COMPANY: GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company)

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: US

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

MIGRATION PATH: Proprietary middleware platform to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

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

HARDWARE: 50 Dell servers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: CME Group

Industry: Financial Exchange

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To migrate from a cost-inhibitive proprietary UNIX platform to a Linux alternative in order to reduce costs and increase performance, reliability, scalability, and agility of the systems on which its critical trading platforms handle billions of derivatives trades per year, worth more than a quadrillion in notional value

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Training

Hardware: 4,000 x86 quad-core servers

Migration Path: Sun Solaris on SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on x86-based servers

Benefits: Achieved reduced latency, expanded flexibility, heightened performance, ease of migration and management, and increased scalability while providing cost savings for the systems responsible for processing CME Group’s millions of daily transactions

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market. We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience.”
–Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group.

Download case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
CME Group is the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange. Building on the heritage of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, and New York Mercantile Exchange, CME Group serves the risk management needs of customers around the globe. As an international marketplace, CME Group brings buyers and sellers together on the CME Globex electronic trading platform and on trading floors in Chicago and New York.

CME Group provides the widest range of benchmark futures and options products available on any exchange, covering all major asset classes, including interest rates, equities, FX, commodities, and alternative investments such as weather and real estate. CME Group’s vision is one of ongoing global growth, innovative product development, continually enhanced technology, and the highest level of service available on any exchange.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
CME Group processes millions of transactions per day. In 2008, CME Group’s volume totaled 3.3 billion contracts, worth $1.2 quadrillion in notional value. In order to meet the heavy demands placed on its IT systems, CME Group has rigorous requirements that must be met across the performance, scalability, reliability, ease of use, and costs of its IT infrastructure.

CME Group’s IT architecture must also be agile to scale with rapid system changes in demand and volume. It must reduce latency wherever possible to ensure millisecond response times for its customers, and needs the reliability, scalability, and performance of a mission-critical infrastructure.

Since 1997, CME Group has witnessed a migration of trading volume from the trading floors to its Globex electronic trading platform. Today, 80 percent of CME Group’s volume is handled by its electronic trading platform, with 20 percent of volume still handled on the trading floor.

CME Group previously relied on a proprietary UNIX operating platform, but began looking for affordable, high-performance alternatives in 2002. “Our systems were relying on a proprietary UNIX platform,” said Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group. “As the responsibilities of the UNIX servers grew and the number of applications they ran continued to expand, the cost of running those applications grew too.”

CME Group began investigating alternative platforms and placed an emphasis on examining open source Linux options. After rigorous internal testing, CME Group’s IT team decided that a move to Linux would provide cost, performance, and reliability benefits over its previous Solaris platform. To prepare for the migration, the team created an eight-step plan for moving to Linux.

SOLUTIONS
A key factor in CME Group’s plan to move to Linux was to identify a technology vendor that could provide optimized support for its Linux operating systems. “Our systems are too critical to not have someone to turn to in the event that an issue arises,” said Panfil. “We looked at the players, and Red Hat had the best support infrastructure and the most solid product.”

“We saw the performance advantages of Linux and were looking for ways to reduce costs and increase performance for our customers,” said Vinod Kutty, associate director, Distributed Computing at CME Group. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux fit the bill, and we started to gradually test and deploy it internally. Our organization was an early adopter of open source technologies, and we first deployed Linux in 2003.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the primary operating platform for CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform in 2004. The exchange began by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, and has migrated to all of the latest versions of the leading operating platform through today’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. During the first year in production in 2004, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered a twofold increase in performance and reduced costs for CME Group by 50 percent. Today, 99 percent of its distributed platform runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers support both CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform as well as devices on its trading floors. “We still have a huge interest in the trading floor, but the electronic trading platform is very attractive to those who desire the speed it delivers,” said Panfil. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports both the electronic trading platform and the floor through the server floor displays and hand-held trading devices.”

CME Group’s IT architecture is designed so that every application runs on a minimum of two servers and a disaster-recovery server. “We try to design applications so that failover is seamless and customers don’t see interruptions,” said Panfil.

