Flexibility, cost savings and compatibility drive selection of Red Hat as its enabler for customer-focused technology development

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Jordan’s Security Depositary Center (SDC), a non-profit public utility institution that oversees the registration and deposit of securities, has implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the foundation to its open source strategy.

SDC is currently implementing a number of e-services applications within an open source environment, including an e-payment system and the SDC Portal, which offers a wide range of electronic services. These services include enhanced account viewing, public data, statistical data, electronic initial public offering (e-IPO) and mailbox services.

In addition to the traditional benefits of working with open source, such as access to code, cost reduction and flexibility, SDC recognised the value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux interoperability as it deployed and developed with a range of hardware, including IBM and Dell. SDC has 20 x86 servers running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux that drive a range of applications, including mail systems, its web portal and intranet.

Key to SDC’s technology agility and management is the ability to manage its entire Linux environment from one console. Red Hat Network Satellite allows SDC to investigate and fix technical issues in a timely manner and with internal resources – assuring consistent run rates and performance.

“The main advantage to using open source and working with Red Hat is the flexibility to develop and maintain our technology assets internally,” said Samir Jaradat, CEO of SDC. “Red Hat not only saves us money, but it also provides us with a level of technology sophistication and interoperability that gives us the tools to develop solutions that directly meet the needs of our business.”

Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite is Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. It offers customers opportunities to gain enhanced performance, centralized control and higher scalability for their systems, while deployed on a management server located inside the customer’s datacenter and firewall.

In September 2009, Red Hat released RHN Satellite 5.3, the first fully open source version of the product. This latest version offers opportunities for increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups for customers with the incorporation of open source Cobbler technology in its provisioning architecture. The 5.3 release is also designed to allow customers to better scale with server growth, offering the ability to manage large numbers of systems with comparable ease to managing one.

Recently, IDC also published a Red Hat-sponsored paper featuring the systems management benefits that customers have experienced with RHN Satellite. After interviewing 10 RHN Satellite customers in depth – crossing geographies and industry verticals — IDC reported significant return on investment (ROI) and productivity results for customers. Here are some of the highlights from the customer testimonials:

Average of 338% ROI

Average payback period of 4.8 months

A doubled increase in the number of Linux servers managed per system administrator

Average annual benefit of $82,521 per 100 Linux servers

Average of $23,207 in annual user productivity increase

In their own words, customers quoted in the paper showed that RHN Satellite helped them achieve:

Enhanced productivity: “If RHN Satellite Server didn’t exist, I would need another person or more.”

Scalability: “…with Satellite Server, once things are set up and it is in place, managing 200 servers is as easy as managing one.”

Reduced costs: “For an OS install, we used to hire someone outside to do the work. We would buy the hardware, then we pay them to come on site, answer questions. So now, we are completely avoiding that cost.”

Faster server setup and management: “As far as time saving goes, I would say we are easily saving 20 hours per month because we aren’t doing things manually.”

Business growth: “In terms of the impact, I always count what we can sell in an hour. If the system is down, we can’t sell and that’s a revenue impact. In just one hour, we might lose millions of euros, so the impact is huge.”

To read the full IDC paper on RHN Satellite, visit here.

To learn more about RHN Satellite, visit here.

Or, to read more about what customers have to say about RHN Satellite, visit here.

Brazilian Paint Manufacturer, Tintas Iquine, Migrates from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Increase Performance and Improve Security

FAST FACTS

Customer: Tintas Iquine

Industry: Manufacturing: Paint and Tints

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Increase the stability and performance of business critical ERP applications

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Datasul, Progress Database, Trend Micro Security Solution

Hardware: Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

Migration Path: UNIX/RISC based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge servers

Benefits: Red Hat virtualization enabled increased stability, performances, and increased security on redundancy and backup, and Red Hat Satellite simplified systems management

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Tintas Iquine, a Brazilian paints, coatings, and special resins company, produces more than 1,500 products including; industrial paints, varnish, sealing, resins, pastes, and is known for its rigorous quality control, and its use of new technologies to improve its processes, products and deliver more value to its customers, paint and building material resellers and retailers.

