FAST FACTS

Company: ITI Neovision

Industry: Broadcast media

Geography: EMEA, Poland

Business Partner: Atom-Tech, Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland recommended Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the solution

Business Challenge: ITI Neovision looked to replace its enterprise platform solution, with a virtualized environment that could be supported by local teams.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization and Red Hat Cluster Suite

Hardware: HP BladeSystem BL460c

Migration Path: Gentoo Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: ITI Neovision has deployed a stable, reliable and officially supported platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization has significantly improved hardware management in terms of full utilization of available servers. Red Hat virtualization can easily scale to accommodate the demand for new servers. The company has also achieved significant cost savings and obtained all the required components in one solution.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting the Red Hat solution.”
- Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The ITI Group is Poland’s leading media and entertainment group. It is active in television broadcasting and production, multiplex cinema operations, home video and theatrical distribution, special events organisation and new media. As a subsidiary of the ITI Group, ITI Neovision offers the first Polish DTH (Direct to Home) platform, called “n”. The platform includes High Definition television channels and digital entertainment services broadcasting. The “n” package broadcasts 79 television channels, hundreds of satellite channels as well as a vast library of movies and TV series’ in the Video on Demand package. As the new generation TV, “n” continuously expands its programmes and introduces new services and channels, many of them in High Definition.

The dynamic growth and excellent results of “n” reflects a unique combination of high quality content offerings and innovative services. In June 2008, ITI Neovision launched a triple-play service combining television, internet and telephony. Following the upgrades of the nBox HDTV and nBox HDTV recorder software, subscribers of “n” have gained access to a range of new services and functionalities such as remote recording through internet and mobile phones. In October 2008, “n” launched its pre-paid television service “telewizja na karte”.

ITI Neovision worked with Atom-Tech, a Poland based Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, that focuses on generating measurable benefits for their customers by using the latest technologies and highly qualified personnel”. Atom-tech provides customers with, consulting services, IT services, and assistance with the production of customised software applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ITI Neovision required a new enterprise platform which would allow it to quickly and easily implement new technology solutions and also benefit from fully accredited local support. ITI Neovision’s hardware supplier, did not support its previous platform, Gentoo Linux.

ITI Neovision considered two possible solutions – Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. A positive experience with the Red Hat community version, a well-known brand name and HP’s ability to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux were the main criteria for selecting the Red Hat solution. Local partner Atom-Tech, who recommended the Red Hat solution, proved to be a reliable local partner during deployment.

SOLUTION
ITI Neovision deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 with virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform as its standard platform, all of which is running on HP BladeSystem. Other components of the infrastructure are MySQL database, Apache web server, FTP server, proxy server and SAN Network.

There are five host machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Every host machine supports four virtual machines including all the necessary applications. The virtual machines are also services in a failover cluster including Microsoft Windows 2003 servers. Such a set up offers ITI Neovision a high level of flexibility as it enables the migration of virtual machines between physical servers as needed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures high availability of the virtual instances, which run ITI Neovision’s mission-critical applications.

BENEFITS
It is of the utmost importance to ITI Neovision to have a robust, stable and reliable platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Since deployment the number of outages has been reduced significantly.

Another important benefit is ease of use. The Red Hat solution includes l a number of useful tools, such as clustering which enables the automation of several tasks managed by the IT department, increases work efficiency and saves time on a daily basis. Atom-Tech, the Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland, provides local Polish language support which is crucial for ITI Neovision, as well as excellent IT engineering skills.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has significantly improved hardware management by making the best possible use of all available hardware. Previously, servers were under-used in terms of processing memory because each operating system required one physical machine. Now thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization, ITI Neovision can use one physical machine for five operating systems. ITI Neovision is a fast growing company and with the Red Hat solution it is able to scale to meet any future growth.

“New projects are coming along almost every day and Red Hat virtualization can easily accommodate the demand for new servers. We can literally deploy a new server in a minute,” says Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

The Red Hat solution is less costly compared to proprietary alternatives, particularly because there are no license fees involved. An important added value of the Red Hat solution is that it contains all the necessary components in one solution set.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting Red Hat solution which is very important in the current economic climate,” said Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

FUTURE
ITI Neovision is planning to expand its Red Hat deployment to include the full 24/7 Red Hat support as well as leveraging Red Hat training and certification. As a result of its excellent experience with the current platform Red Hat has become part of the long term IT strategy at ITI Neovision. The company is planning to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more servers and thereby increase the potential for virtualization. Additional virtual instances are currently being installed on the same hardware server as a testbed for other platforms. Further expansion on other Red Hat products is also being considered.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Construction & Engineering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Healthplan Services (HPS)