The move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on commodity x86 hardware goes hand-in-hand with CME Group’s horizontal scalability model. “Red Hat helped us achieve the level of horizontal scalability that we needed,” said Kutty. “Our ability to add incremental capacity to the thousands of servers we maintain daily with the reliability to deal with the great demands of day-to-day trading is only capable because of Linux and our work with Red Hat.”

Given the history and partnering with Red Hat, CME is considering extending that partnership to JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology. “We’ve worked with JBoss architects on solutions in the past and are now determining if JBoss can help us drive the open source software community in the same manner Red Hat has driven the operating system,” said Joel Tosi, lead applications architect for Front-End Systems at CME Group.

Relying on one vendor for support for both its operating system and middleware layers has proved valuable to CME Group. “The coordination between Red Hat and CME Group has been great,” said Tosi. “We knew we wanted to grow the partnership with Red Hat that we had already established and grown for more than six years. With Red Hat, we also knew we’d get the high visibility we wanted for both our operating system and middleware projects.”

BENEFITS
Performance is a key metric by which CME Group is judged by its customers. Many of CME Group’s customers’ highest priorities are reduced latency and speed. “We need a good balance of performance and reliability,” said Kutty. “We need to be able to react very quickly to changes in business. We don’t want fluctuations in performance and cannot have any downtime.”

“One thing we found was that Linux was faster, and speed in this industry is really important,” said Panfil. “We want customers to get as fast a response time as possible, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux we gained speed and reduced costs.”

The reduced costs associated with Linux were an attractive factor to CME Group’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Cost savings was something we were targeting, but we didn’t know how dramatic the cost savings would be,” said Kutty. “We saved during the initial switch from the support perspective, but over time, a combination of Linux and commodity hardware has continued to deliver reduced costs.”

The IT team expects to gain continued cost savings from elimination of licensing with both its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform solutions and through resource reallocation. “We see cost savings not only from both the operating system and middleware infrastructures, but from the productivity of staff too,” said Tosi. “We see productivity gains when our staff has the ability to see into the code and also through the ease of management of the systems.”

CME Group also reduced costs by gaining flexibility with its systems. CME Group strategically executes a multi-vendor strategy in order to avoid vendor lock-in. With Red Hat, it achieved a platform with great flexibility through a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software vendors.

CME Group was quickly able to transition its administrators’ UNIX expertise to its new systems. The team leveraged hands-on Red Hat Training courses to ease the shift of both skills and systems, which resulted in a seamless migration. CME Group also benefited from the skills of its dedicated Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), who offers additional, ongoing Red Hat expertise to the exchange’s IT team. Its TAM is the first line of support and provides one point of contact through which CME Group can collaborate with Red Hat on new technologies and support needs.

“The practical, hands-on nature of Red Hat Training courses provided real value to the transition of our team’s skills to Linux,” said Kutty. “All of our system administrators are Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE).”

CME Group today works closely with Red Hat’s performance teams to demonstrate workloads and tune systems for the great performance and reliability demands it mandates for its mission-critical systems. It builds synthetic workloads that replicate the demands of its systems in order to collaborate with Red Hat for future developments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other products. Together, Red Hat and CME Group form a technology partnership that benefits the entire open source community as well as the vast community of Red Hat customers.

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market,” said Panfil. “We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience. To be competitive in this industry, we have to use the best possible applications, operating systems, and servers. For our mission-critical systems, we leverage Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

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

Company: AutoTrader.com

Industry: Automotive information and sales

Geography: Atlanta

Business Challenge: Rock-solid support needed to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and off-the-shelf applications

Solution: Subscribe to Red Hat’s Technical Account Management (TAM) service, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite

Benefits: Smooth migration to a new IT infrastructure. Immediate response to questions and issues regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Direct access to senior Red Hat technical expertise. Improved productivity of internal IT support staff.