In operation since 1974, Tintas Iquine’s two factories have the capacity to produce 8 million liters of products per month, guaranteeing to the company 6% to 7% of the Brazilian market, operate 24/7 and are fully computerized in order to achieve enhanced production capabilit, security, and in addition, less impactful to the environment. Tintas Iquine achieved the certificate of approval in NBR ISO 9001:2000, which signifies the company´s compliance with the requirements of the standard of Quality Management System in coatings. Iquine also won the certificate of quality of the Brazilian Association fo Manufacturers of Paints.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tintas Iquine grew significantly in a short amount of time, with sales volume increases of 20-30 percent, the company increased in size from 200 to 500 employees, and needed a operating platform to improve its critical Enterprise Resource Planning applications and increase the IT team’s ability to scale for the company’s growth.

The existing UNIX based server environment at Tintas Iquine supported the ERP system, database, BI, CRM and security tools, consisted of a disparate, aging infrastructure that resulted in a lower application performance level and required resources devoted to systems management and monitoring, making it increasingly difficult and costly.

The new operating platform needed to increase the ERP application’s performance, security, and provide a simplified systems management tool.

SOLUTION
The Tintas Iquine’ IT team was well versed with open source operating platforms, and especially favored Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to the enterprise support, stability, and performance the platform provides, in addition to Red Hat Satellite systems management, that would solve the company’s systems management issues.

With the expertise in-house and the enterprise-ready reputation, Tintas Iquine confidently decided not to conduct a lengthy technical evaluation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Due to the breadth of third-party applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Tintas Iquine decided to migrate all of its applications from UNIX, as all of the applications would be running under only one operating system, thus increasing the performance and reducing systems management resources.

The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux involved the virtualization of 12 machines to supports the company’s Progress database, Business Intelligence (BI) applications, CRM and Trend Micro Security Solutions.

BENEFITS
Tintas Iquine’s implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has allowed the company to scale for growth, increase application performance, reduce costs, and simplify systems management. The satisfaction and gain of performance were immediately realized by the IT staff and throughout the company, as application users began to work more efficiently and more productively.

The virtualization and the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from UNIX, provided Tintas Iquine increased server utilization, and the management process on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux based servers have shown greater agility and ease of use, when compared to the Windows based servers, due to less interruptions in the maintenance process.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the performance in the application processing has increased 30 percent, and the costs have fallen about 50 percent, thus confirming the company’s decision to migrate to Red Hat.

Although Tintas Iquine’s Oracle database is running in a Windows platform, due to the results of the UNIX to Red Hat migration, the company plans to gradually migrate all systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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

COMPANY: Whole Foods Market

CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Consumer

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

HARDWARE: 75 HP x86 servers, 16 virtual servers

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Banco Pastor

Industry: Financial Services Banking

Geography:Spain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

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

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

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

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

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

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

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

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

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

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

Download the PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPANY:Allianz Australia Insurance Limited (Allianz)

CATEGORY: Carved Out Costs

INDUSTRY: Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: Australia

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

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

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

HARDWARE: IBM System z10 mainframe, HP ProLiant servers

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

Download the PDF case study

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

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

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

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: 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: Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation (OL&T)

Industry: Transportation: Managed logistics services for the chemicals and process industries

Geography: Headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut with international offices in North America and Europe

Business Challenge: Needed to cost-effectively scale its infrastructure to meet exponential growth in the business

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle Database, Oracle ProC

Hardware: 33 multi-core Intel® Xeon® based IBM xSeries servers

Migration Path: HP-UX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and multicore Intel Xeon processor based servers

Benefits: Ability to add transaction processing and storage capacity quickly and cost-effectively as business continues to expand. Ensures uptime and reliability to customers relying on Odyssey Logistics & Technology to run mission-critical supply chain operations

“Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat. Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”
– Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services, Odyssey Logistics & Technology

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Odyssey Logistics & Technology provides global logistics management services to the chemical industry and other process manufacturers. OL&T delivers a comprehensive portfolio of logistics services to the chemicals and process industries so that clients’ products are delivered safely, reliably and economically, with the advantage of shipment visibility and actionable data across all modes.  

OL&T presents a unique scope of industry knowledge, experience and technology, applied to client supply chain operations in two distinct outsourced logistics contexts: Managed Logistics Services and Third Party Services. The OL&T team of chemical engineers and logisticians brings unparalleled expertise—they are chemical and process industry insiders, intimately familiar with the supply chain complexities and hazardous materials requirements. Its technology backbone, the Odyssey Global Logistics PlatformSM features a net-native transportation management infrastructure that supports highly integrated, flexible and data-rich service offerings.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2005, OL&T ran its business primarily on HP-UX and Windows systems. But that infrastructure simply couldn’t support a business growing as fast as OL&T’s. First, there were cost issues. Adding proprietary RISC/UNIX hardware to handle its rapidly rising transaction volumes was prohibitively expensive. “So we began looking at ways we could handle growth by using standard based servers rather than simply buying more UNIX boxes,” said Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services for OL&T.

