidelberg’s use of JBoss for its customer portal and web application server has resulted in; improved customer web presence with a central portal, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

“All over the world, the name Heidelberg is synonymous with state-of-the art technology, top quality, and closeness to the customer, so we set the benchmark high for ourselves and we expect the same level of quality from all of our vendors,” said Neff. “JBoss absolutely delivered all we needed, by providing high availability, performance and scalability. Due to the Red Hat subscription model, we realized signification cost savings, faster ROI, and freedom from vendor lock-in.”

The introduction of JBoss has helped simplify IT administration: with only one portal infrastructure to manage, one platform and one brand for the company’s Web presence, helping to strengthen the brand of Heidelberg. The new self-service capabilities provided by the MyHeidelberg.com portal give customers fast, convenient access to critical information whenever they need it, increasing customer satisfaction and the credibility of Heidelberg as a valuable business partner.

“In addition to the enhancements for our customers, the MyHeidelberg.com portal based on JBoss Enterprise Portal, offers valuable customer insight and behavioral information that is being leveraged internally by our marketing, sales, and product development teams, which will allow us to make informed and targeted business decisions and increase company sales,” said Berg.

The cost of developing and deploying new services and applications has been reduced now that Heidelberg has a simple way to integrate content and information into the portal; the IT team can index content and expose it through the search capabilities; and can manage single sign-on. Also, JBoss has drastically reduced costs, as the subscription model has freed Heidelberg from the cost-constraints associated with proprietary software licensing and support.

“We were especially impressed with the performance, product features of JBoss and the quality of support, advice, and knowledge contributed by our Red Hat consultants,” said Neff, “The JBoss Enterprise Portal and JBoss Enterprise Application Platforms went into production and performed extremely well, and this is a great benefit for our customers and internal users, who can now access their data securely and without restrictions.”

“JBoss was always willing to work with us, as partners, to ensure the success of the project,” said Berg, “A prime example is when we identified the need for a unique feature for our customer portal, with any other vendor, we would have had to develop a custom feature ,with no vendor support. But with JBoss, we discussed our need, and they worked with us develop a new feature into the product, that will be fully supported by JBoss. This kind of commitment and performance is something that I have never seen before, from any technology vendor.”

COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company)

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: US

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Existing proprietary middleware platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

MIGRATION PATH: Proprietary middleware platform to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform: 28 bands (1 band = 32 CPUs), JBoss Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Consulting, Amentra

HARDWARE: 50 Dell servers

BENEFITS: Reduced the total cost of ownership by more than 30%, throughput gain of 3X with utilization down to 1/3rd of the current platform, overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

Download the PDF case study

COMPANY BACKGROUND
GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) is the third-largest private passenger auto insurer in the United States based on the latest 12 months written premium. GEICO provides auto insurance coverage for nearly 9 million policyholders and insures more than 14.4 million vehicles.

In addition to auto insurance, GEICO also offers customers insurance for their motorcycles and homes. Commercial auto insurance, boat, ATV, RV, personal umbrella protection and life insurance are also available.

GEICO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Berkshire Hathaway group of companies, is rated A++ for financial stability by A.M. Best Company and ranks at the top of several national customer satisfaction surveys. For more information about GEICO, go to www.geico.com.

BUSINESS AND/OR TECHNICAL CHALLENGE
In 2007, GEICO’s enterprise architecture team recognized they were facing several challenges with their existing proprietary middleware platform. The platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.

The GIECO IT team identified the following challenges with their existing proprietary solution:

- Cost – GEICO’s license agreement was a “time bound licensing agreement” related to the number of proprietary application servers deployed during the time frame. Since GEICO experienced significant growth during this time frame, the cost to “true up” and pay for the additional licenses was significant.

- Performance – When GEICO upgraded their standard Java Development Kit (JDK) from version 1.4 to 1.5 on their existing proprietary platform, they did not see any improvements in machine (CPU/Memory) usage or application response time. After eight weeks of performance testing and tuning, they were finally able to configure the upgraded proprietary platform to match the earlier version’s performance. The upgrade was not only cumbersome but was also expensive since they had to engage external consultants to accomplish the upgrade.

- Memory leaks – The previous proprietary deployment also experienced unexplained memory leak(s). Developer load and memory testing returned misleading results unless the developer knew how to work around the leaks and complete certain types of tests.

- Documentation/Support – GEICO found it challenging to identify and understand the Java API in the current proprietary environment due to lack of documentation. They also had challenges in acquiring tools to identify memory issues, debug leaks, etc. For every instance of a high severity issue such as memory leak, external consultants needed to be engaged to identify and fix the problem.

- Staging – Due to these challenges, some of the GEICO development teams adopted JBoss technologies for their developer workstations and began building applications using JBoss. This dual use strategy became complex and redundant for IT Operations as they needed to make configuration changes on both the proprietary and JBoss platforms.

VENDOR SELECTION PROCESS
GEICO conducted extensive research and identified Sun’s GlassFish and Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware as potential solutions that were suitable for GEICO’s application and infrastructure. JBoss Enterprise Middleware was selected based on its’ market share and extensive support from Red Hat. GEICO conducted a proof-of-concept, installing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in a cluster of servers (POC environment). Performance and load tests were conducted using various tools for a selected business application on both platforms.

The JBoss results from these tests were astonishing. A few highlights include:
- User page transition time decreased as much as 19 seconds using JBoss

- During the proof-of-concept 1,749 additional business processes were created on the JBoss platform

- On the same hardware and environment, JBoss required 70% less CPU resources than the current platform

- Performance tuning with JBoss was accomplished in 40 man hours versus 1440 man hours for the existing proprietary platform

GEICO also conducted multiple reference checks with organizations that were of similar size and industry. The reference checks were extremely positive about Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

SOLUTION
The solution consisted of subscriptions for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and the initial deployment environment consisted of 540 processors. An additional 350 were added at a later date. A plan was put together to aggressively migrate 2 out of 3 mission critical applications in a time span of 3 months. GEICO also utilized a JBoss Technical Account Manager (TAM) who was dedicated to supporting GEICO’s specific needs during their switch to JBoss.

BENEFITS
By implementing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, GEICO was able to reduce the total cost of ownership by more than 30%.

When compared to the previous proprietary platform, GEICO also experienced throughput gains of 3x, and a 2/3 reduction in utilization. The overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

RED HAT SUPPORT, TRAINING, AND CONSULTING SERVICES LEVERAGED
One of the challenges for GEICO was the time bound migration process. GEICO’s middleware team was trained on JBoss for a week. With the support of Red Hat and Amentra (a Red Hat company), they successfully migrated the initial 2 applications and were able to migrate the 3rd application as well. This was a clear demonstration of expertise in Red Hat Consulting services and the ability of GEICO’s middleware team to adapt rapidly to the new JBoss environment.

ADVICE FOR OTHER COMPANIES FACING A SIMILAR BUSINESS CHALLENGE
“Open-source does not translate to unsupported. Don’t be afraid of change. GEICO had initial concerns about support, stability and deploying open-source software for its mission critical applications, but the market maturity and the premium level of enterprise support offered by Red Hat made it very easy to make the change to an open source environment. If your organization has been slow to consider adopting open-source solutions, they may lose a competitive advantage that can be gained based on lower cost of ownership and utilization of efficient/best of breed open source products.

COMPANY: American Family Mutual Insurance Company

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Property and Casualty Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

MIGRATION PATH: ad hoc monitoring solutions to JBoss Operations Network

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

HARDWARE: Intel based Dell x86 commodity servers

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY:Allianz Australia Insurance Limited (Allianz)

CATEGORY: Carved Out Costs

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: Australia

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

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

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

HARDWARE: IBM System z10 mainframe, HP ProLiant servers

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Local Government

Geography: The Netherlands

Opportunity: Renew part of the city’s IT infrastructure and create a future-proof platform for its heterogeneous environment

Migration Path: Windows and Unix with small amounts of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, including virtualization and clustering

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Satellite Server, Red Hat Consulting, Basis Registratie Systeem (BRS)

Hardware: 6 Dell 1750, 1850, 1950, and 2950 servers

Benefits: Run more applications with less hardware, enable cost- and space-savings, provide scalability, offer capacity to support future growth and deliver disaster-recovery capabilities

“One of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization is that we can install and roll out a new application in 60 minutes to all of our systems, compared to four hours per system previously.”
– Hennie Stam, Senior System Administrator, DS+V Division at City of Rotterdam.