“Any company that has anything important running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux would benefit from a TAM. Even in times like these, when additional expenditures are difficult to justify, the TAM service is worth every penny. It more than pays for itself in the time it saves and the competitive edge it provides.”
–Mark Juliano, UNIX Systems Manager, AutoTrader.com

Download the Case Study [PDF]

BACKGROUND

AutoTrader.com was launched in 1998 and over the past 10 years has grown into the Internet’s leading marketplace and information portal for automotive products and services. Today, AutoTrader.com brings more than four million vehicle listings from 40,000 dealers and 250,000 private owners together with more than 14 million qualified buyers each month. By leveraging high-tech merchandising techniques that incorporate images, videos, and sophisticated search capabilities, AutoTrader.com makes it easier, quicker, and more cost-effective for people to research, find, and buy and sell new and used vehicles.

In addition to vehicle pricing – including seller specials and dealer discounts – AutoTrader.com posts safety information and provides vehicle history reports, and offers insight into the auto buying process with information on financing, auto loans and more. In August, 2008, AutoTrader.com ranked highest in satisfying dealers with new-vehicle leads for the second year in a row, according to the 2008 J.D. Power and Associates Dealer Satisfaction with Online Buying Services Study.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

In 2004, AutoTrader.com made a strategic decision to move away from developing home-grown systems toward deployment of off-the-shelf applications. At the same time, the firm wanted to migrate off high-end proprietary SPARC servers to commodity x86 machines, primarily for cost reasons.

“We very much wanted to change to a buy-versus-build mentality for applications, and in the process wanted to move away from legacy UNIX operating systems tied to proprietary hardware that were costly and difficult to maintain,” said Mark Juliano, UNIX systems manager for AutoTrader.com. Open source Linux was the obvious answer, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the obvious top choice of Linux distribution.

“We did our homework, and Red Hat came out on top,” said Juliano. Not only is Red Hat the No. 1 Linux provider, but it offers infrastructure management capabilities and toolsets– via its Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite systems management solution – that are unequaled among Linux vendors. “And then there was the fact that just about every independent software vendor (ISV) supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” Juliano said. Currently, AutoTrader.com is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more than 350 x86 servers.

But although Juliano’s staff had extensive experience with Solaris and other variations of UNIX, none of the other internal IT staff members were familiar with Linux. Complicating matters, AutoTrader.com was in the process of implementing a strategic, corporate-wide service-oriented architecture (SOA) using an enterprise service bus (ESB) that “had a lot of visibility within the company,” said Juliano. “That project was too important for us to take any risks with it.”

SOLUTION

To get the extra support it desired to help enable a simpler and streamlined transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SOA, AutoTrader.com subscribed to the Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) service. This value-added offering is designed for Red Hat customers that desire a highly personalized support relationship with Red Hat. By subscribing to the TAM service, companies get a primary technical contact at Red Hat who works with them to understand their ongoing technology requirements and provide trusted advice that enables them to optimize their Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. As companies’ single point of accountability when faced with mission-critical systems issues, the TAM tailors support for customers’ unique technical and business environments; acts as an advocate for them within Red Hat; and facilitates collaboration with other vendors.

BENEFITS

Although it originally intended to subscribe to the TAM service for only one year – “to get that extra support we needed,” said Juliano – the experience was so positive and the return on investment (ROI) so great that AutoTrader.com promptly renewed the contract for three more years.

“My estimate is that every time we call our TAM, we get an immediate solution 80 percent of the time,” said Juliano. “That’s not just saying he picks up the phone – although that kind of responsiveness would be impressive under any circumstances – it’s that he provides us with a solution during that first exchange.” This is especially critical given that AutoTrader.com has a technically sophisticated in-house support staff that attempts to troubleshoot any problems before getting the TAM involved. “My staff really knows what they’re doing, and have already tried 20 different solutions before they come to me for help,” said Juliano. “And when they ask for help, they need it at a very high level, and very, very quickly,” said Juliano. The fact that the TAM is intimately familiar with AutoTrader.com’s hardware and software infrastructure is critical to making this work so well, he said.

The TAM service has also enabled AutoTrader.com to be more flexible in a highly competitive marketplace. “Historically, flexibility has been our biggest competitive advantage,” said Juliano. “Our ability to rapidly develop new systems that provide our users with additional functionality is key to our success, and our TAM helps us achieve this.”