Then there was reliability. As OL&T’s customer list grew to include some of the largest and most recognizable names in the chemical industry, it simply couldn’t afford any downtime. “UNIX and Windows are not the friendliest environments to operate,” said Massey. “With the growth we were experiencing, we had a lot of concerns about the stability and scalability of our systems. We needed to make sure we could handle all of the new customers we were implementing.” According to Massey, the impact of downtime would be serious to OL&T’s customers. “We’re integrated right into our customers’ supply chain operations, and have to respond in real time to their needs 24/7,” he said. “We’re mission-critical to them, which means that having a stable infrastructure is mission-critical to us,” he said.

Over the past three years, OL&T has seen an 83% compounded growth rate in transactions through the system. Given the firm’s rapid rate of growth, the ability to scale was critical. OL&T decided it needed to implement a virtualized environment so that it would be able to scale on-demand.

SOLUTION
To address all these challenges, OL&T decided to do a complete infrastructure “refresh” that involved migrating all of its HP-UX and most of its Windows systems over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers. Today, OL&T deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM xSeries servers and virtualized on IBM 3850 M2 servers. It also implemented Red Hat Satellite to manage provisioning and administration of its Red Hat systems. “Through our use of Red Hat Satellite, Odyssey has realized: centralized configuration management and compliance, faster patch deployment and more streamlined server deployment,” said Massey.

On the decision to move to Red Hat over other Linux distributions, Massey said there was hardly any discussion at all. “Red Hat is the market leader, period,” he said. “Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat.”

Though the majority of the company’s mission-critical systems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the deployment is “ongoing,” Massey said. “We started with our Oracle database, and our HP-UX batch processing, and were so pleased with the results that we have continued to progress toward making as much of our infrastructure as possible run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

BENEFITS
The migration went extraordinary smoothly, and was accomplished “virtually painlessly,” said Massey. And, the cost savings were immediate. There were direct savings, as OL&T was able to keep up with its exponential growth by replacing its proprietary RISC/UNIX boxes with virtualized x86 based systems. And because it had deployed Red Hat Satellite, these virtual machines could be provisioned in a matter of just minutes rather than the hours it previously took to get a new server up and running.

Then there were indirect savings due to increased IT worker productivity. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just so much easier to manage than either UNIX or Windows,” said Eric Brown, database administrator. As a result, OL&T can do more with fewer people. “Even with our tremendous growth, we’ve been able to continue to manage our IT operations with a reasonable staffing level,” said Massey. “And given the kickstart and configuration management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite, our workers can add a lot more value to our organization

About the quality of the support OL&T receives from Red Hat, Massey said it’s a moot point. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux just works,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it.” He said he can count on one hand the number of support calls he’s had to make – but stressed that those support calls were promptly and professionally dealt with. “The attention and care that Red Hat provides to its customers is truly enterprise-class,” he said.

As far as the workloads that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is capable of supporting, Massey said that it’s been able to handle everything OL&T has thrown at it. “We’ve migrated our Oracle databases over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Windows and our mission critical batch services for planning and rating from HP-UX over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he said. “In fact, we’ve completely eliminated UNIX from our environment.” OL&T is currently also in process of moving its Java workloads from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”

Red Hat provides the University of Southern Mississippi with time-saving solution

FAST FACTS

Customer: University of Southern Mississippi

Industry: Education

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Reconfiguring servers that were not based on the same hardware platform lead to an increase in errors and demanded much of the IT team’s time and financial resources

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite

Benefits: Streamlined the university’s IT environment and standardized the systems management process, reduced overhead, minimized errors, and saved time and financial resources

“We transitioned to Red Hat solutions very easily. It was just flipping a switch. It was easy.”
– James Daniel, system administrator at the University of Southern Mississippi

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The University of Mississippi, located in Hattiesburg, serves more than 14,000 students and 700 faculty members. The university, which was established in 1910, offers over 90 academic programs and approximately 250 clubs and organizations.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Managing close to 80 physical servers with limited technical resources can quickly become a challenge for any organization. Purchasing and maintaining subscriptions for each of these systems requires diligence and excellent management skills, as the IT team at the University of Southern Mississippi discovered in 2008.