Geography: North America

Industry: Healthcare

Migration Path: Sun Solaris 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform; Sun SPARC servers to virtualized Linux instances on HP ProLiant DL380 servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Network, Apache webserver, MySQL databases, IBM DB2

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 servers

Benefits: Increased performance, usability and convenience; enhanced support, and reduced cost with a Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration on HP ProLiant servers

“The speed is going to increase: we’ll see people working faster, and we’ll be able to process more claims, all by switching an operating system. I can’t believe it was that cut and dry.”
– Adam Atkinson, UNIX administrator at Healthplan Services

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Healthplan Services (HPS) is the nation’s largest independent provider of service and technology solutions to the insurance and managed care industries. HPS offers customized administration and distribution services to insurers in the individual, small group, and voluntary markets supporting health insurance and ancillary product lines (i.e., dental, life, disability, accident, cancer, etc.).

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
HPS faced three major business challenges with its aging Sun Solaris on SPARC hardware with RISC architecture. First, the Sun UNIX-based solution delivered limited application performance and support. In one year, HPS dealt with four service degrading incidents. Second, the escalating cost of the SPARC systems were becoming a drag on HPS’ limited IT budget. Third, employees were experiencing slow response times, and the developers complained about usability issues with the Solaris operating system.

HPS needed an operating system that could interoperate with Microsoft Windows Active Directory, and desired a reliable platform that optimized performance and was easy to upgrade. Because its customer service applications were experiencing page loading delays, HPS needed to increase computing performance to meet the needs of its customers and employees.

SOLUTION
Adam Atkinson, HPS’ UNIX administrator, manages some 200 web, database, and FTP servers, 30 of which were pure UNIX systems utilizing Solaris 9 on Sun SPARC servers. After recognizing the organization’s UNIX systems were becoming outdated and obsolete, Atkinson decided to conduct research to find a high-performing alternative solution.

Atkinson investigated three primary options for the HPS operating system migration: Novell SUSE, Solaris 10, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. Quickly eliminating Novell SUSE because it was not a standard in his organization, the decision came to Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. Atkinson decided to run benchmarks to compare the operating platforms. His testing revealed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was superior for each benchmark. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform ran pages at more than three times the speed (452 pages per second) of Solaris (135 pages per second) in one test. “That’s a massive difference,” said Atkinson.

In addition to performance testing, cost was also a primary consideration in identifying a solution. When comparing Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the optimal platform was obvious. “Upgrading Solaris is hard to do. With a migration to Solaris 10, due to high costs associated with SPARC servers, we would have needed to migrate our hardware platform from SPARC to Intel, which would have required me to recompile nearly all of my modules and applications. If we were going to make a big technology move like what Solaris 10 would have required, we decided to look at all of our opportunities, and that meant hosting Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers became a truly viable option for us,” said Atkinson.

Atkinson, who was familiar with Red Hat’s usability benefits, also evaluated support comparisons between Red Hat and Sun. “Solaris support is fine as long as you’re using new equipment and Sun’s latest operating system version, but you will pay an extreme premium as soon as your version begins to age. We did not use Sun’s Solaris support because it was too expensive. Instead, we had third-party support.” HPS recognized a cost savings in Red Hat’s subscription model and was especially impressed with Red Hat’s patch management and package management capabilities available through the reliable Red Hat Network systems management platform.

Another valuable advantage provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform is the solution’s integrated Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) technologies for no added price. Red Hat Global File System is comparable in speed and performance to Veritas. But, Veritas comes with an added cost and additional vendor relationship, while with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, HPS would receive its file system clustering solution integrated with the operating system free of charge.

“Red Hat’s integrated file system clustering technology was important to us. I was paying Veritas for support every year, whereas with GFS through Red Hat, it’s free with my subscription and the support is there too,” said Atkinson.

The cost and time savings delivered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, coupled with the solution’s enhanced performance and support, as well as the increased ease of use for customers and employees, convinced Atkinson, his team, and his company to select Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform to replace its unreliable Solaris systems.

HPS is currently in the process of migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant DL380 servers with virtualization capabilities, superior uptime and effortless management. The company expects Red Hat to be fully in production in August 2009. “We’re moving our systems technology-to-technology instead of server-to-server in more of a piecemeal fashion. It’s more consumable to us that way,” said Atkinson.

BENEFITS
HPS is most excited about the impending performance benefits that will result from its migration away from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “The speed is going to increase: we’ll see people working faster, and we’ll be able to process more claims, all by switching an operating system. I can’t believe it was that cut and dry,” said Atkinson. The company also recognized great benefits in the general manageability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “To stage a Solaris server, it takes a lot of time to do even simple tasks,” said Atkinson. “Red Hat frees up my time. Tasks that took 30 minutes with Solaris take five minutes with Red Hat. Installing one package across all systems with Red Hat might take an hour, as opposed to a full day with Solaris.”