Juliano said he can’t recommend the TAM service more highly. “Any company that has anything important running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux would benefit from a TAM,” he said. “Even in times like these, when additional expenditures are difficult to justify, the TAM service is worth every penny. It more than pays for itself in the time it saves, and the competitive edge it provides.”

Industry: Marketing services

Geography: Global

Business Challenge:
To increase the speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of the business’ high-performance grid computing environment, which now records more than one trillion transactions per month

Migration Path: UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Network

Hardware: x86 Servers

Benefits: Standardizing its grid computing environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux helped Acxiom achieve 100-fold performance gains and unmatched scalability while also reducing costs and increasing flexibility

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Acxiom® Corporation, a global leader in interactive marketing services, was founded in 1969. Headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, Acxiom provides deep consumer insight to companies that want to better connect with customers and prospective customers for lasting relationships. The Acxiom team incorporates expertise in consumer data and analytics, information technology, data integration, and consulting solutions to enable marketing across digital, Internet, email, mobile and direct mail channels.

Acxiom is widely recognized for its ability to successfully utilize advanced technology to meet its clients’ marketing demands. The company’s teams process and interpret massive volumes of client data for use in developing and executing strategic marketing campaigns.

CHALLENGE
In 2001, Acxiom introduced a breakthrough marketing technology that delivered entity resolution and customer recognition. The technology quickly became vital to Acxiom’s business proposition. Despite compelling growth opportunities, Acxiom discovered scalability and affordability challenges because the application was built on large SMP boxes running UNIX.

“Implementation of the application would not allow us to scale cost-effectively to meet our customers’ needs,” said Terry Talley, chief technology officer at Acxiom. “We needed to solve this problem with hardware, and the only way to do that was through commodity hardware. Then, we needed to find a reliable operating system to run successfully and easily on commodity hardware.”

SOLUTION
Needing an infrastructure that was faster, more scalable, and more affordable, the company decided to assess the use of open source technology for its operating system solution. Acxiom turned to Red Hat for its industry-leading solutions and support.

“We needed a reliable, stable, and supported version of Linux that was tested and production-ready to support millions – and now billions – of records per day through our application,” said Talley. “Red Hat was that solution. Red Hat was sensitive to our unique support needs. Although we had thousands of machines, we had few distinct instances. Red Hat was very flexible in engaging with us, and as a result we are able to build stronger and smarter systems with our customers in mind.”

Acxiom’s grid infrastructure is designed to improve efficiency, maintain consistency across its systems and logically partition resources to meet Acxiom clients’ increasing demand.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the standard operating system for Acxiom’s grid computing environment that amounts to over 6,000 machines today, translating to 12,000 sockets. It is the foundation for all of Acxiom’s scalable marketing business applications and bulk processing applications,” said Talley.

An important goal for Acxiom in rolling out the deployment was to substantially reduce hardware costs. With a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled Acxiom to make hardware choices independent of the operating system. In addition to hardware flexibility, Red Hat Enterprise Linux addressed Acxiom’s need for increased performance and congruent scalability.

“If you considered a ratio of throughput to cost, the ratio for one of our key applications running on SMP boxes under UNIX was about 10 to one. After migrating our application to a grid computing environment running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and commodity hardware, the ratio went to 1,000 to one. The 100-fold increase was a dramatic improvement in throughput to cost and an extremely successful strategy for us,” said Talley.

Acxiom’s grid environment is business-critical and can’t afford unscheduled downtime or gaps in performance. “As all of the machines in our grid run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it is the core of where we do all of our CDI processing, which is essential to our business,” said Chuck Howland, technical group leader for Acxiom’s CDI and Marketing Services line of business. “One of our applications is capable of handling a peak load of 15,000 transactions per second. On average across all applications, we process billions of transactions a day and over a trillion records per month. So it simply has to work.”

Additionally, Acxiom uses Red Hat Network for management and procurement of the various instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in its grid computing environment. Acxiom has also utilized a Red Hat Technical Account Manager to assist in managing its Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based systems and for expert advice and hands-on training during new implementations.