None of the servers that System Administrator James Daniel worked with in the data center were based on the same hardware platforms, which meant that he had to consistently manually reconfigure the servers.

“When you have a farm of 80 plus servers, it’s very time consuming to manage,” Daniel said, “and our former process was prone to error.” Between taking care of the heterogeneous servers and keeping up individual subscriptions, the department technicians were stretched thin.

SOLUTION
Looking for a solution to help ease its systems management challenges, the University of Southern Mississippi IT team turned to Red Hat for a reliable solution. Red Hat provided Red Hat Satellite, a reliable, advanced systems management solution that is based on open standards, and a campus-wide Site Subscription to the high-performance Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating platform.

“We transitioned to Red Hat solutions very easily. It was just flipping a switch,” Daniel said. “It was easy.”

BENEFITS
The new Red Hat Satellite solution streamlined the university’s IT environment, reduced overhead, and minimized errors, according to Terri Lowery, systems administration manager at the University of Southern Mississippi. Instead of individually updating each server in the data center, the university’s technicians can now update all of the servers at the same time with one click of a button.

With Red Hat Satellite, the IT team has saved at least the annual salary of one full-time employee. In addition, the team can now reallocate the resources previously spent manually updating the heterogeneous servers. Red Hat Satellite also helps the team manage their Sun Solaris systems and virtual environments.

The Red Hat Satellite systems management solution has worked so well for the University of Southern Mississippi tech team that Lowery wants to expand its use throughout the campus. “We would like to have a long-term, university-wide systems management solution,” Lowery said, “not just a technology department solution.”

The university today utilizes the Red Hat Site Subscription for the entire campus. Since Lowery initiated the subscription more than a year ago, she hasn’t had to worry about running out of entitlements or money. Previously, when faced with the need for additional entitlements, the team had to pull entitlements from other groups because the budget didn’t allow for additional purchases. “We had to keep licenses individually and be really stingy with them,” Lowery said.

They also had some entitlements that they didn’t use, but that situation changed when they switched to Red Hat, Systems Engineer Charles Wright said. “We didn’t have 20 or 30 extra entitlements sitting out there that were collecting dust every year,” Wright said. Now they have the flexibility to do what they need to do, when they need to do it, without worrying about anything, according to Lowery.

“We also didn’t have to tie a particular entitlement to a particular server to a selected budget. It was more of a blanket, so it cut down on the logistics,” said Daniel. “We’ve pretty much been able to set up development boxes on the fly, which has streamlined our research and development as well.”

The Red Hat Site Subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the use of Red Hat Satellite have allowed the university’s tech department to standardize its systems management process, cut back on errors, and use less manpower. Today, the university’s technicians have better control over their IT environment, and are able to focus their resources on other critical university projects.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Local Government

Geography: The Netherlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [ PDF ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: YPF SA

Industry: Oil and Gas

Geography: Argentina

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Discount Tire Company

Industry: Consumer – Automotive Retail

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

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

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

Hardware: 50 Dell x86 servers

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast Facts:

Company: 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.”

Experiences heightened flexibility, stability, cost savings and ease of management with Red Hat solutions

RALEIGH, NC – 3 December 2008 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Scania, the leading Swedish manufacturer of heavy trucks and buses, has expanded its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated server and storage virtualisation capabilities. The company utilises the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its critical systems, including specific infrastructure services, databases, applications and high-performance computing (HPC) servers to leverage the solution’s compelling benefits, including cost savings, stability, flexibility and ease of management.

With its virtualised Linux environments, Scania is achieving shortened time-to-services and increased flexibility. Scania can now perform system maintenance by shutting down servers in a structured process, enabling preserved stability and reliability. Throughout the rest of its virtualised Linux infrastructure, Scania also has the option of leveraging the solution’s included Live Migration functionality, allowing for the transfer of virtual systems between physical machines in the network to reduce the hardware requirements necessary to maintain the same workload.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform replaces some proprietary Unix dialects in Scania’s infrastructure with an open platform without lock-in to a specific vendor. We are now building a cost-efficient, flexible and stable infrastructure on top of the Red Hat platform, and have maintained high security and stability throughout the process,” said Mikael Åhlqvist, service team responsible for Unix at Scania. “The virtualisation capabilities provided by Red Hat play a key role in our platform. The solution has provided cost and time savings by reducing the necessary number of physical servers and decreasing the need for related maintenance, administration and energy consumption.”