The collaboration of the vast open source community is expected to provide an additional benefit to HPS with the Red Hat migration. With the open source community, innovation happens more quickly and provides greater technology enhancements than the alternative proprietary model. “If I run a search for a quick ‘Solaris’ fix, I might get 10 results as opposed to the thousands I receive when I search ‘Red Hat,’” said Atkinson. Red Hat takes the innovation that happens in the community and certifies and tests the technology so that HPS knows it will work seamlessly in its IT infrastructure. With the backing of Red Hat support and the consistent management capabilities provided by Red Hat Network, Atkinson and his coworkers save time, which allows the reallocation of staff resources to more business-critical tasks.

HPS is expecting a three-year return on investment (ROI) once its full Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration is complete. “After three years, we’ll be generating money,” said Atkinson. “I feel that we will immediately see an increase of revenue with the speed difference. The return on investment being 3 years is purely technology, we will see it much sooner at the business level.”

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.”

Fast Facts:

Company: SPH Search

Industry: Information technology

Geography: Singapore

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

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

Hardware: HP Intel Xeon-based servers

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Sydney

Industry: Education

Business Challenges: Quickly and cost-effectively develop a high-availability platform to support a web-based file repository, enabling the University to comply with new Government regulations

Migration Path: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat Consulting, DSpace (web-based file repository)

Hardware: 2 x HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers, 2 x Dual Core CPUs, HP EVA SANs

Benefits: Achieved quick deployment, cost savings, high availability, reliability, and scalability

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1850, the University of Sydney became the first university established in Australia. Today, it has an international reputation as a centre of research excellence and an active and engaged community leader.

The University boasts approximately 45,000 students and about 3,000 full-time academic staff. Its library holds the largest collection of books in Australia.

The University of Sydney is one of a number of member universities across Australia and New Zealand that takes advantage of the Red Hat CAUDIT Agreement. Through the CAUDIT Agreement, the University is given the opportunity to deploy an unlimited number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments covering both its server and desktop environments. Each Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is protected by unlimited 24×7 support, and the package comes at a small fee. The CAUDIT Agreement is currently one of the most successful university programs in the world.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2007, the Australian Federal Government introduced new guidelines for justifying university funding, based on evaluating the quality of research output from individual universities. Known as the Research Quality Framework initiative, the program introduced a peer-based output review process that relied on reviewers’ input from all over the world. In order for this to be successful, the Government required a reliable and secure channel of 24/7 access to each university’s repository of research.

The new guidelines presented two main obstacles for the University of Sydney. First, it was unsustainable to finance round-the-clock datacentre staffing to ensure the 24/7 system uptime that was required. Second, it would risk overloading its two aging datacentres. This meant that the University of Sydney couldn’t guarantee 100 percent uptime and needed a reliable system.

“In order to comply with the new rules we needed to quickly and inexpensively provide a high-availability platform for the ‘DSpace’ Tomcat Web-based repository application that would enable us to store research files and publications, along with a PostGreSQL back end,” said Nikolas Lam, Unix System Administrator, University of Sydney.

“The real dilemma was that both the University’s aging datacentres, situated approximately two kilometres apart and powered by different electricity sub-stations, were already under considerable cooling stress and were very close to electrical capacity. On their own, neither was considered to be reliable enough to handle the platform,” said Lam.

Lam and his team also recognised the need to enable DSpace to failover relatively quickly, not just between hosts, but between the two datacentres.

SOLUTION
Given that the university faced significant time, financial, and capacity constraints, it turned to Red Hat to help provide a virtualised open source environment as an alternative to adding multiple new machines.

In mid-2007, the University of Sydney deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 Advanced Platform with built-in virtualisation and integrated Red Hat Cluster Suite capabilities. It engaged the trusted expertise of Red Hat Consulting to provide guidance during the deployment, which was completed within three months.

“We were already running DSpace on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and the team was familiar with the operating system. Initially, we considered having the code of the application modified to make it cluster-aware, but it became apparent that it would be too complex a task,” said Lam.

“Red Hat Cluster Suite emerged as a straight-forward way of taking a non-cluster-aware service and placing it in a cluster, and was a fundamental component of the system. When it came to virtualisation, the compatibility with Cluster Suite, the extra efficiency of para-virtualisation and the ability to minimise the number of vendors involved meant that the virtualisation capabilities incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform made the most sense,” said Lam.

“Enlisting the help of Red Hat Consulting to assist with the installation also meant that our staff could continue with their normal workload, which expedited the implementation,” said Lam.


The University also employed Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite with management and provisioning modules, for additional administrative capabilities. RHN Satellite is an easy-to-use systems management platform for growing Linux infrastructures. Built on open standards, RHN Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities for large deployments. It enables organisations like the University of Sydney to manage many servers as easily as it would one.