In addition to its expansive use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Acxiom utilizes the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. In 2004, it turned to JBoss to leverage its high-performance middleware solutions. Today, the company continues to expand its use of JBoss’ enterprise solutions to build its service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment.

“The open source community and open source standards are very important to us, as are the community-driven aspects of the products we use,” said Matt Hoggatt, technical unit leader, Acxiom Service Delivery Infrastructure. “The immediate performance benefits delivered by our JBoss solutions resulted from the ease and speed of the initial migration. The ability to easily integrate applications and meet our customers’ needs was another benefit we’ve experienced with JBoss.”

“We have a very good relationship with Red Hat and JBoss,” said Hoggatt. “In the future, as we continue to build out our on-demand capabilities, we fully expect to leverage the capabilities that we have come to expect from JBoss.”

BENEFITS
Using Red Hat and JBoss solutions, Acxiom’s grid environment has achieved heightened scalability, increased stability, and 100-fold performance increases. Red Hat solutions have enabled Acxiom to focus on its business needs and trust that its technology is delivering high performance, low latency, and reduced costs.

Acxiom realized improvements from migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the grid, including an internal syndicated datamart process that accommodated one billion records and quickly grew to six billion records. “Using the standard SMP box, it ran in 28 days,” said Howland. “After migrating to the Red Hat environment in the grid with our scale-out approach, we were able to run it from 28 days down to 2.8 days, 16 hours to six minutes, six days to six hours – all significant improvements.”

“Red Hat is the leader in the open source community and is the industry standard for Linux,” said Howland. “Our long-standing relationship with Red Hat has allowed us to create business value. And with the reliability, scalability, and support it provides for our critical grid computing system, we can focus on our business goals.”

“Our use of Red Hat has grown along with our use of commodity hardware and our involvement in the open source community,” said Talley. “With Red Hat we have a very collaborative, partner-oriented discussion about the technology we need and what Red Hat can provide for us. As we venture into new technology areas, Red Hat has always been very responsive. We view it as a true partnership.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Mentor Graphics

Industry: Technology

Geography: Wilsonville, Oregon

Business Challenge: Facilitate use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to deliver mission-critical electronic design automation (EDA) software and hardware designs to market

Solution: Subscribe to Red Hat’s Technical Account Management (TAM) service, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Immediate response to questions and issues regarding Red Hat solutions. Direct access to senior Red Hat technical staff. Increased return on investment (ROI) of deploying Red Hat solutions. Improved time-to-market.

“For any company that needs an additional level of support above the standard offering, Red Hat’s TAM service is the answer. In addition to providing us with a great opportunity to build a deeper relationship with Red Hat, it enables us to leverage Red Hat products for greater competitive advantage.”
–Laurent Rochette, alliance manager, independent software vendors (ISVs), Mentor Graphics

Download [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1981, Mentor Graphics is a leading provider of electronic design automation (EDA), delivering software and hardware design solutions that enable electronics manufacturers to bring products to market faster and more cost-effectively. As the only company offering an embedded software solution for the electronics industry, Mentor Graphics has developed leading-edge and best-of-breed products for more than 25 years. It delivers excellence in an industry where technological complexity and rate of innovation challenge even the brightest board and chip design engineers.

Based in Wilsonville, Oregon, with offices in Silicon Valley and 70 other locations around the globe, Mentor Graphics earned $850 million in revenues in fiscal 2007, and employs 4,450 workers worldwide.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Mentor Graphics began using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2002 as part of its engineering infrastructure for Linux to develop efficient and cost-effective EDA products. These systems were critical to Mentor Graphics’ success because of the fast-moving and highly competitive nature of the EDA market. “Our customers are aggressively seeking to lower their manufacturing cycle times and costs,” said Laurent Rochette, alliance manager for independent software vendors (ISVs) at Mentor Graphics. “We’re under constant pressure to develop hardware and software design solutions that allow them to do this quickly and cost-effectively.” Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays a prominent role in allowing Mentor Graphics to perform simulations of new designs and customize the workflow of getting products to market.