In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in virtualisation, Scania is utilising Red Hat Network Satellite to retain in-house control over management and administration of its Red Hat-based systems. With Red Hat Satellite Server, Scania has access to Red Hat Network updates and has the ability to maintain local control over the management, administration and monitoring of its systems.

“We see benefits provided by Red Hat’s open source solutions, particularly in regard to its virtualisation capabilities and its subscription business model. Red Hat centers its business focus on delivering valuable ROI to its customers, and we are experiencing this valuable return today. We are continuously exploring the option of migrating additional systems to open source, and specifically Red Hat,” said Åhlqvist.

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 65 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 survey. 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 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 Web site at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

###

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

FAST FACTS

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: 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.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Finance/banking

Geography: New Zealand

Business Challenge: Address environmental and space issues in the datacentre and achieve the corporate goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2010

Migration Path: From distributed Intel and SUN SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running under z/VM on IBM z9 and z10 mainframes

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Oracle database, WebSphere Application Server, ESB, Process Server, TX and MQ

Hardware: 1x IBM z9 and 1x IBM z10 mainframe (with 3 x IFL engines in each)

Benefits:

• Recovered 30 percent of datacenter floor space
• Reduced power consumption by 38 percent
• 20 percent return on investment (ROI) over the life of the platform
• Simplified, more efficient deployment

Download the Case Study [PDF]

Read More About BNZ in the press:
CIO Magazine
Computer Business Review
OS Today
Linux Today
Financial Extra
Banking Technology

BACKGROUND
For the last 150 years, BNZ (Bank of New Zealand), a subsidiary of the National Australia Bank Group, has helped individuals, farmers and businesses with their financial pursuits. Throughout this time, BNZ has evolved to meet changing customer needs and expectations, while continuing to deliver innovative new products and services.

BNZ is focused on empowering its customers and prides itself on its flexibility, innovation, and corporate responsibility. It is also leading the New Zealand banking and finance industry in developing, and benefiting from, a more energy efficient, ‘green’ IT operation.

CHALLENGE
Like a large number of businesses in New Zealand and around the world, BNZ was close to reaching capacity in its datacenter and needed to determine how to maximise space while keeping costs down.

The bank’s corporate values also have a carbon neutral focus, which it was keen to put into practice across all aspects of its business operations.

“The issues we were dealing with were not necessarily unique, but a reflection of the current business climate,” said Lyle Johnston, Infrastructure Architect for BNZ.

“BNZ had defined two important goals for the future, both of which relied heavily on IT. The first was for the organisation to become carbon neutral by 2010 and the second was to explore open source opportunities though the adoption of Linux.”

Another challenge BNZ faced was to create a disaster recovery solution. Its datacentres – one in Auckland, New Zealand and the other in East Melbourne, Australia – are separated by the Tasman Sea.

SOLUTION
In mid 2007, BNZ embarked on a bold mission to realise its corporate objectives. It overhauled its mission-critical front-end IT environment, including its Internet banking and bank teller functions through to core backend data. It migrated its systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running under z/VM on the mainframe.

BNZ purchased one IBM z10 system for use in production, as well as one IBM z9 system for use as a disaster recovery machine. Both mainframes exclusively run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, IBM WebSphere application and IBM Process server, along with customised JAVA applications written by BNZ. Combined, these power BNZ’s customer facing banking systems, including Internet banking and teller platforms.

The combination of z/VM and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 enabled BNZ to virtualise and consolidate a largely distributed SUN environment, which incorporates all of its front-end systems, down to just one box and run it in a manner that didn’t present a significant change for administration staff.

A critical component in the successful deployment and ongoing management of its new systems, BNZ also incorporated Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite. RHN Satellite provides BNZ with the ability to combine provisioning, updating, patching and maintenance into a single function for greater simplification. By utilising RHN Satellite, the bank was able to re-provision its entire Teller platform development environment in approximately two hours.

“When it came to selecting a Linux provider, the choice to invest in Red Hat was largely based on its commitment to the ongoing development of the platform and its strong support capabilities, particularly in reference to supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the mainframe,” said Johnston.

BNZ’s first production load on the new system went live in August 2008, with high visibility across the organisation.