Also important for the University was ensuring immediate, seamless automatic failover between datacentres, should a disaster arise. For this it relied on one HP EVA SAN in each datacentre. Another critical component was the layer three Linux Virtual Server, developed in-house to allow the University to present a single IP address to the outside world despite being hosted in various geographical areas.

BENEFITS
For the University of Sydney, one of the most notable benefits of the Red Hat deployment was the ability to plug in a standard application and instantly improve its availability, without substantial modification to the application source code.

“When we were suddenly faced with Government-imposed guidelines for managing and storing research data, it was Red Hat that allowed us to easily and effectively plug in DSpace to give us the solution we needed,” said Lam.

“It also meant that we could comply with the new regulations in a short space of time. The alternative would have required time and money that we didn’t have,”
 said Lam.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, the University was provided with a complete solution that offered both cost savings and high performance. The solution delivers integrated virtualization technology at no additional cost, eliminating the need for expensive, third-party alternatives. It also provides Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite as a part of the solution without added fees.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform allowed us to carve costs out of our deployment because we were able to consolidate servers and use a leading, high-performing virtualisation solution that came built-in as part of the solution without us needing to buy from another vendor,” said Lam.

The University was also impressed by the scalability of its new virtualised environment. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform’s virtualization capabilities accommodated the architecture’s current data load of about 15 gigabytes, as the University continues to grow and incorporate new video and other rich data formats, it will scale up to several terabytes of data without any configuration change.

FAST FACTS

Company: Tribune Company

Industry: Media

Geography: Chicago

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

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

Hardware: Commodity Dell and IBM x86 systems

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

Download [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Booz Allen Hamilton

Industry: Government, Management Consulting

Geography: McLean, Virginia

Challenge: Build a service oriented architecture (SOA) solution for a government client that could be leveraged and reused for other client engagements

Migration Path: Transitioned a custom coded, proprietary-based solution to a a hybrid COTS/GOTS/Open-Source application that leveraged a significant portion of the Red Hat product portfolio.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform including JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules, JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Xen virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat GFS.

Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Hardware: Eight Dell 2950 servers with 32 gigabytes of memory

Benefits: Booz Allen built a modular SOA environment that efficiently supported the development and integration of new applications into the system, reducing the dependence on custom coding when doing proof-of-concept or production deployments of client systems across a broad range of government and commercial applications

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs. The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”
– Christopher Dale, associate, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Download the Red Hat case study [PDF]

Download the JBoss case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of strategy and technology consulting for more than 90 years. Every day, government agencies, institutions, and infrastructure organizations rely on the firm’s expertise and objectivity, and on the combined capabilities and dedication of our exceptional people to find solutions and seize opportunities. Providing a broad range of services in strategy, operations, organization and change, information technology, systems engineering, and program management, Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure. With 20,000 people, Booz Allen generates approximately $4.0 billion in annual revenue.

CHALLENGE
In 2004, Booz Allen was approached by a government agency to perform a proof of concept for a proprietary-based document-processing system. Although the proof of concept was successful, attempts to scale the solution up to a production-grade system encountered serious roadblocks. “We went into it carrying a lot of ‘baggage’ due to short-cuts we’d made in the prototype system because of the lack of time and the resources we’d had during the proof of concept,” said Christopher Dale, an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton. Over the next year and a half as more users were added, the team “spent a great deal of effort trying to deal with that baggage,” Christopher said. “But the system simply couldn’t scale the way we needed it to.”

When the agency secured funding to take the system to a new level of capability, the Booz Allen team knew it had to completely rethink its options. From the start, Christopher believed that open source was the answer, and virtualization clearly needed to be part of the solution. Additionally, “we knew we needed a clustered file system, as the old way of moving data back and forth was a real bottleneck,” said Isaac Christoffersen, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. There also had to be a lot more flexibility for dealing with changing customer requests for additional functionality as well as scalability.

SOLUTION
After thinking through its options, Booz Allen decided to design a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based cloud platform using an enterprise service bus (ESB) for a variety of reasons. First, a highly clustered and highly virtualized architecture was needed to build the kind of agile grid of computing and storage resources necessary to scale to the extent the client agency needed. Additionally, Booz Hamilton wanted to build a platform it could leverage in the future for other client engagements.

The physical layer of the architecture was made up of the computers, storage-area networks (SANs), Ethernet networks and Fibre Channel switches. Booz Allen used commodity hardware to build this layer out. The foundation layer of the architecture created a physical “resource pool” for the system to utilize at the virtualization layer, where server, network, and storage resources could be more efficiently leveraged. Booz Allen also used Xen virtualization and the Red Hat Global File System (GFS) on top of Red Hat Cluster Suite to create an environment for transaction processing. Red Hat’s Conga Cluster Management capability, a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, was used to control cluster and storage management.