Download the case study [ PDF ]

BACKGROUND
The City of Rotterdam, known for its famous harbour and large city council, is located in the Netherlands and boasts over 600,000 inhabitants. The Maas river is at the heart of the City of Rotterdam’s economical development and is responsible for the shipment and handling of over 350 million tons of goods per year.

Rotterdam’s City Council operates a number of autonomous services, including Dienst Stedenbouw en Volkshuisvesting (DS+V), an organization responsible for town planning, housing, and traffic in the city. The City Council employs nearly 16,000 civil servants, with about 1,000 of these workers making up the DS+V division. DS+V’s IT systems are managed by the Information, Policy, and Procurement department, which includes an IT management team that is responsible for handling the entire IT environment, including the proprietary, UNIX, and Linux systems.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The DS+V IT management team first implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 in 2004 for a small number of specific Linux applications, but was primarily running its applications on a Microsoft and UNIX platform. In total, 40 Dell and HP Servers were running its Microsoft, UNIX, and Linux applications, 10 of which were Linux-based.

As the IT team began developing a new administration and registration application, called Basic Registration System (BRS), for Rotterdam’s real estate activities, the department initiated an evaluation of the existing platform that included the assessment of various alternatives, including Linux. The IT team was looking for a cost-effective solution and a future-proof platform for its heterogeneous IT environment.

SOLUTION
During its assessment of alternative IT solutions, the City Council of Rotterdam’s DS+V IT team ran a pilot during the summer of 2007 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, specifically using the solution’s virtualization capabilities. The pilot aimed to assess the benefits of virtualization for the organization. The IT team compared Red Hat and VMware’s virtualization solutions and discovered that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5’s virtualization capabilities best fit its requirements and was the most cost-effective choice in terms of licensing costs.

After a successful pilot, the IT team migrated its servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and began using the solution’s virtualization capabilities running 10 virtual machines on its 6 Dell servers. Key drivers that led the team to move to a virtual environment included the benefits of less hardware, greater independence in software, the ability to support future growth, and space and cost-savings.

The DS+V department of the City Council of Rotterdam additionally runs Red Hat Global File System (GFS) for storage virtualization. The clustering capabilities of the solution equip the IT team with the ability to eliminate the impact of the fallout of physical servers. It also allows the organisation to optimize installation and patching of applications, improve the efficiencies of SAN resources, and simplify back-up and disaster-recovery systems.

The department’s IT team also selected Red Hat Satellite Server to optimize the management and deployment of both physical and virtual machines in its network. Satellite Server enables the IT team to download and distribute patches and fixes to exiting applications, and advance the user and license-management capabilities in comparison to its previous solution.

BENEFITS
Red Hat solutions have delivered heightened performance and availability for the City Council of Rotterdam’s DS+V IT team’s IT infrastructure. “Performance levels are excellent and the availability is 100 percent because the machines are no longer dependent on the uptime of the hardware,” said Hennie Stam, Senior System Administrator, DS+V Division at City of Rotterdam.

The IT group has seen cost savings since migrating to Red Hat solutions. The new setup requires less hardware, which has decreased the size of the server farm and the space required for the servers. “With our previous solution, the high number of physical servers would soon force us to look for additional space to accommodate the new servers, putting more pressure on our budget,” said Stam. “Additionally, the DS+V has managed to save on energy costs by decreasing the number of physical servers since migrating to Red Hat solutions.”

By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization capabilities, the DS+V, as part of the City Council of Rotterdam, has succeeded in saving on licensing costs. The Linux environment has given the IT team more flexibility in terms of testing and deploying new applications, and adding users to the network. “One of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and its virtualization capabilities is that we can install and roll out a new application in 60 minutes to all of our systems, compared to four hours per system previously,” said Stam.

“We were dedicated to successfully and rapidly roll out Linux and virtualization across the organization. Therefore, we chose direct support from Red Hat during the implementation phase by hiring a Red Hat consultant to guide us through the whole process to educate the IT managers that are responsible for our Linux environment,” said Stam. “We are satisfied with Red Hat’s support and responsiveness to our specific needs. The process was smooth and gave us a reliable platform to build up our Linux infrastructure to its current state.”

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

Industry: Education

Geography: United Kingdom

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

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

Solution:

Hardware – HP ProLiant Servers

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Discount Tire Company

Industry: Consumer – Automotive Retail

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

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

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

Hardware: 50 Dell x86 servers

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

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

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

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

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Hong Kong

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

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

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

Hardware: Intel Xeon based servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: EnerNOC

Industry: Energy

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Improving the efficiency of its demand-response network that helps manage energy supply and demand

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Benefits: Streamlined the complex workflows involved in aligning the needs of utilities/grid operators to avoid blackouts during peak energy-consumption times and the desire of energy users to generate revenues through better managing their energy use.

“It would be very difficult for us to compete successfully without jBPM. We could not deliver our solutions nearly as efficiently and cost-effectively in this extremely aggressive market without it.”
–Ed Kusnitz, lead platform engineer, EnerNOC

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As a leading provider of technology-enabled energy management solutions, EnerNOC is changing the way the world uses power. Through the use of advanced technologies, EnerNOC helps utilities and grid operators maintain the delicate balance between supply and demand.

EnerNOC’s demand-response solution is based upon an innovative business model. It pays the more than 4,000 business and industrial organizations in its network to reduce their electricity usage during times of high demand. This decreases stress on the electric grid, preserving the reliability of a region’s electricity resources and helping to prevent blackouts and brownouts while also alleviating the need to rely on fossil fuel-burning power plants. By acting as the middleman between energy providers and consumers, EnerNOC plays an important role in allocating what can be a scarce resource, especially when weather conditions, problems with the electrical grid, or other events create unusual demand or cause unanticipated disruptions in the flow of power.

EnerNOC is perfectly positioned for success due to three major trends: first, demand for energy is rapidly outpacing supply; secondly, due to regulatory and community concerns, it is difficult to build new regional power plants located close to energy users; and third, emerging regulatory trends on both national and local levels are changing utility business models with incentives that promote efficient energy practices.

EnerNOC is growing exponentially. At the end of 2007, EnerNOC had approximately 1,100 megawatts under management across approximately 2,200 individual sites. It ended 2008 with more than 2,000 megawatts under management across more than 4,000 sites.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
EnerNOC’s demand-response solution consists of three distinct steps: first, a customer sends out a request for additional power so as to alleviate stress on the grid or in response to high wholesale energy prices. EnerNOC takes that request and initiates actions across its network – turning out lights, turning on generators – to enable participants to follow through on their commitments to conserve power when requested. This in turn allows EnerNOC to fulfill its contracts with its customers to help reduce demand on the grid.

Prior to 2005, EnerNOC’s depended heavily on manual processes. Although certain procedures were automated, a great deal of human intervention was required to ensure that the workflow proceeded seamlessly. EnerNOC saw an opportunity to both slash operational costs, and provide greater customer service.

EnerNOC also saw an opportunity to position itself for future success. “Our strategic vision is to build highly scalable, best-of-breed technologies to support a comprehensive suite of energy management solutions and services,” said Terry Sick, vice president of product development and engineering at EnerNOC. “To accomplish this, we needed supporting technologies based upon open standards and interoperability.”

SOLUTION
Choosing the operating system was easy: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, due to its market dominance and technical leadership, was the obvious choice. And after investigating all the options for business process management (BPM) on the market, EnerNOC decided that the JBoss jBPM solution was the best choice.

JBoss jBPM is a JBoss Enterprise Framework that delivers workflow, business process management (BPM), and process orchestration in a scalable and flexible product footprint. “We were still a startup at that point, and needed a very cost-effective solution that still provided us with all the functionality we required,” said Ed Kusnitz, lead platform engineer for EnerNOC. EnerNOC also deployed JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Application Server, Messaging, Clustering, Seam, Hibernate, and EJB3 along with MySQL to complete the solution.

For help with the JBoss implementation, EnerNOC selected Amentra, a leading provider of systems integration services for SOA, business process management, systems
development and enterprise data solutions. Amentra was acquired by Red Hat in March 2008.

BENEFITS
Because JBoss jBPM provides all the tools and process execution engine needed to automate complex workflows in Java and Web applications, EnerNOC was able to reduce business process errors, speed process execution, and enhance overall business performance.