“Deploying IBM mainframes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to address our carbon footprint and cost saving concerns was a very big deal, especially at the senior management level. It provided us with the opportunity to take a very serious leap into Linux, and that was exciting for everyone in IT and beyond,” said Johnston.

To date, the bank has consolidated 131 SUN SPARC systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z. These systems include v440s, v280Rs and E10Ks on the high-end.

BENEFITS
While a move to Linux on the mainframe represented a major shift from traditional banking systems, for BNZ the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z platforms produced impressive returns and exceeded expectations.

After just three months the project was ahead of schedule and on budget, and BNZ was already able to consolidate its servers and reduce its front-end systems datacenter footprint by 30 percent. Even in the project’s early days, the bank noted significant cost advantages with approximately 20 percent ROI expected over the life of the platform.

According to Johnston, “We have also managed to substantially reduce our front-end power consumption by nearly 40 percent, which means we were well and truly on our way to becoming carbon neutral by our 2010 goal.”

In fact, since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM mainframes, BNZ has recorded a 33 percent reduction in heat output and a 39 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, for its front-end systems.

The new virtualised platform has also boosted the speed and simplicity of new deployments. Instead of taking days, a new environment can be deployed in just minutes. Furthermore, with just one administrator needed per 100 virtual servers, BNZ can save on resources traditionally used to manage the platform, freeing them up to work on new innovative projects.

BNZ’s industry-leading move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has attracted plenty of attention, with a number of banking counterparts monitoring BNZ’s performance benchmarks with great interest.

“The fact is there are a lot of reasons to consolidate with Red Hat on the mainframe and as we were the first in New Zealand to do it, it has attracted a lot of interest from the banking world,” said Johnston.

Looking forward, BNZ has adopted a long-term, strategic view of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux will continue to deliver value.

“What’s been truly remarkable has been the fact that introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux into the organisation has breathed new enthusiasm and new life into the business and the people behind it,” said Johnston.

“This project has been a type of gateway for us, and working with Red Hat has opened our eyes to what’s possible with open source. From our perspective, the best is yet to come.”

Australian University Carves out Costs and Improves Stability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that CQUniversity, an Australian university with ten campuses and more than 21,00 students and staff, has migrated its critical IT systems to Red Hat solutions. CQUniversity implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite and has since realized significant cost savings, increased performance, ease of management and reliable, ongoing support.

CQUniversity offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on-campus and through distance education. The University relies heavily on the reliability and stability of its IT environment on a daily basis. Its technology powers critical finance, human resources and student-administration systems. With campuses and students located across various time zones, CQUniversity requires an infrastructure that supports standard operation at all hours of the day.

For a number of years, the University serviced its student body and faculty with an extensive HP Tru64 UNIX deployment. As the University continued to expand and demand more from its technology infrastructure, its IT department knew it was quickly outgrowing its existing IT system and needed a reliable alternative.

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

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

Today, CQUniversity runs 12 HP Blade Servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its databases. Ten additional Blades run CQUniversity’s middleware solutions to support its applications. “Already, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be a fundamental component of our infrastructure, and while we’re running more environments than before, we’re running them a lot faster,” said Young.

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

Since putting its production systems into operation in April 2007, CQUniversity has completed the initial stage of its migration. To date, the University has realized immediate savings of approximately $100,000 when compared to Solaris on Sun T2000 servers. In addition to carving out costs, CQUniversity has experienced a boost in server performance, which has increased by between 20 and 30 percent, and enjoyed an easy-to-deploy solution.

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

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

To read the full CQUniversity case study, visit www.customers.press.redhat.com.

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

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: 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: Real Estate

Geography: Germany

Business Challenge: Dramatically reduce energy use and operating costs while improving overall performance and manageability of servers and maintaining zero downtime

Migration Path: 32-bit Windows server environment to 64-bit server environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in virtualization technology

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat Global Support Services

Hardware: HP Blade Systems

Benefits: Reduced energy usage by 25 percent and hardware cost per server by 60 percent, carved out operations costs by 10 percent with streamlined systems management, achieved full return on investment for the project within three months, and maintains consistent zero downtime

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

BACKGROUND
ImmobilienScout24.de is one of the most successful real estate listing companies in Europe. Servicing primarily German-speaking countries, the site has more than three million visitors each month and serves more than 800 million pages. Headquartered in Berlin, the company currently has approximately 400 employees and serves more than 95,000 realtors – its paying customers.