At the application layer, JBoss Enterprise Application Server provided the ability to create a clustered application server environment. Its built-in redundancy allowed Booz Allen to implement a message-driven Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) infrastructure using the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform that included JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules. JBoss Operations Network was used to perform application and service management.

BENEFITS
The Red Hat-based implementation provided the agency with a multitude of benefits. For starters, it was able to consolidate 55 underutilized servers into just eight servers. This reduced number of systems not only handled the existing processing load, but left capacity available for even more growth in the future.

The system also helped Booz Allen design a system with tremendous flexibility and scalability. Using Red Hat solutions, Booz Allen was able to help the government agency adapt to changes in its mission and system demand in a more agile manner. Over a one-year period, data processing has increased from 1,000 documents per hour and 18,000 documents per day to more than 10,000 documents per hour and 100,000 documents per day. The number of users increased 600 percent in the first year that the system was implemented.

Believing that Booz Allen could leverage what the team had designed for other client engagements, the team briefed a group of Booz Allen partners on the idea… and they agreed. These partners agreed to fund a new initiative that is taking the SOA groundwork that the team created for the federal government, and using it to build a more general platform for application prototyping, development, and production for other government clients.

The current configuration of this platform offers database as a service, storage as a service, network as a service, and hardware as a service. The concepts in this SOA are those that industry leaders such as IBM and Amazon have been promising to deliver at some point in the future, Christopher said. “But we’re able to deliver it now.” Among other things, SOA has greatly improved our ability to integrate commercial and government off the shelf (COTS/GOTS) products. Historically, around 50% of Booz Allen’s development efforts were related to writing custom software to enable the integration of COTS and GOTS. By selecting solutions that leverage commercial and open standards, Booz Allen’s SOA approach reduces the need for this custom software and helps their clients achieve better reuse within their enterprise. Going forward, this new platform promises to be absolutely mission-critical to the way Booz Allen will provide its technology consulting services.

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs,” said Christopher. “The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”

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www.redhat.com
5/08

Hospital utilizes Red Hat and JBoss technology to maintain disaster-recovery systems

Raleigh NC – March 10, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Florida Hospital, the largest hospital in the state of Florida, providing care to over one million patients per year, relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network to maintain reliable disaster-recovery systems that protect and maintain critical patient information.

Florida Hospital, ranked in US News and World Report magazine as one of America’s Best Hospitals for the past six consecutive years, has seven facilities totalling 2,300 beds throughout Central Florida and is part of the Adventist Healthcare system, the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in the nation. The hospital’s MIS Department manages one centralized datacenter for all seven facilities and includes approximately 100 developers. Florida Hospital’s IT systems needed a cost-effective solution that could replace its expensive proprietary operating system, and a solution that could improve the reliability of its disaster-recovery systems.

Initially, Florida Hospital turned to Red Hat because it provided cost efficiencies for its Web initiative, but found many more advantages for its disaster-recovery project. The hospital soon realized that Red Hat solutions could offer additional benefits, such as greater reliability and increased hardware and software compatibility. Florida Hospital now runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 70 HP and IBM servers, and also incorporates JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The hospital’s proprietary applications, including those for patient care, financial and data-management solutions, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In order to protect its critical information, the hospital created a unique disaster-recovery solution that utilizes Red Hat Global File System running on the SAN and Red Hat Cluster Suite with a six-node cluster. To facilitate infrastructure management, security compliance and new-system deployment, Florida Hospitals also implemented Red Hat Network.

“Red Hat enabled us to create a highly efficient disaster-recovery system that expedited restoration time from days to minutes. This means we make patient data readily available and provide the highest level of care at all times” said Jack Velazquez, senior systems engineer at Florida Hospital. “With 100 developers on our team, we rely on Red Hat to save us time on everyday management issues so we can focus on creating new solutions. Our parent company has been impressed by our efficiency, ROI and performance gains from using Red Hat solutions.”

Florida Hospital is looking forward to expanding Red Hat usage. In the near future, the hospital’s Open Systems Team will be implementing Red Hat virtualization capabilities for some of their projects.

“When it comes time to upgrade again, we intend to move more of our mid-range systems to Linux. We’d love to experience Red Hat performance and reliability throughout the entire hospital,” said Velazquez.

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

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

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center hosts its mission-critical applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Raleigh NC – February 11, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital in Boston, Mass., has migrated to Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network. Red Hat solutions have provided BIDMC with significant cost savings, higher system availability and streamlined disaster recovery, creating an opportunity to enhance patient care.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is renowned for excellence in patient care, biomedical research, teaching and community service. It is the fourth-largest recipient of biomedical research funding from the National Institute of Health and staffs 3,000 doctors and 12,000 employees. The Information Systems Division of BIDMC, which maintains a datacenter with 146 mission-critical applications that are vital to the functioning of the hospital, decided to replace its proprietary operating system in 2005 with a more secure, reliable solution that could provide reduced operating and capital costs for the hospital. The IT department also looked to create a new disaster-recovery system that could improve performance and availability.