Today, upon receiving an email that one of its customers requires power, the now-automated workflow process is immediately triggered. This one step alone can be extraordinary complex. “A single action initiated by an utility or grid operator can impact 300 sites on our network, and each one needs its own workflow,” said Kusnitz.

For example, some organizations want to be notified in advance before their power is curtailed; others are fine if EnerNOC just takes appropriate action. “jBPM allows us to manage the state of each site very easily, while giving us transparency into the entire operation,” said Kusnitz.

“If we had to code all this ourselves, it would be very difficult to accomplish what we need to, much less see what was occurring at any particular point in time,” agreed Andre Quina, software engineer at EnerNOC. “Under jBPM we can bring up a graphical image of the state of the workflow, which immediately shows us the state of the processes.”

jBPM has also allowed EnerNOC to achieve tremendous flexibility, reliability, and scalability. “If we need to make changes to the workflow – which happens all the time – we can do that without having to go in and actually edit the code,” said Quina. “That eliminates the risk of introducing errors, and makes for much more reliable operations.” And because EnerNOC is growing so rapidly, jBPM’s ability to manage ever-greater numbers of organizations’ power capabilities has been essential. “jBPM is enabling us to meet escalating market demand for our solutions,” said Quina.

Looking ahead, EnerNOC is currently using jBPM to create the business logic involved in curtailing and restoring sites. For example, before turning off lights, an on-site generator might need to be started, and the power load transferred to that generator. “When we get this last phase automated, we’ll be able to respond even more rapidly to a request from an ISO for more power,” said Kusnitz. “In effect, our jBPM application will be transformed into a virtual generator. We’ll be able to power it on, and provide our customers with power within just a few minutes notice.”

Amentra contributed enormously to the success of the project. “Amentra’s expertise with both JBoss jBPM and the messaging layer allowed EnerNOC engineers to focus on core business logic, which is helping us prepare for future expansion into new markets,” said Sick.

What would EnerNOC do without JBoss? “It would be very difficult for us to compete successfully without jBPM,” said Kusnitz. “”We could not deliver our solutions nearly as efficiently and cost-effectively in this extremely aggressive market without it.”

Agrees Sick: “Technical innovation has been key to EnerNOC’s growth. Open source in general – and Red Hat in particular – have been behind our success in this area.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Education

Geography: Singapore

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

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

Hardware: HP Proliant G5 servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits:

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: Transportation

Geography: The Netherlands

Business challenge: Maintaining an uninterrupted rail service. Realizing an uptime of 100 percent.

Migration Path: Migrating existing applications, including those that suffered problems with the performance of BEA Weblogic on OpenVMS. Building new applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Global File System with cluster environment, Red Hat Directory Server, Red Hat Network Provisioning Module, Red Hat Certificate System, Red Hat Consulting, and Red Hat Training and Certification.

Benefits: Easy update policy, stable system, 100 percent uptime in the first quarter of 2008

”We wanted a stable, robust, yet flexible infrastructure and finally chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We also selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for most new projects as the Red Hat operating system best suits our requirements and objectives for future business plans.”
– Mike Bos, infrastructure manager, ProRail

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ProRail manages the rail infrastructure in the Netherlands and is responsible for the Dutch railway network. The organization came into being through a merger of three organizations: the former Railinfrabeheer (responsible for rail maintenance and construction), Railverkeersleiding (rail traffic management), and Railned (rail capacity planning).

ProRail has been active since 1 January 2003. The organization has 2,600 employees who run the railway network, and guarantee reliability and safety. The rail infrastructure manager has an operating area of about 6,500 kilometres of track and carries 1.2 million passengers and 100,000 tons of goods every day. This makes the 6,500 kilometres of railway track in The Netherlands among the most used in the world.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A failure in the system at ProRail has far-reaching consequences and represents a substantial loss for and industry commerce alike.

The technical challenge for ProRail, and the basis for achieving 100 percent uptime, was the introduction of a sound operating system. This means that the application has no unplanned downtime. ProRail works with OpenVMS (Virtual Memory System), a high-end computer system originally designed by Digital Equipment Corporation and now sold by HP.

OpenVMS, a multi-user, multiprocessing virtual memory-based operating system, functions satisfactorily. But in early 2000, the system was no longer available for all the products that ProRail wanted to launch.

Mike Bos, infrastructure manager at ProRail, explains: “At the time Open VMS was running behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows in terms of layered product applications available. The J2EE applications had performance issues. The need arose for a second operating system. With the addition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are moving to a shorter time to market model.”

SOLUTION
ProRail did not intend to replace the existing OpenVMS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It would have been an enormous job to migrate every existing application,” said Bos. “The applications that were easily migrated and/or had problems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Another decision ProRail made was to allow each new application to be built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “After all, you have to use the best tool for the job. We are working to achieve long-term objectives,” said Bos.

Red Hat assisted ProRail by implementing Red Hat Network Satellite for the testing and training environment. With Red Hat Network Satellite, different ‘virtual’ systems can be controlled as a single system. This means that systems can be added to a controlled environment. The ProRail IT network is spread across The Netherlands in 13 local offices. Red Hat Network proxies have been set up at those locations. Every system is installed and managed by the central Red Hat Network architecture, including custom software which needs to be delivered in RPM format by the projects. ProRail also acquired a mix of Premium and Basic Red Hat Enterprise Linux support subscriptions.

Pro Rail is also using Red Hat Global File System. Global File System contains embedded clusters, jointly providing an integrated software framework. ProRail needed to design a complete infrastructure for a new open source solution within its data centres. To help define the organization’s needs and design this new architecture, ProRail engaged Red Hat Global Professional Services, Red Hat’s consulting practice. The new architecture consists of an array of Red Hat tools and software, including:

• Red Hat Network products for provisioning and management
• Default installation profiles that consist of only the products needed by ProRail
• Red Hat Directory Server providing multiple master setup for the centralized user management and application needs.
• Default Red Hat Cluster Suite setups, including Global File System as shared file system with Oracle Real Application cluster
• Default High-Availability Loadbalancer setup (active/backup)
• Develop custom applications for current monitoring systems
• Plans call for Certificate System to be implemented Global Professional Services helped ProRail to develop a custom default architecture design to
  maximize its technology investment.

A Red Hat Consultant, specifically a Dedicated Enterprise Engineer (DEE), installed the framework within the production environment and continues to perform third-level support on-site at ProRail.

The DEE is also responsible for product development and implementing new products from which ProRail can profit. Examples include:

1. Creating a default workstation install, from which several different workstations could be installed. Before this, every workstation type (differs by application use), had its own installation profile and was built by different partners, so every setup looked different and cost a lot in maintenance effort. The new default modular approach significantly reduces maintenance costs.
2. Virtualization setup within the test/training environment. This makes it possible to mix test setups and training instances on a small amount of hardware and is a good start ahead of Proof of Concept for virtualization within the production architecture. ProRail asked Red Hat to help them define the skills needed and execute a training program giving ProRail’s system administrators the appropriate knowledge to support projects which would use the new architecture and set the default framework in production. This service was also delivered by its (DEE) consultant. Together with the Red Hat DEE, ProRail set up a training track for the current operations managers, so they can cover first-line support on the new architecture using Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) skills. To get the maximum performance out of the system, the operations managers at ProRail had to take two Red Hat training courses. “We wanted our people to benefit from thorough training and examination,” said Bos. Besides training its own personnel, for second-line support ProRail hired Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCEs).

BENEFITS
Thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ProRail now has a stable and flexible environment. In the first quarter of 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux satisfied the requirement of an uptime of 100 percent. “There have been no incidents so far. Hopefully, by the end of 2008, we can realize our goals. Thanks to Red Hat,” said Bos.

The maturity and robustness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is important to ProRail.

“We don’t want any new, unproven products. Infrastructure managers are conservative,” said Bos. “Red Hat’s expanding presence in the market is proof of its reliability, and we know that the system is viable for a long lifecycle.”

Bos praises Red Hat’s update policy too. “Updates can be done very easily with Red Hat. With Red Hat we created a more flexible, reliable environment which is easy to maintain and this leaves us free to concentrate on new projects. We’re very happy with the flexibility and reliability we’ve achieved with Red Hat.”