Because of the strategic importance and complexity of these deployments based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mentor Graphics required premiere support from Red Hat that could deliver an added layer of value above the standard support provided with a Red Hat subscription. “Our internal engineers are technically very sophisticated, and we do all the first-line troubleshooting and problem solving internally,” said Rochette. “When we run into something we can’t solve ourselves, we need immediate help, and we need it to begin at a very high level.”

SOLUTION
To get the expanded support it required, Mentor Graphics turned to the Red Hat Technical Account Management (TAM) service. This value-added offering was designed for Red Hat customers that desire a highly personalized support relationship with Red Hat. By subscribing to the TAM service, companies get a primary technical contact at Red Hat who works with them to understand their ongoing technology requirements and provide trusted advice that enables them to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their critical systems. As a companies’ single point of accountability within Red Hat when faced with mission-critical issues, the TAM tailors support for customers’ unique technical and business environments; acts as an advocate for them within Red Hat; and facilitates collaboration with other vendors.

BENEFITS
“Mentor Graphics has had a TAM subscription now for a little more than three years, and we find it a useful and valuable resource,” said Rochette.

For starters, he gets direct access to a dedicated senior Red Hat support engineer who participates in bi-weekly review calls to assess the status of Mentor Graphics’ Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementation. Whenever an urgent issue arises between calls, Rochette gets an immediate response. “I can’t think of a time when we didn’t get a phone call or email back right away,” he said. And the quality of the support is excellent, he said. “Because our TAM knows our technical environment as well as our business needs, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we call. Any question that our TAM can’t answer right away is immediately escalated to a senior technologist within Red Hat.”

The TAM relationship is also a proactive one. Rochette gets advanced exposure and access to Red Hat’s technology and development plans that he can leverage to make strategy decisions. He also gets early notice of other things that could impact his Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment, such as beta testing of new features and pending release of bug patches. A subscription to Red Hat’s monthly TAM newsletter also keeps him abreast of developments within Red Hat that could impact Mentor Graphics.

Perhaps most critically, having a TAM allows Mentor Graphics to speed time-to-market of its EDA products. “If an issue is impacting our ability to complete our code development and release, the relationship with our TAM relationship is critical to timely resolution of it,” said Rochette.

“For any company that needs an additional level of support above the standard offering, Red Hat’s TAM service is the answer,” said Rochette. “In addition to providing us with a great opportunity to build a deeper relationship with Red Hat, it enables us to leverage Red Hat products for greater competitive advantage by resolving issues rapidly and speeding time to market of new products.”

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.”

Delivered Value Winner: Nortel

Submitted by: Ernest Szeideman

Vertical: Telecommunications

Geography: International

Website: www.nortel.com

Company Background

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

Business and/or Technical Challenge

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

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

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

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

Vendor Selection Process

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

Benefits

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

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

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

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

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

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

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

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

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

Industry: Telecommunications

Industry: Technology (ASP, Hosting and E-Business)

Geography: The Netherlands

Challenge: To build a standardized, high-availability application-, web- and database-server environment that would ensure security, interoperablity with multiple database systems, and cost efficiency for a growing customer base.

Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS Premium Edition, Red Hat Network Satellite Server, Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM)
Hardware: HP Proliant DL380, HP BL20, Dell PowerEdge 1850, Dell PowerEdge 2850s servers

Benefits: Increased performance and availability of applications on a standardized platform. Simplified maintenance and support. ISO 17799 compliance.

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

ASP4all, founded in 1999 and based in Huizen, the Netherlands, is a specialist in building and hosting online applications and websites. The company offers full application service provisioning, application hosting, and Web hosting. ASP4all has been awarded the ISO 17799-certification (also known as the International Code for Information Security and Business Continuity) for the high quality of its technology and security implementations, and is externally audited every six months by KPMG.

The company has built two highly resilient A-class datacenters in Amsterdam, providing services to midsize and large companies, government institutions, local councils and educational institutions across the Netherlands. The Netherlands’ two most important eGovernment websites, Overheid.nl and Regering.nl, are hosted and managed by ASP4all, and provide 24×7 availability of legal and social information to the Netherlands’ 16 million citizens.

Growth creates strict technology requirements

When we came across Red Hat, the advantages were very clear — Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable, secure, cost-effective and highly compatible with our database offerings.