The internal security team at BIDMC had been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its servers for three years, and the hospital’s Sr. Cache Administrator had extensive experience with Red Hat solutions with a previous hospital. After providing benchmark data that exhibited the benefits of Red Hat solutions to hospital decision-makers, BIDMC purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Red Hat value-added provider, DLT Solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux now runs on 40 BIDMC servers, 11 of which are installed in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Cluster that hosts Intersystems Cache and the hospital’s proprietary Triple A applications, those that are most mission-critical for patients. BIDMC implemented Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite to develop a more robust disaster-recovery strategy. With the solutions, BIDMC’s IT team is creating a multi-tiered architecture that separates the network, applications and database layers with one stack.

With Red Hat solutions, BIDMC has realized significant cost savings and increased system availability. IT budgets are small, so we don’t have much money to spend, but we have to be obsessed with security, privacy and reliability because in this industry when services go down, patient care can be disrupted, said Dr. John Halamka, MD, MS, Chief Information Officer of Harvard Medical School and of Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center. Red Hat solutions provide us with high reliability and security, reduced TCO with lower costs from the use of commodity hardware and a strategy that allows us to support our mission-critical Triple A application levels. I haven’t found another operating system that incorporates all of those benefits. We expect true zero downtime with our Triple A applications because our clusters will be geographically isolated across two physical locations.

BIDMC’s future IT plans include migrating additional hospital systems from HP-UX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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

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

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

Experiences 500 percent increase in website capacity after implementing Red Hat and JBoss technologies

Industry: Real Estate and Movie Exhibition Corporation

Challenge: With a growing online customer base, Decurion’s ArcLightCenmas.com looked to fix issues with its ticket sales website, previously based on Microsoft’s .NET framework.

Migration Path: .NET framework to JBoss Enterprise Applciation Platform

Solution: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Global File System

Benefits: Enhanced support and increased performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Geography: Los Angeles, CA

“JBoss Enterprise Middleware helps us accelerate solution delivery because it provides the beneficial features associated with open source solutions, combined with easy deployment and impressive customer service and support.”
Brad Bahmanpour, Enterprise Systems Architect at Decurion

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., The Decurion Corporation is parent to three primary operating businesses: Pacific Theatres Corporation, Robertson Properties Group and the ArcLight Cinema Company (ArcLight). ArcLight provides a transformational movie experience that enhances the viewers’ connection to cinema through design, amenities, service and programming. ArcLight formerly operated one theater in Hollywood with 14 auditoriums and the world-famous Cinerama Dome. The company opened a second theater in December 2007 in Sherman Oaks, CA.

Approximately 40 percent of ArcLight Cinemas ticket sales are sold through its online ticket site, ArclightCinemas.com. With a growing online customer base, ArcLight looked to fix issues with its ticket sales website, previously based on Microsoft’s .NET framework. The website had experienced issues including extensive downtime and lengthy resolution time for issues.

“When researching solutions for our ArcLight ticket website, I referenced my successful past experience with JBoss’ proven technology. There was no need to explore other technology options, because I knew JBoss would solve our issues,” said Brad Bahmanpour, Enterprise Systems Architect at Decurion. “Open source is much easier to work with in terms of licensing for the user, and it’s extremely cost-effective. JBoss Enterprise Middleware helps us accelerate solution delivery because it provides the beneficial features associated with open source solutions, combined with easy deployment and impressive customer service and support.”

Since the migration, ArcLight has experienced benefits, including ease of development on J2EE platforms and the utilization of Web Services technology. “It’s like a black and white experience between .NET and developing with JBoss,” said Bahmanpour. “We’ve had far fewer issues, and those that we have experienced have been dealt with very quickly and efficiently. JBoss technology makes development much easier and it’s very open for natural extensions like JBoss Hibernate.”

Additionally, utilizing the clustering features of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has made the ArclightCinemas.com website scalable. ArcLight will now be able to add new nodes to its servers and enable more users and heightened traffic on its website without a change in application. Prior to implementing JBoss technology, the website could only sustain about 100 concurrent users. Now, with JBoss Clustering, it can sustain more than 600 concurrent users. For this capacity increase, ArcLight uses the same number of HP DL580G machines with only the addition of one load balancer and two application servers.