2008 Red Hat Innovator of the Year

Creative Use Winner: IBM and Raytheon
Submitted by: Keith Bright

Vertical: Information Technology and Government

Geography: US

Websites: www.ibm.com, www.raytheon.com

Company Background

Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN), with 2007 sales of $21.3 billion, is an industry leader in defense and government electronics, space, information technology, technical services, and business and special mission aircraft. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 72,000 people worldwide. Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon, is a leader in joint battlespace integration. It serves as the prime mission systems integrator for all electronic and combat systems for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer program.

IBM is the world’s largest information technology services and consulting services organization, with 2007 revenue of $98.7 billion. As a business, IBM delivers innovation that matters for its clients. As a global enterprise, it values innovation that matters for itself and for the world, addressing some of society’s most complex problems with game-changing business and technology innovation. IBM’s collaboration with Raytheon is one example of its innovative approach to addressing challenges facing government and commercial organizations alike.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

The U.S. Navy required assistance building an open-architecture shipboard enterprise network that would allow seamless integration of all on-board systems. The system, called the Zumwalt Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE), would give the Navy increased ability to use open-source software and commercial-off-the-shelf hardware to build a ship wide infrastructure that supported all ship functions, including combat systems. The computing environment for this complex set of applications required deterministic low latency (real-time) performance. Although Linux’s Real Time capabilities were insufficient in 2005, a vibrant RT community was forming, which welcomed IBM’s participation and contributions. The project schedule was aggressive: time from the formation of the IBM RT team to the first release was just over one year.

Raytheon approached the project by envisioning a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) computing infrastructure comprised of hundreds of x86 servers, all providing RT response from an IBM-developed industry standard RT Java environment running on Linux. This solution would permit developers to write standard Java code that provides the RT response required for the Zumwalt program, reducing the need for special-purpose and legacy languages such as Ada, since the US Navy demanded the use of ubiquitous industry standards with vibrant communities and ecosystems (such as Linux and Java) to simplify complex projects such as the Zumwalt program. “However, when the project started some years ago, we were quite aware that it demanded capabilities that were well in excess of anything Linux had ever provided,” said Keith Bright, program director of IBM’s Linux Technology Center, in Austin. Furthermore, these capabilities were also well in excess of what the community was willing to support at that time. “Choosing a partner capable of addressing such challenges was therefore critically important,” said Bright.

Vendor Selection Process

There were three requirements that drove IBM’s search for a vendor. First, it needed a free and open source software (FOSS) environment with strong market acceptance; secondly, IBM needed to modify the environment to provide tens-of-microsecond response times; and, finally, the project required long-term vendor support.

The first requirement clearly pointed to the Linux kernel. The fact that Red Hat’s Ingo Molnar had recently launched an aggressive RT project for the Linux kernel helped satisfy the second requirement, as IBM and others could contribute to this project using their particular strengths. For example, IBM’s special areas of time-keeping, security, validation, performance, scalability, and read-copy-update (RCU) capabilities were critical to the project. Given the quick growth and progress of this new RT Linux community, an IBM-assembled skunkworks team with Ted Tso as lead architect stood a good chance of meeting the Zumwalt program’s performance and quality needs, even in the face of this program’s aggressive schedule. Finally, the third requirement favored the Linux vendor with the greatest critical mass and staying power – namely Red Hat.

Solution

Red Hat was critical to the success of this solution. Raytheon and IBM depended on Red Hat’s Ingo Molnar’s ability to lead a cutting-edge Linux-kernel project involving a large number of developers from a wide variety of organizations, including academics, industrial companies, other Linux distributions, and system vendors such as IBM. “We expect that the integration of community-developed code into the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux MRG RT Linux distribution will be a key enabler for future projects, permitting a more traditional support model.”

The Zumwalt utilizes an open-architecture shipboard enterprise network that enables seamless integration of all on-board systems. Zumwalt’s computing infrastructure provides computer support for combat systems, internal and external communications, ship control, maintenance, logistics, training, and other deployment functions. The RT Linux kernel provides tens of microseconds response times. IBM’s RT Java provides millisecond response times for garbage-collected code, and sub-100-microsecond response times for “real-time standard Java” (RTSJ) code. The natural integration of the RT code with the garbage collector enables Java’s rich class libraries to be used in RT code, but without source code modifications, preserving Java’s productivity advantages.

Benefits

This project was first of a kind, demonstrating that Linux is now capable of supporting some of the most challenging RT applications, while still running traditional mainstream software on the same computer system at the same time. “We believe that this project also demonstrates that RT processing is going mainstream,” said Bright. The overall impact included improved RT programmer productivity, reduced RT application development times, and reduced overall cost – for example, Zumwalt ramped up to 1,200 software professionals in more than 30 sites in less than two years. “It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to staff this project that quickly – or to maintain that staffing – if we’d used specialized proprietary technologies that required extensive education and training,” said Bright. “The ability to staff up a project so quickly provides Raytheon with an important competitive advantage.

Additionally, basing the Zumwalt program on Ingo Molnar ’s PREEMPT_RT project, which IBM’s Linux Technology Center could build upon, permitted use of a single operating-system environment throughout, greatly simplifying deployment. “Without the PREEMPT_RT project, meeting the Zumwalt program’s schedule would either have required a proprietary RT operating system that lacked Linux’s rich ecosystem, or would have required a mixed environment, with all the complex integration effort that such a mixed environment entails,” said Bright. “Again, Red Hat was the obvious choice.”

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

IBM used Red Hat consulting services in order to get fixes and features in areas of special Red Hat expertise as needed, and, additionally, to help ensure that the RT modifications – IBM’s Red Hat’s, and those of the rest of the Linux community – required for this project went upstream into Linus Torvald’s mainline Linux source tree. “In addition to being the right thing to do, it was also a U.S. Navy requirement to push the code upstream,” said Bright. “This guarantees that future projects will be able to reap the benefits of the good work done by the community.”

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

IBM believes that there are three critical things companies must do to get leading-edge capabilities from FOSS projects: participate, participate, and participate. “If we all contribute to our common goals, there is no limit to what we can accomplish together,” said Bright. And the resulting technology from this particular project is an outstanding example of combining commercial opportunities, Linux technology, and the Linux community. “The participation of Red Hat, IBM, Raytheon, and others within Linux community adds value for everyone, throughout society at large,” said Bright. “Even though the first release to Raytheon was a special one-off fork supported by IBM, the RT technology is being accepted into the mainline kernel, where it will be readily available to everyone. This project has been an exciting technology collaboration, in which we have been proud and happy to participate.”

Delivered Value Winner: Nortel

Submitted by: Ernest Szeideman

Vertical: Telecommunications

Geography: International

Website: www.nortel.com

Company Background

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

Business and/or Technical Challenge

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

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

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

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

Vendor Selection Process

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

Benefits

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

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

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

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

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

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

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

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

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

Customer: Incentive Logic

Industry: Performance-based rewards solutions

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

Opportunity: Transforming the infrastructure for increased scalability and agility.

Solution: The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and an interactive, hands-on workshop

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Server, JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate

Migration Path: Pearl-based environment to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Benefits: Faster development, greater scalability and “Ignited Performance”

“We have a very smart, fast-moving team and had set very aggressive deadlines for
taking our designs and re-factoring them in JBoss. “Instructor-led or classroom training wasn’t going to work. We needed someone who had detailed
knowledge of the entire platform, as well as of the specific applications and who could
go shoulder-to-shoulder as we tore into the code.”
- Frank Gartland, Vice President, Solution Strategy and Development, Incentive Logic.

Read Their Story

Read full case study in French

Industry: Retail

Geography: France

Opportunity: The aim was to free CAMIF from overly-complex nested systems and come up with a more efficient information system which was structured
by business activity, thus enabling more transparent and targeted intervention.

Solution: CAMIF has built its technical base using Open Source components and can now offer business applications as both development frameworks and cross-functional services.
Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Server, JBoss Hibernate, JBoss Rules, JBoss Messaging, JBoss Eclipse IDE

Benefits: There are currently three application groups that benefit from the new architecture, which now integrates open source solutions, including several modules from the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Project summary: The CAMIF Group, a multi-specialist distributor and the third largest French mail-order company, offers a range that extends from household appliances and personal equipment to supplying local authorities and from home furnishings to fine foods, without forgetting financial products. In 2003, the company took the step of progressively decommissioning their twenty-year-old HP3000 servers and completely revising the software architecture that was in place.