Since its website is the core of its business, uptime and performance are crucial factors for meeting customer expectations. To meet these demands, ImmobilienScout24 had previously migrated from a 32-bit Windows server environment to a more sophisticated 64-bit server environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and added a second fully redundant active-active data center in Hamburg to support its existing datacenter in Berlin. Each location had approximately 100 physical servers running a variety of applications including Oracle, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, and LAMP-based subsystems as well as PHP and Perl for front-end applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
With many servers scheduled for end-of-life in 2008, ImmobilienScout24 planned a major virtualization initiative with the goal of speeding provisioning time and lowering overall operating costs per server instance.

However, early in the year, ImmobilienScout24’s Tier-1 datacenter provider came to the company with dramatic news—the vendor could not provide any more power, at any cost, to ImmobilienScout24’s servers. Energy prices were rising quickly and the provider had been given new limitations on its electricity supply to certain locations.

Considering the company’s growth rate, ImmobilienScout24 knew that it would begin to exceed the new power limitation within a few months and had to act quickly. Evaluating other datacenter providers was considered, but the cost and complexity of migrating datacenters was extraordinary and would likely result in some downtime – an unacceptable option.

In reviewing its planned virtualization project, ImmobilienScout24 found that it could reduce power consumption and allow the company to continue its rapid growth into the future. However, this meant completing an eight-month project in just four months.

SOLUTION
Giving the virtualization project priority, the ImmobilienScout24 team quickly got to work planning the migration of 200 old physical servers onto 90 new physical servers with more than 400 logical server instances.

The first challenge was in selecting a virtualization solution. In its test lab in Berlin, ImmobilienScout24 worked closely with their Operations Service provider, Computacenter to begin a series of tests to monitor and measure the performance of a variety of services on both physical and virtual machines. The company measured that services running on VMware typically showed a 20 percent performance degradation compared to services running on the physical server.

When it tested Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform virtualization capabilities, tests showed only a mere three percent difference between virtual and physical machines – an impressive virtualization performance result.

ImmobilienScout24 also considered pricing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes virtualization integrated in the operating system at no additional cost – a benefit few other vendors are able to deliver. It eliminates the need to add an additional, and often expensive, third-party vendor layer to its solution, while delivering leading performance. Combining performance and cost benefits, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform was the solution of choice for ImmobilienScout24.

The second challenge ImmobilienScout24 faced was designing a system that would maximize redundancy and performance for each service. And, while also ensuring that the failure of one service would not affect the rest of the system. Achieving specific utilization levels was less important to ImmobilienScout24 than cutting energy and ensuring redundancy and uptime for the project.

So, ImmobilienScout24 worked closely with Computacenter to deploy Red Hat Cluster Suite, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform at no added cost, to create a comprehensive network design that included failover clusters between different physical machines. It also updated its Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers to support both 32- and 64-bit virtual machines. By carefully designing the clusters and physical and virtual machines, the team created a system that could easily accommodate future growth, while maintaining 100 percent uptime.

To manage its systems, ImmobilienScout24 also utilizes Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, a reliable, easy-to-use systems management solution that provides simple tools to efficiently manage the lifecycle of systems on its network. With RHN Satellite, ImmobilienScout24 was able to streamline its management and reduce costs.

In the conception phase of the project there were sometimes up to ten people contributing to the project, but in the datacenters, the brunt of the project was implemented by a team of four. “Executing this rapidly with a fixed number of people simply would not have been possible with most other vendors,” said Oliver Schindelhauer, project leader. “Administrative tasks including imaging, server provisioning, and mapping are really fast with Red Hat.” The team started the project in February and was finished by the end of May—on schedule and without any downtime.

BENEFITS
The project was considered an all-around success and resulted in significant savings for ImmobilienScout24. Power consumption was reduced by 25 percent – 21 megawatt hours per month – without affecting performance or uptime. Hardware cost per server was reduced by 60 percent, and the project reduced ImmobilienScout24’s licensing costs by 50 percent with the use of open source software. The project also reduced operations costs by 10 percent through simplified system management.

“Without this solution we would not have been able to continue the growth that our executive team planned for the year,” said Dr. Oliver Zeiler, chief technology officer for ImmobilienScout24. “But now, we have a significantly more agile and cost-efficient datacenter and services infrastructure. In fact, with the cost savings we’ve achieved with Red Hat, this project will have paid for itself in three months.”