“With Linux and JBoss, we have a lot of room to grow right now. In addition to our ArclightCinemas.com website, we have utilized the JBoss, Apache and Linux platform to develop the Decurion Management company website, www.decurion.com, and also the forums.arclightcinemas.com and experience.arclightcinemas.com websites. We are planning to incorporate JBoss Operations Network, JBoss Hibernate and JBoss Seam into our solution in 2008,” said Bahmanpour

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Florida Hospital

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Orlando, Fla.

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

Migration Path: IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

Hardware: HP and IBM servers

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

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

Download the case study[PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry: Healthcare Geography: Boston, MA

Opportunity: Migrate core clinical applications to stable, secure operating environment and create new disaster-recovery system with higher availability

Migration Path: HP Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite; Intersystems Caché; proprietary Triple A, utility, and security applications

Hardware: HP DL385 with AMD dual-core processors

Benefits: Realized $200,000 in annual cost savings, decreased annual downtime from 20 hours to near zero—furthering leading-edge patient care

Challenge

In 2005, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and BIDMC, wanted to migrate the hospital’s IT infrastructure to a more secure, reliable operating system that would reduce operating and capital expenditures. “Our Triple A applications, which are responsible for all of the clinical, financial, administrative, and academic activities in the hospital, ran on HP Unix. But the operating system had memory leaks and required frequent virus patches,” said Halamka. “We experienced approximately 20 hours of planned and unplanned downtime last year,” added Rob Hurst, Sr. Caché Administrator for BIDMC. The hospital not only wanted to move its applications to a more stable and secure operating system, but also wanted to create a new disaster-recovery system that would increase availability from 99.7 percent to 99.99 percent—improving the hospital’s level of patient care even further.

Solution

Three years prior, BIDMC had begun using Red Hat for the hospital’s utility services, including mail exchange, spam filtering, and DNS. “Our internal security team was running Red Hat Enterprise Linux exclusively on its servers, so we knew Red Hat provided rock-solid security,” said Hurst. However, executive management questioned whether an open source solution could scale sufficiently while providing the level of reliability needed to support enterprise applications. As the former IT director for another Northeastern hospital, Hurst had gained extensive experience deploying Red Hat for core clinical systems. “Based on my previous experience, I was able to provide BIDMC with benchmark data, demonstrating that Red Hat performance, scalability, and reliability was proven in hospital environments,” he said.

After gaining management approval, Hurst spearheaded the migration project, purchasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux from DLT Solutions, one of Red Hat’s value-added providers dedicated to healthcare and government environments. Hurst’s team deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 11 servers that run Intersystems Caché, as well as the hospital’s proprietary Triple A applications. “Red Hat Professional Services helped us review the architecture design, ensuring a smooth transition to our production environment,” said Hurst. Within six months, the migration from HP-UX to Red Hat was complete, and Hurst is now leveraging Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Cluster Suite, to implement a more robust disaster-recovery strategy. BIDMC currently operates four environments—development, testing, production, and shadow production—and runs 11 servers in a cluster.

Using Red Hat Global File System and Cluster Suite, Hurst and his team are creating a multi-tiered architecture that separates the network, applications, and database layers within one stack. “Red Hat GFS creates one file system as if all of the layers are running on one server and redirects files seamlessly as needed. If we have an unplanned outage on one application server, then GFS automatically distributes to another application server or environment, eliminating lengthy wait times,” said Hurst. To perform a planned update, such as a security patch or memory upgrade, GFS enables the team to redirect to a different environment easily without having to shut down the system.

Benefits

Red Hat’s open source technology, combined with high-level support, provide BIDMC with the reliability and agility it requires to run a leading-edge hospital. “Red Hat solutions, such as GFS and Cluster Suite, are built into the kernel, providing all of the open source technology we need—affordably and without vendor lock-in,” said Hurst. Before moving its Red Hat servers into production, Hurst was impressed when his team was able to communicate directly with the Vice President of Support, 24×7. “Red Hat is an engineering-focused company with executive management and a Global Support Services team that is highly involved and technically capable. This means we can resolve issues quickly and keep our most critical hospital information systems available to ensure leading-edge patient care,” he said.

BIDMC’s roadmap includes moving other hospital systems from HP-UX to Red Hat. “The hospital is currently considering migrating its Oracle and PeopleSoft database applications to Red Hat. “Moving our core clinical applications to Red Hat was the first step. The reliability and performance gains we’ve experienced are proof that we’re ready to migrate our other applications,” said Hurst.

For more about Red Hat’s open source solutions for healthcare, visit the Red Hat healthcare web site http://www.redhat.com/solutions/healthcare

Industry: Hosting services

Geography: St. Louis, MO

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

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

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

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge Series servers

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

Opportunity

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

Solution

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

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

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

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

Benefits

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

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

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

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

This story is available in the following languages: [  ]

Introduction

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

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

Challenges

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

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

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

Benefits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Roadmap

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

Conclusion

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

Industry: Services

Geography: Switzerland

Opportunity: Swisscom IT Services needed to create a standardised and stable operating system environment to host outsourced services for its customers. The company also wanted to simplify the provisioning and allocation of new servers by creating an automated staging infrastructure.