“Now the different blocks of our information system all work together, thanks to the JBoss AS application server.In addition, we can intervene locally on any of the blocks at any time, thus minimising impact on neighbouring blocks.”
- Charles Detemple, Technical Architect, DSI (Information Systems Department), CAMIF Group

The Goal:
The aim was to free CAMIF from overly-complex nested systems and come up with a more efficient information system which was structured by business activity, thus enabling more transparent and targeted intervention. To do this, an internal working group assessed various market solutions and looked at Java J2EE architecture designed using Open Source components.

Solution:
Half of the internal developments intended for CAMIF’s information system overhaul are based on the JBoss Enterprise Application Server. The JBoss Hibernate, JBoss Rules, JBoss Messaging and JBoss Eclipse IDE modules are associated with this server, offering assistance and features that facilitate the development of J2EE applications. CAMIF has built its technical base using these Open Source components and can now offer business applications as both development frameworks and cross-functional services. “In parallel with training and workshops, the company has entered into a JBoss Silver support agreement, which has proved efficient and timely in its response to critical issues” says Charles Detemple, technical architect, DSI, CAMIF Group.

Results:
There are currently three application groups that benefit from the new architecture, which now integrates open source solutions, including several modules from the JBoss JEMS package. The first set of applications handles all the activities of the CAMIF Habitat subsidiary, the second uses specifically designed software to handle logistics: stock management, delivery deadlines and transportation. The third, which is in the start-up phase, deals with customer referencing. This changeover should be gradual, with complete migration within five years.

Read full case study in French

Category: Certified Service Provider

Winner:Amentra

Submitted by: Amentra Team

Industry: Amentra = Technology / La Petite Academy = Education

Geography: Virginia

Overview
Selected for helping enterprises deploy mission-critical business systems on JEMS through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Read Amentra Case Study

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Amentra, Inc. offers a distinctively different approach to business and IT consulting. By helping clients deploy mission critical business systems through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program, Amentra has earned industry accolades for combining two areas that have historically been separate service offerings into a single solution: deliverable-based project solutions integrated with IT Mentoring. Amentra has great expertise in retail, insurance, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and finance. Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Amentra also has regional offices in Reston, VA and Charlotte, NC. Amentra’s web address is http://www.amentra.com.

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The project had several significant business and technical challenges as outlined below:

Although these challenges were significant, they each also had reasonable solutions that could be addressed by a combination of proper project implementation and proper utilization of the JEMS stack. The challenge with the most far-reaching impact was the issue of the long-term implications of technology migration for the management of the IT department. This challenge alone had several major components:

– Any of the previous risks can negatively affect the total cost of ownership and return on investment – the gold standard of business success.

Although these risks are evident in every technology platform migration, they are rarely directly addressed and can often lead to the long-term failure or underperformance of a technology adoption effort and can poison the reputation of a product or technology solution.

3. What was the desired solution?
Amentra worked with the client to formulate a solution that involved two tightly integrated components: a traditional IT implementation with a focus on iterative implementation and heavy business involvement and a parallel mentoring approach that targeted developers, architects, IT support staff, and key business leaders.

Implementation and Architectural Approach

[ Note: At JBoss’s request, Amentra can describe every aspect of the business and technical solution (confidentiality agreements notwithstanding) in exhaustive detail. However, given that Amentra’s proposed innovation is its mentoring model for technology transfer and adoption of the JEMS stack, a brief overview of the technology solution will be provided for context while more attention is devoted to the mentoring aspect. ]

Amentra utilized its industry-leading expertise in J2EE implementation to help the client design a service-oriented architecture based on the JEMS stack. The architecture was specifically designed to provide scalable, reusable business and infrastructural services that would assist in the development of future applications. Amentra’s status as a JBoss partner also gave it additional insight into the future viability of various technology solutions on the JEMS stack, allowing further customization and refinement of the architecture.

A standard logical view of the architecture is provided in the JBoss World Innovation Award Submission
Mentoring Approach

The following section briefly explains Amentra’s mentoring approach as applied to this engagement and will provide a concrete case study of the mentoring process on a JEMS-centric project. The mentoring process is very flexible and based upon the level of the client staff’s experience and the client’s desired end result for mentoring, determined during the initial stages of the engagement. The process behind this methodology can be broken into several high-level steps:

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
Mentoring Topic Customization
Delivery Process Planning
Periodic Review and Adjustment

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
At project inception, Amentra met individually with each member of the technical staff who would be developing or supporting the application in order to establish a basic understanding of the backgrounds and relevant experience of those to be mentored. Amentra focused on obtaining information such as the person’s job description, education and experience, as well as asking each person to complete a self-assessment on their specific business or technology skill sets. It was important that Amentra included support staff as well, as the platform would eventually impact every single person in the IT department.

The resulting feedback received from these individuals along with the end result expectations as described by client management was used to select not only the high-level topics to be covered during the initial mentoring sessions, but to calibrate the level of detail and focus that was targeted for specific topics. For example, even though the development staff all came from Visual Basic 6 and RPG development backgrounds, all of the team members had a solid basic understanding of SQL and basic relational database usage. Identifying this at project inception allowed Amentra to skip classroom training for that area and reallocate the time to discuss less well-understood areas like practical object-oriented design.

Amentra had similar, but more subtle, conversations with key business stakeholders. This allowed Amentra to help IT leadership craft an effective message that emphasized the platform’s strengths, but also communicated the platform’s limitations as well.

Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
As the initial skill set evaluation was concluding, Amentra conducted a review of the client’s business processes, requirements management approach, and/or software development lifecycle processes as appropriate to determine opportunities for refining, augmenting, or reducing process in order to become more consistent with current best practices for the new business and technology environment. In this case, the client had a fairly sophisticated business requirements gathering approach that would work well with the new technology platform. However, the development and testing approaches would benefit from different approaches that better aligned with modern J2EE development. Mentoring in these approaches was thus added to the mentoring plan.

In order to maximize relevancy, Amentra’s mentoring process has been designed to be extremely flexible in its ability to be incorporated within any lifecycle methodology. Amentra has its own iterative methodology for delivering turnkey projects and will utilize this process if the client has not yet developed a process. In this example, the client chose to be mentored on portions of these processes and incorporate these portions into their enterprise direction. Amentra has substantial experience in incorporating its mentoring strategy within very rigid environments for some of the largest companies in the world, including heavily regulated environments like the pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, and financial industries.

Mentoring Topic Customization
Using the findings from the staff skill set evaluation and the current status review, Amentra customized a mentoring approach for the client and the team being mentored. The approach highlighted multiple key business processes, technologies, and methodology topics as high-level subject categories for the mentoring effort as listed below. A non-exhaustive list of the mentoring topics covered includes:

Agile Methodology
Requirements Gathering
Test Plan Development
Unified Markup Language (UML)
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section I
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section II
Advanced Java Programming
Java Server Faces (JSF)
Java Messaging Service (JMS)
The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Database Design
Hibernate
Logging
JUnit and Grinder
Subversion (SVN) Configuration Management
Ant
Maven

Amentra’s extensive experience helped to focus on the most appropriate foundational mentoring topics for initial efforts in order to help prepare the client team for more detailed and nuanced mentoring later in the project.

Delivery Process Planning
Amentra worked with the client’s management team to coordinate the mentoring plan with the overall project plan for the engagement. Like the project plan, the mentoring plan had formal deliverables, timelines, and milestones. The mentoring plan was designed in compliance with Amentra’s following guidelines:

Delivery of mentoring topics were coordinated with the project schedule so that topics relevant to the current stage of a project are covered just prior to and during that stage whenever possible. These topics sometimes spanned different groups participating in an overall mentoring approach and were executed in parallel with these groups by different members of the Amentra consulting team.
Classroom training was always confined to a limited period of time as knowledge retention drops off sharply in long training sessions.
Mentoring material preparation time for extremely customized mentoring topics was considered. However, since Amentra has already created a significant library of mentoring presentations and material, additional preparation time was typically quite small.

Mentoring Delivery
Amentra then iteratively implemented the mentoring plan with the client. Initial iterations for each topic covered involved relatively short (1-4 hour), highly interactive classroom training sessions. This helped establish a baseline among the team for new topics and provided some structure for how the new technologies and skill sets could best be used. Most classroom training sessions had a corresponding set of “homework” assignments for the team to complete individually. This allowed the team to immediately reinforce the learning. Just as importantly, the assignments provided Amentra with immediate feedback on the amount of comprehension that occurred on an individual basis. In one or two cases, training sessions were repeated or extended based on the results of the assignments. In other cases, planned follow-on sessions were eliminated when the team demonstrated immediate understanding of the subjects.