FAST FACTS

Company: CQUniversity Australia (Central Queensland University

Industry: Higher Education

Geography: Australia

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

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

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

Hardware: HP 7000c Blade System and BL460c Blade Servers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Industry: 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.”

Bank PHB improves flexibility, reliability and performance with Red Hat solutions

Dubai, GITEX – October 23, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Bank PHB, one of Nigeria’s top ten banks, has migrated its core mission-critical banking applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. Bank PHB migrated to Red Hat’s open source solutions to achieve the next step in scalability, performance and the ability to handle heavy workloads and achieve cost reduction more effectively than with other proprietary software platforms.

Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with 1.8 million customers, making it the eighth largest bank in the country by both profitability and size. The bank has one of the most innovative financial product portfolios in the region and with its recent acquisition of Gambia’s International Bank for Commerce (IBC) it has even more plans to grow. To facilitate this growth successfully, Bank PHB required an IT solution that is based on open and flexible architecture, with higher performance and manageable total cost of ownership. It also desired a solution with no proprietary lock-in in order to allow the bank to integrate all of the different banking applications and products from its varied acquisitions.

Bank PHB, with the assistance of Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, Qrios, has migrated to a cluster of commodity hardware, including 23 IBM x86 X3850 multi-core servers. The servers are now equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which replaced the previous IBM eServer pSeries servers that ran Unix AIX. The full solution incorporates IBM Intel servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, built using the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on the web front end to provide a highly-available client by implementing the clustering, caching and fail-over capabilities of JBoss. Bank PHB also uses Red Hat Network Satellite and JBoss Operations Network to monitor and manage updates. The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers all run the Temenos T24-core banking application that is built on an open architecture and uses established standards such as HTTP, XML and J2EE for a variety of banking modules including retail, private banking, treasury and Islamic banking.

“Migrating our systems to Red Hat and JBoss solutions was a strategic choice for us,” said Henry Okoede, chief technology officer at Bank PHB. “Cost saving was not the only reason we went with open source, though it was certainly icing on the cake. Our decision was driven by the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform provide constant innovation and the flexibility that enables us to develop products that we can launch to market faster, while making sure that all our systems are fully integrated and optimized to communicate with each other flawlessly. We have also felt that the service provided by Red Hat professional support was also one of the best we have ever experienced with a vendor.”

“The communication and middleware tier had to be able to support the total bank community with acceptable response times and guaranteed delivery of messages to the Temenos T24-core banking application,” said Mosh Adetoro, director at Qrios. “Bank PHB chose JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, including JBoss Messaging, a Java Message Server (JMS), to ensure delivery of the messages to the core application.”

“Bank PHB Bank is another great example of how open source provides real value for our financial services customers,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president of the EMEA region at Red Hat. “JBoss technology, combined with professional support from Red Hat, has enabled PHB Bank to deploy an enterprise-ready robust platform that meets both the performance and reliability demanded by the financial sector, with the major advantage of flexibility provided by open source.”

For more information on Red Hat, please visit www.europe.redhat.com. For more information about JBoss solutions, visit www.jboss.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com .

About Bank PHB

Bank PHB, a leading financial services institution is Nigeria’s emerging icon for banking excellence. Our strategic intent is to build a national and diversified franchise by creating superior value for all our stakeholders through unrivaled customer service experience, superior shareholder value, a conducive workplace, and commitment to corporate citizenship.

Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with profit before tax of N10.28 billion, total assets and contingents of N480 billion as at June 2007 making it Nigeria’s eighth biggest bank in profitability and size, and seventh biggest bank in deposits. It is significant that Bank PHB since its merger in December 2005 has maintained an average growth rate that is about three times the banking industry average growth rate.
http://www.bankphb.com/live/general/index.php

About Qrios

Founded in 1998, Qrios is West Africa’s major Linux and open source service provider. As a Red Hat Advance Partner, it provides support for the most recognized open source brand in the world. Through its consulting practice, it has consistently used open source Infrastructure, Integration and Innovation to deliver measurable business value to its enterprise customers; its focus being on the major players in the financial services, telecoms and Oil and gas sectors of the region.

Leveraging on Red Hat’s professional services and a budding local team Qrios has successfully delivered projects based on almost every Red Hat solution from the operating system, database availability to SOA and middleware solutions.

Qrios is a regional Red Hat Certified Training Partner.
http://www.qrios.com/

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 60 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 survey. 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 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 to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.
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