Solution: Hardware: IBM Blade servers
Software: Simple Managed Linux (SIMLUX) including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Satellite Server, JBoss Enterprise Application Server

Benefits:

• Swisscom IT Services now has a highly stable standardised Linux platform called Simply Managed Linux (SIMLUX).
• The solution, combining Red Hat and JBoss solutions, delivers simple management through the reliable Red Hat subscription model.
• The solution also delivers top price-performance ratios for Swisscom IT Services.

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Background

Swisscom IT Services is a strategic subsidiary of the Swisscom Group, the largest Swiss telecommunications provider, and is one of the largest outsourcing companies in Switzerland. It offers services that range from the integration, operation, and further development of complex IT environments to the development and maintenance of applications.

Opportunity

Swisscom IT Services was running a comprehensive Linux infrastructure at the beginning of 2005. But Bertrand Dafflon, the head of the internal IT department, decided to further advance the company’s infrastructure. Dafflon’s team looked to implement a completely standardised Linux environment with an automated staging infrastructure for the majority of applications.
Solution

Under the name “Simply Managed Linux” (SIMLUX), Swisscom decided to work with Red Hat to develop a highly flexible and effective infrastructure for its data centres.

“Over the years, we have seen time and again that Red Hat follows a more conscientious approach than others. Red Hat only makes functions available once they are stable and suitable for enterprise use,” said Thomas von Steiger, systems engineer at Swisscom IT Services. “We run many applications within the SIMLUX environment that are critical to our company and our clients, making Red Hat’s concentration on the reliability of its software essential to us. We believe that the principles of open source development are best represented by Red Hat. We would rather use open source software for SAN multi-pathing than the tools provided by the SAN provider. In this way, when we carry out a kernel update, we can update the multi-pathing functions at the same time without having to worry about proprietary drivers and so on.”

The decisive factor in choosing Red Hat was the company’s total commitment to the reliability of its software and its open source strategy. Our clients depend on installations such as SAP in our Linux environment. There was no serious alternative to Red Hat in that respect.

Swisscom IT Services uses IBM blade server hardware for the SIMLUX infrastructure. The IT team has assigned both data management and the operating system to a Storage Area Network (SAN) and has enabled the blade server to boot directly from the SAN without a hard drive. This ensures system stability and hardware independence. The server hardware can be replaced easily with minimal configuration, as all the data is held separately on the SAN. As a result, the blade servers now require less cooling because without a hard drive, they produce much less heat. In addition, the SAN images serve as the basis for the automated staging infrastructure, making it possible to allocate a new server with just a few clicks in a web interface—a process which only takes about 30 minutes.

Swisscom IT Services deploys web, application, and database servers. All software is installed in the RPM format developed by Red Hat. So the company can use Red Hat satellite server as the central administration centre for updates, monitoring, and allocation.

As of June 2007, Swisscom IT Services operates approximately 70 SAP, 40 Oracle, 90 Web and 100 JBoss application servers in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based SIMLUX environment. The IT service provider also uses Red Hat Cluster Suite as the basis for 20 cluster nodes. The SAN provides 40 Terabyte of memory too. With the benefits of Red Hat’s management tools, Swisscom IT Services’ two Linux administrators are more than capable of maintaining the entire infrastructure. They ensure optimum supply for more than 50 outsourcing clients on the SIMLUX platform in addition to other responsibilities.

Benefits

The SIMLUX infrastructure offers Swisscom IT Services an extremely stable and flexible data environment that can be managed centrally by Red Hat Satellite Server. Red Hat’s subscription model also gives Swisscom the ability to benefit from technical innovations and updates without incurring additional costs. Since 2006, Swisscom IT Services has implemented 64-bit applications and device mapper multi-pathing for booting from the SAN after a corresponding operating system update. At the start of 2007, Dafflon’s team also began the most crucial test phase for server virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. “Virtualization with Xen is a good example of a function that other providers have pressed ahead with, without being able to offer the required stability and integration into the complete solution,” said von Steiger. “In contrast, we wanted to optimise our hardware capacity without endangering reliability for our clients. Red Hat’s virtualization solution makes this possible. With virtualization integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, new systems are provisioned as virtual machines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Application Server make it possible to integrate even the most demanding of architectures into a virtual infrastructure. Swisscom IT Services has installed a cluster of JBoss Application Servers in virtual machines on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

“Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss was another lucky break for us,” said Dafflon. “Since the acquisition, we have been able to profit from the same excellent price-performance ratio for middleware as for the operating system layer.”

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