The classroom training sessions were carefully scheduled to be executed immediately before a corresponding opportunity to use the knowledge in practice. One the classroom training established a baseline of comprehension, Amentra immediately targeted follow-on project tasks that helped ensure retention of the knowledge. As the staff attempted to apply their new knowledge to a project challenge, Amentra consultants worked with them individually at various points each day to ensure that they were progressing towards an effective solution, and shared additional, more refined techniques as the staff demonstrated increasing confidence and competence with their new skills. This carefully planned, one-on-one mentoring approach is unique to Amentra and has been critical in helping dozens of clients migrate from legacy platforms to more modern solutions.

It is worth reiterating that Amentra’s mentoring was not just applied to developers. Key business stakeholders and analysts were mentored in the software methodology and requirements gathering sessions. QA staff members were mentored in the test-related topics. Administrators and support staff were mentored in the introductory and administration-related topics. This holistic mentoring approach ensured that all stakeholders were up-to-speed in the new platform and techniques that were being adopted.

Periodic Review and Adjustment
The effectiveness and progress of the mentoring plan was periodically assessed and adjusted throughout the project as Amentra worked with the client to design and implement the application. This iterative approach to mentoring allowed for adjustments to be made as Amentra saw evidence of strengths and weaknesses in the new approaches, creating an optimal learning experience for the project team.

Summary
Amentra’s mentoring model ensured the long term success of the effort by addressing each of the following risks:

Potential Loss of Personnel/Business Knowledge – Amentra’s evangelization and individualized attention helped initially convince the client staff that they would continue to be vital members of the organization after the adoption of the new platform and would continue to be strong contributors to ongoing project success. As the mentoring process progressed, the staff became even more excited about the new skills that they were learning and applying on a daily basis. In fact, the IT department experienced no attrition at all among legacy developers during the project span.

Critical External Leverage – By training the client team in all aspects of product development and administration with the JEMS stack and other technologies, Amentra ensured that the client would be able to support and extend the application without any outside assistance.

Failure to Realize Productivity Gains – Amentra’s critical contribution to the long-term reduction in total cost of ownership was to mentor the team in optimal development practices using the JEMS stack and related technologies. This not only included detailed training in sophisticated development areas like remote application server debugging using JBoss-IDE, but also in software development best practices like designing for reuse, automating integration builds, and test-driven development.

Failure to Realize Integration Savings – Amentra’s vast experience in large-scale enterprise integration helped make this challenge simple for the client. Even before Amentra was formally engaged by the client, Amentra helped the client understand the attractiveness of an integration solution based on a reusable enterprise service bus. Once engaged, Amentra then provided critical mentoring that allowed the client to understand how to extend the integration implementations required for this project.

Increased Total Cost of Ownership – The shared knowledge provided by Amentra in each of the preceding bullets helped to ensure the smooth transition from the legacy technology platform to a JEMS-based platform and guaranteed that the client staff had sufficient in-house expertise to continue to deliver systems efficiently on the new platform.

Inappropriate Long-Term Expectation Management – As noted above, Amentra’s mentoring methodology has evolved over time to include informal mentoring of key business stakeholders specifically to ensure that expectations are properly managed.

Amentra’s innovative mentoring approach to project delivery and the client-consultant relationship has delivered initial project success on the JEMS stack for customers while ensuring their satisfaction with JBoss and Java for years to come.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
Amentra worked with the client to evaluate the JEMS stack along with several other commercial software vendors and several partial J2EE-based solutions (e.g., standalone portals, standalone servlet engines) for features, adoption costs, expected productivity, support capabilities, and licensing costs. JEMS was the clear winner in each of these categories.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
At Amentra’s urging and with full client agreement, JEMS products played critical business and technical roles in the solution. JEMS products are used at every layer of the implementation, including:

Presentation Layer – JBoss Portal has provided the presentation infrastructure for the effort and has served as the interface into several of the reusable services designed for this effort (e.g., authentication/authorization, reporting).

Business Layer – JBoss Server has provided the central hub for the application and hosts the services that comprise the application.

Integration Layer – Hibernate has been used exclusively for all database integration and has drastically reduced the development time for this layer.

With Amentra’s encouragement, the client adopted Eclipse as the IDE of choice and leveraged the JBoss-IDE plug-in as well to help speed development.

Although the JEMS stack played an absolutely mission critical role in the technology stack, its most critical contribution was to allow the adoption of an enterprise-class, fully-supported J2EE solution at a price point that led to quick return on investment. Without this capability, the project might well have languished in the planning stage.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
Amentra’s mentoring approach gave the client the confidence to include a significant amount of functionality in scope for the first release of the platform. This created several critical and immediate positive benefits for the business:

Reduction in Labor Costs – Within seconds of any student or employee arriving or departing any of the client’s branch locations, the system is notified and recalculates the appropriate labor staffing ratio based on regulations at the state, county, and municipality level. Management in the field is instantly alerted if staffing is too high and can react appropriately. Managers can then react appropriately and with iron confidence to minimize overstaffing. This significantly reduces labor costs, the largest single expense for the client, while maintaining excellent quality of service for customers.

Increased Regulatory Compliance – State, county, and municipal ratios are now automatically calculated based on centrally maintained information instead of being calculated manually at each branch location. This eliminates any chance of inadvertent non-compliance at the branches.

Greatly Increased Operational Visibility – For the first time, corporate management now has near-real-time reporting capabilities on attendance data. This allows for true auditing capabilities from the corporate office, increasing management efficiency in the field and ensuring that every location is meeting or exceeding all appropriate staffing regulations at all times. The use of JBoss Portal as a web interface and delivery method also allows district and regional managers to use the system for self-service reporting when traveling, a critical capability for an organization where some districts cover tens of thousands of square miles.

The savings and operational improvements noted above fully justified the implementation on their own. However, Amentra used their longstanding J2EE expertise to help the client design the system as an extensible, service-oriented platform that can quickly and inexpensively support additional capabilities in future versions such as:

Improved Strategic Reporting – Because of Amentra’s mentoring approach, the client now has the JBoss Portal expertise required to easily deploy existing reports to executive and field management through the JBoss Portal-based interface designed as part of this application. This will also allow the client to further leverage the common authentication/authorization service built during this effort. Further, strategic reports can now be updated on a daily basis instead of a weekly basis due to the ESB-based common data collection infrastructure (q.v. above).

Yield Management Analysis and Improved Pricing Models – Amentra helped the client design the business rules service in a manner that will also support rule-based pricing as part of a future effort. Utilizing more sophisticated pricing methods will allow the client to increase their revenue in the future without a corresponding increase in labor costs. The common data collection infrastructure is a necessary prerequisite for this capability as well, allowing for models that react instantly to changes in student attendance and staffing levels.

Centralization and Portal-Based Delivery of All Applications – The success of this JEMS-based rollout and the low associated development costs have made it likely that more of the applications that are currently executed at the branch will be centralized. This will eventually allow complete central data storage, reducing the computing needs at the branch level and eliminating the existing data protection needs at each branch.

Increasing Automation of Complex Business Processes – The client’s newly acquired ESB experience has enabled them to more aggressively target automation efforts that span systems. This has created a paradigm shift for the client that will likely support years of future projects that generate further incremental cost improvements. Detailed knowledge of existing systems and processes will be equally as important to the success of these efforts as ESB expertise, but Amentra’s ability to retool the development team with ESB skills has ensured that the system knowledge acquired over years of experience at the client has been preserved for the future.

Amentra’s expertise helped the client correctly design the initial services to readily support these future initiatives for very low effort. Amentra’s mentoring methodology ensured that the client developed their own in-house expertise to implement these initiatives with little or no outside support.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
Confidentiality agreements with the client prevent Amentra from disclosing details of savings and expenditures at this time. However, some of the savings created by using JEMS was used to help implement additional services in the service-oriented architecture that will greatly lower future implementation costs for the client.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
In order to fully leverage the client’s existing infrastructure standards and investments, the following hardware/software stack was used:

Presentation/Application Servers: JBoss Portal, JBoss Server, Hibernate, Windows 2003, on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Enterprise Service Bus Servers: Cape Clear ESB, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Business Rules Engine Server: Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor

Database Server: Microsoft SQL Server, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Server

Business Intelligence Server: Information Builders WebFOCUS on existing hardware.