– Marcel Jansen, CTO at ASP4all

Owing to growing demand from its customers for large scale website and online application hosting, ASP4all recognised the long term value in building a highly resilient infrastructure, capable of providing secure and scalable services. The chosen infrastructure would need to provide high levels of uptime whilst requiring only a small number of system administrators. Wanting to standardise on a single platform, the company looked to increase the cost-effectiveness of its solutions without substantially increasing its operating costs.

In addition, the platform had to fulfil certain specific criteria, including support for a wide range of common databases, including MS-SQL, Oracle, Progress, Sybase, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, as used by customers including Vodafone, Kennisnet, Regering.nl and Overheid.nl.

Red Hat provides full-service solution

ASP4all’s heterogenous network is standardised on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms. The company chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS Premium Edition at its Linux standard, which ensures that they are able to meet stringent requirements for security, interoperability and cost-efficiency. The use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux now also enables the company to provide “five nines” reliability to its customers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Today, many ASP4all clients have their systems hosted on some 300 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. ASP4all uses a combination of HP Proliant DL 380 / BL20P servers and Dell PowerEdge 1850 and 2850s servers. This solution has been optimised for large transactional systems and allows ASP4all to deliver 100% on its service level agreements.

Red Hat Network Satellite Server

The RHN Satellite Server architecture allows us to stay in complete control of our network, while ensuring that security is always at the highest possible level … Having RHN backing us up means that we can guarantee the very best support possible to our customers.

Having first completed pilot implementations, the company has now built its entire Linux infrastructure utilizing the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite Server architecture. This guarantees a secure and reliable environment for ASP4all’s customers, while also providing the ASP4all team with in-depth technical support from Red Hat Network advisors.

Red Hat Training

Several of ASP4all’s support staff and engineers are specialised in Red Hat solutions and have become Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE). These specialists have helped to build a wealth of experience in hosting and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems within the company. In order to maintain this expertise, ASP4all invests in continuous training and improvment for its staff, whilst also making use of the Red Hat Technical Account Management (TAM) service for specific situations and changes.

Red Hat solution is stable, secure, and cost-effective

“In the early days of ASP4ALL, we installed our applications on Solaris and Windows-based platforms, but we soon outgrew this environment which proved to be rather costly. As a result, we started implementing Linux solutions as well,” says Marcel Jansen, CTO at ASP4ALL. “When we came across Red Hat, the advantages were very clear — Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable, secure, cost-effective and highly compatible with our database offerings. Putting it simply, some applications just run faster and are more reliable on a Linux platform.”

A significant benefit for ASP4all is the dramatic reduction it has been able to make in installing and optimising online applications. “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are able to have applications up and running in next to no time — a refreshing change from other operating system platforms. After installation, applications run consistently and quickly, and updating of the OS is much smoother too,” says Jansen.

ASP4all has a small, but growing number of customers running Oracle databases on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As a result, ASP4all has been able to provide exceptionally robust and reliable performance in compute-intensive transactional systems, ensuring that customers such as Vodafone, which hosts its online shop with ASP4all, derive maximum benefit from their investments.

Putting it simply, some applications just run faster and are more reliable on a Linux platform.

Deploying Red Hat Network Satellite Server has also been an important step for ASP4all. “We are very proud to have one of the first RHN Satellite Server deployments in the Netherlands,” says Jansen. “The Satellite architecture allows us to stay in complete control of our network, whilst ensuring that security is always at the highest possible level. In addition, maintenance and support are a key part of our service offering, and having the Red Hat Network backing us up means that we can guarantee the very best support possible to our customers,” says Jansen.

Crowning achievement is ISO 17799 certification
Perhaps the most important benefit of ASP4all’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementation is the role it played in helping the company gain its ISO 17799 certification. Jansen says: “The requirements of ISO 17799 are some of the most stringent in the IT industry, and set strict rules for security policies, system development, maintenance and disaster recovery. The use of the Satellite Server and Red Hat Network contributed to fulfilling the requirements for certification, and as a result, to the growth of our business. Security and business continuity are of critical importance to our customers.”