In order to meet the client’s needs, the application will support thousands of simultaneous users and hundreds of thousands of messages per day from over six hundred branch locations.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
At Amentra’s suggestion, the client purchased JEMS support to guarantee support, warranties, and indemnification equivalent to that provided by a closed-source platform. Due to Amentra’s support and mentoring, the client has enjoyed the best possible experience with their support – they have not yet had cause to use it at all!

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
The obvious licensing cost and standardization savings resulting from the adoption of professional-grade, open source platforms have traditionally been countered by the perceived difficulty in quickly retooling existing staff to effectively use these platforms. The combination of JBoss’s demonstrated commitment to platform excellence and the proven results of Amentra’s mentoring methodology for retooling legacy developers from COBOL, RPG, VB6 and dozens of other programming backgrounds have overcome this challenge and drastically lowered the entry cost for J2EE platform adoption.

Category: User Experience
Winner: Daiwa Securities America
Submitted by: Steve Dunstan, Vice President / Enterprise Systems Architect
Industry: Financial services
Geography: New York, NY

Overview
Migration of 120 separate applications running to JBoss Portal using a series of unified templates. This enabled rapid growth, increased productivity, faster service, and hundreds of thousand of dollars in cost-savings.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Daiwa Securities America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daiwa Securities Co. Ltd. of Japan. The subsidiary focuses on sales and trading of Japanese and U.S. equities and fixed income instruments, financial futures, and investment banking, including mergers and acquisitions and structured finance. For the year ending March 31, 2007, Daiwa Securities America had ¥14,684,000,000 (134 billion dollars) in net operating revenues.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

In 2006, we successfully migrated one section of our prior portal to JBoss Portal. The section we migrated contained our Compliance Dashboard, a portal that ensures new financial and securities compliance regulations remain updated and implemented across our company. We initiated the migration because of the serious problems we were having with our prior vendor—not just technical, but organizational, and with tech support in particular. Because we are small and agile, we were more bleeding edge than their other customers; we had stressed the prior vendor’s platform to the breaking point. The prior vendor’s support team couldn’t answer any of our questions and were unable to support their own product. In addition, the slow speed and unreliability of the prior vendor’s portal was becoming an issue for our users, and the complexity of porting new applications was an ongoing problem for our IT department.

Based on the ease of the Compliance Dashboard migration and the resulting stability we experienced, we decided to migrate the remainder of our applications onto a new JBoss-based portal. Because we are on the leading edge of technology, we also needed a solution that we could support ourselves. This gave an open source solution a natural competitive advantage.

What was the desired solution?

We required a high-performance solution that was stable, fast, and flexible. Our IT department needed to be able to roll out new applications quickly and insert them on-the-fly. We also needed to gain more control over the vast number of applications that were running on the portal because supporting them was difficult and time consuming.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

When we had the problems with our prior vendor, we brought in a large, well known IT vendor for an interview. From their very high-level PowerPoint presentation, it became apparent that our agile corporate culture was not in line with theirs. We also evaluated another vendor’s product, but it was overly complicated.

On the other hand, our previous experience with JBoss products and technical support had been excellent. We had purchased a support subscription for the Compliance Dashboard and used it during our JBoss migration. When we had problems with the applications we were building, we were able to leverage JBoss support, sometimes communicating directly with the engineers who actually coded the program. The high quality of first-line support JBoss provides impressed us. We don’t have to go through a bunch of call center people to get answers to a problem.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

Our portal had about 120 applications built on top of it, and we weren’t sure how we were going to perform the migration. We completed a broad analysis of the applications, looked at what they did and what they were used for, and found that they all did pretty much the same thing. They were mostly database-driven applications with minor differences in the inputs and outputs (commissions, broker dealer set-up, client set-up, etc.).

We used JBoss Portal to front end the database. Then, we designed an idealized template that described our applications in terms of how they “mine” that database, and ran the Velocity templating engine to regenerate all of our applications on the new JBoss Portal. Once we decided how to do this, it only took us three months from development to production. To complete the migration took one year. We had four people working on it: one person worked on the bulk of the templates; three developers handled the others that were more complicated or needed different business rules.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• From the user’s perspective, the biggest gains were speed, reliability, and ease of use. Since all of the applications are now from a common source, the method of operation and presentation of data is consistent from screen to screen. As a result, we’ve reduced training cycles for employees.
• From the developers’ point of view, we can create new applications in far less time. The compile time for an application dropped from five minutes in the prior vendor’s portal to less than a second in JBoss. In addition, the modularity of JBoss allows us to plug new pages into the portal easily. With our prior vendor, we either had to roll the entire portal (which took over an hour), or use WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets), which had lots of inherent problems. With JBoss, we’ve experienced much shorter development cycles, which means we can be more innovative in our approaches.
• The JBoss solution is also easier to maintain. With our prior vendor’s product, we had some difficult, opaque technical problems that we were never able to get resolved. Now, when we have a really tough problem, we look at the JBoss source code to help us debug it.
• Because we’re only running one program, the applications are also easier to maintain. When we find a bug, we re-roll the applications and the bug fix propagates to all of the pages.
• The system is far more reliable, as well. During the last year, we have had no unscheduled down time.
• Our IT team’s credibility with management has improved significantly. Since our applications no longer crash, management is now comfortable coming to us with their problems and required improvements. Turnaround time for developing new applications they request is only a few weeks.
• JBoss has provided us with the scalability we require. Since the time we switched over to JBoss, the number of applications running has increased from 120 to 170, and continues to grow at 40% a year.
• In strictly monetary terms, we’re saving $90,000 by eliminating the prior vendor’s support costs.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

Our back-end database is Sybase running on a Solaris server. For development, we are using a single four-CPU server that is front ended by Apache on a single CPU Solaris box. For production, we have a Windows 2003-based server online, with a hot backup (the total number of servers is doubled because of our disaster recovery setup).

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

Our key people took the JBoss for Administrators class 18 months ago. We currently have a Premium Subscription to the JBoss Portal Platform and are very happy with the high level of support we receive. During the migration process, we also worked with a JBoss consultant. We had some tough integration problems related to security, so we asked for help from JBoss. They got the job done.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

If you’re going to be a fast, nimble organization, you need to consider open source options. The ability to self-support yourself means that your down times will be minimized. It also means that you can develop cutting-edge applications by exploiting the openness of the program.

Download this video: [Ogg Theora]

Category: Migration
Winner: Sakonnet
Submitted by: David Renton, Vice President, Product Delivery at Sakonnet
Industry: Oil and Gas
Geography: New York, London, Rio de Janeiro

Overview
Used JBoss Application Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to develop a scalable, performance-driving, well-supported solution that provided ease-of-use, cost savings, and transparency for Sakonnet’s energy-trading solutions. With JBoss Application Server, Sakonnet discovered a solution that combined low-cost, quality software and reliable support to fit into its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategy of frequent application upgrades and top-notch support.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Sakonnet Technology, dedicated to excellence in trading solutions for wholesale energy markets, is a private company that was started by JPMorgan technologists in 1999. The company focuses on energy trading and risk management systems under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model for utilities, banks, hedge funds, and commercial and industrial companies that are heavy consumers of power./p>

Sakonnet’s main offering is the energy-trading application, Xenon®. Xenon is the ideal platform for running a profitable, tightly-controlled trading operation. It allows clients to set their processes and controls at every stage, from pre-trade analysis to final settlement. The application covers trades in power, natural gas, crude oil, refined products, coal, and emissions credits.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

The challenge for companies trading in energy markets is handling the vast quantity of data that arises from transactions combined with traders’ reporting needs. There is a tension between the amount of data and the near realtime speed with which traders need consolidated reports to take further actions in the markets. A single trade in the power market may require the system to capture a distinct price and volume for every 15-minute period for the next year, and then turn around and report on position and risk in a matter of seconds. Timely reporting and suitable follow-on actions are a key difference in making profit and avoiding loss in fast-moving markets.

What was the desired solution?

As we developed the newest version of our application, Xenon 5.1, we were focused on scalability and performance and needed a solution that could help deliver these benefits. Originally, the application ran on Weblogic technology. With the vast amount of data processing involved in energy trading, we required a large number of application servers and suffered heavy licensing fees associated with our previous Weblogic solution.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

When looking for a solution that would fit our scalability, performance-enhancing and cost-effective requirements, we looked toward open source solutions because we knew we could find the reliability and low cost that we desired. We decided to migrate to JBoss technology because we saw a solution that combined the transparency, which would provide us with top-level operational availability, and the same functionality from a licensing perspective, but with a much lowered cost. The quality of the software, the support available for the software, the performance data, and the ease of deployment were also key factors in our decision to migrate from Weblogic to JBoss.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

Once we migrated to JBoss Application Server in 2002, we added compute server clusters, today known as grid computing, to our n-tier J2EE application for better scalability, while leveraging our existing infrastructure. We paid one licensing fee and were able to utilize JBoss solutions on scores of machines, avoiding a per-CPU cost model.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• JBoss Application Server provided us with lowered costs, mainly through third-party licensing costs.
• We’ve saved a lot of development time with the combination of JBoss Hibernate, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Oracle because the combination provided us with the ability to quickly understand and resolve any issues that arose during our platform migration.
• 24×7x365 availability is less costly to maintain because of the transparency inherent in JBoss’ open source technology. With transparency, we are able to deal with any issues in and take immediate corrective action to minimize the impact to our clients.
• We’ve experienced the benefits of the speed and efficiency of the Red Hat and JBoss support teams, in comparison to other vendors.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

Our IT architecture solution includes 30 HP Blade Servers utilizing Sun JVM 1.4.2 and JBoss Application Server 3.2 on Windows. We also use Oracle databases running in a cluster on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.1 on Dell hardware with EMC. For our migration, our CTO played the role of architect and guided the technology.

For the future, we plan to additionally migrate to JBoss ESB and we’re currently in the early stages of exploring JBoss Rules. We also hope to incorporate a monitoring tool like JBoss Operation Network.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

We used migration consulting when deploying JBoss solutions and had a very positive experience. While our CTO acted as the architect, we utilized JBoss consulting for a few months during the migration. Now, we use 24×7 enterprise-level support and have found that any questions we may have are easily answered by knowledgeable support staff. Our experience with Red Hat and JBoss support has been excellent. After several months in production, we ran into an obscure cluster problem and were able to immediately get the assistance of the senior developer from JBoss to help us understand the issues. That level of expertise truly made a difference for our system. We also ran into several Oracle issues while porting our application. Once the problem was identified, Oracle turned around a patch for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in four days. Our development team currently develops on Windows desktops and the same patch that we had for Red Hat Enterprise Linux would only be available for Windows in the next release of Oracle.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

Our advice to companies in our industry with the same challenge of needing a reliable, scalable, and affordable solution is to explore open source, specifically Red Hat and JBoss solutions, because this technology is 24×7 stable, provides a full feature set, can be developed on quickly, and maintained with less cost. We’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and even more in development time.

Category: Joint JBoss/Red Hat Deployment
Winner: CompuCredit Corporation
Submitted by: Guido F. Sacchi, CIO and SVP, Corporate Strategies, Cindy Hayden, Manager of Real-Time Integration
Industry: Financial services
Geography: Atlanta, GA

Overview
Used JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to construct an XML Gateway that serves as the company’s main real-time transaction hub—enabling rapid growth, increased productivity, faster service, and millions of dollars in cost-savings.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

CompuCredit Corporation is a leading provider of credit and related financial services and products for the underserved consumer credit market. Offering branded credit cards and other fee-based products, the company’s strategic competitive advantage lies in its ability to serve creditworthy consumers in a market segment often bypassed by traditional financial institution. For the year ended December 31, 2006, the company had over 4.3 million customer accounts with an aggregate managed portfolio of $2.81 billion in receivables.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

In 2006, CompuCredit was facing two challenges: one business related and the other technical. From the business point of view, our traditional method of using a direct mail campaign of pre-approved credit cards to attract customers had dried up, and we needed to exploit innovative new sales channels such as Internet-based marketing and real-time telemarketing. The ITA (Invitation to Apply) sales channel had a much more significant potential for growth, but required a platform where information was instantaneously available in real-time in order to effectively turn qualified leads into real customers.

Our second challenge was the real-time interoperability of many fragmented applications that existed in our organization. The applications ranged from “Fat Client” type to web-browser based, and were written in a variety of languages such as C, Java, Python, VB, and .net. Our ultimate goal was to create a seamless experience for users and customers (at the presentation or application layer), despite the fragmentation of the application and data sources.

What was the desired solution?

We wanted to create a solution that would quickly obtain data from different areas of CompuCredit, as well as systems outside of the company, and aggregate that data into a single view for the many different business units. It needed to provide interfaces for a variety of applications, such as Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM), credit card acquisition, on-line services, and even IVR (Interactive Voice Response). The solution also needed to have scalable, reusable components that could be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

In the past, CompuCredit had been primarily a Solaris™ shop. We had been running Apache but had to eliminate it since it only provided pure web services. When we started with the project, we looked at the available solutions for Electronic Services Busses (ESB), but couldn’t find anything in the marketplace that met our needs at the time.

We originally became aware of the JBoss solutions by reading press reports. We had previous experience with BAE’s WebLogic™ and IBM’s WebSphere™, but getting JBoss up and running was much simpler. These proprietary (non-open source) programs took a lot of configuration to get them working the first time. JBoss worked right out of the box, although we have done some configuration over time to streamline and optimize the system. Plus, we liked the concept of having a “one stop shop” for support of both Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

The last, and possibly most important factor, was that JBoss was open source. We like open source products for their ease of use and the availability of the open-source developer community. While we have not yet had the need to modify the source code, knowing that we can if we need to tweak something is a big plus. This is especially important for innovative projects, such as the new application and frameworks that we are building.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

The XML Gateway is a platform that uses all open-source applications with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the core. We were able to create a system that fulfilled our vision for the seamless provisioning of real-time information. The system now masks the complexity and fragmentation of data sources and applications. The XML Gateway was developed in conjunction with a network of partners that each brought their individual expertise to the project, but CompuCredit was the driver in the project.

The CompuCredit web framework relies on the XML gateway as one of the main transaction processing engines for all of our real-time services. The solution we created is similar to a home-made ESB that is focused particularly on real-time and web services. We believe that this is a very innovative approach to solving our problems. In the future, we want to look into leveraging JBoss solutions, not just for the XML Gateway, but for a wide range of applications within the company.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• The XML Gateway was a key factor in our continued growth. In absolute terms, we have doubled the number of accounts we service in just two years.
• We have also seen tremendous business benefits. Just the improvement in productivity in handling collection and customer service calls saved us between $2 and $4 million per year, and we have seen similar benefits across the entire organization.
• Having reusable components that can be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit saved us considerable development effort. There are services that are used by all of the different applications, including customer service, telemarketing, collections, online services, customer acquisition via Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM).
• The time that it takes to process a transaction reduced from minutes or seconds to milliseconds, resulting in increased productivity and greater customer satisfaction.
• The project was easy to implement, taking only eight months from beginning to end and involving the efforts of only four people: one full-time developer and three contractors.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

The XML Gateway is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform that uses all open-source applications, such as JBoss. It consists of three hefty Dell appliances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server, Sun JDK 1.5, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform We use Oracle as the primary database, but with some SQL Server. Each server runs two real-time incidences of JBoss and two hot-failover instances should they be needed.

Our application is meta-data driven. We built a large-scale User Interface (UI) for testing and configuration that allowed us to exercise the web services before exposing them to the customer. Then we were able to easily modify that UI to meet the needs of the individual users.

Our platform serviced 100,000 transactions on the first day, and is currently serving 4 million transactions per day. The average transaction time is only a few hundred milliseconds, and the performance continues to improve over time as pieces are honed and hardware improved.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

We have had several people on our team participate in JBoss training and plan to send more in the future. We are willing to make a commitment in training our own people so we can become proficient in developing and maintaining systems of this complexity. We feel that it is a good investment to have this capability in-house. We also used some of Red Hat’s consultants to help us “tune” our environment for peak performance.

We have been a support customer since 2005 and currently have a 24×7 Premium support subscription. We are pleased with our support experience. Everytime we have had to use it, the answers are good and quick.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

We are firm believers in open source. The common myth about open source is that it is harder to get up and running. We have found that the truth is quite the opposite.

You also need to take risks and work through the initial investment, which pays off in the long run. Writing the first web service is a lot of work, but once that is done, each additional service is easy.