Global enterprises migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a scalable, high performance virtualization solution built on open source technologies including the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and a management platform derived from the oVirt project. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is also a key component of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, a solution which enables organizations to build and manage a private cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) based upon datacenter virtualization and management technologies for traditional workloads, while providing an on-ramp to a highly scalable public-cloud-like infrastructure based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It is offered as a single subscription offering composed of four component technologies: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As organizations look to build and manage private cloud IaaS, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure has emerged as a high performing offering with compelling business value when compared to proprietary cloud infrastructure offerings.

Government of the Canary Islands
The Government of the Canary Islands of Spain is responsible for processing regional business applications and providing eGovernment services, with both applications requiring horizontal and vertical scaling. Following population and workload growth, the Government faced staggering virtualization costs and found that their previous virtualization infrastructure could not keep pace with the growing workloads.

To meet these requirements, the Canary Islands sought a virtualization solution that offered reduced ownership costs without compromised quality. After evaluating solutions, the Government of the Canary Islands found that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was more cost-effective and provided greater capacity and improved service levels and continuity. Additionally, the Government found that Red Hat’s cloud infrastructure solution provided a cost savings of 70 percent compared to proprietary solutions. The Government of the Canary Islands of Spain successfully migrated 100 physical servers running approximately 1,000 VMware virtual machines to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with zero downtime and no user impact. As the Canary Islands’ population grows and places more services demands on their IT infrastructure, the Government plans to virtualize more workloads and reduce their current block of 100 physical servers to even fewer machines.

Bonhams
As one of the oldest and largest auction houses in the world, Bonhams found itself with many unsupported systems after a significant period of growth, including mergers and acquisitions. Bonhams wanted to gain the benefits of server virtualization and integrate with its United States location’s use of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in order to have a single global system to manage all its assets remotely and support its Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy. The U.K. had previously used VMware and found the licenses to be a major part of the total cost, and the move to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has delivered significant cost savings and performance benefits. As a result, they sought to replace their aging servers with a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective platform that enabled remote management of global IT assets while supporting full disaster recovery.
Bonhams worked with Quru, a U.K.-based solutions provider to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on IBM System x servers, enabling Bonhams to avoid vendor lock-in and consolidating their physical servers by nearly 75 percent. Additionally, through the lower licensing costs with Red Hat, the solution was implemented at 50 percent of the cost for an equivalent VMware project in the U.K. Bonhams has been so satisfied with the performance of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization running on IBM System x servers, finding that the KVM technology has boosted their organizational efficiency that they are planning to continue their migration by moving the entire IT infrastructure in their U.K. office from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for consistent scaling and management as its business continues to grow.

Profit Software
Profit Software, a supplier of product-based IT software to Northern Europe’s insurance and financial sector, found that separate development environments resulted in wasted resources and inefficient environmental maintenance. They turned to Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure to help unify its development environment across three locations, providing increased operational efficiency. Profit was able to continue business processes as usual with minimal downtime during their migration from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization-based solutions, and programmers can now work in a standardized environment from a common environment, instead of waiting for their development space to be installed on a physical server. After the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, development environment build time was reduced from one day to one hour, and these environments can be accessed remotely as a virtual desktop through a secure browser connection. Profit plans to migrate their remaining servers that are virtualized on VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and they will be able to scale these future solutions to meet business needs.

Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Centre
Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center encompasses 31 nationwide province-level credit union associations in Beijing, including rural cooperative banks, rural commercial banks, and the Shenzhen Rural Commercial Bank. Rapid business development and 35 percent year-over-year growth left Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center with an imperative need to upgrade the server infrastructure that supported its information system operation. Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on IBM BladeCentre blade servers to optimize their system resources and decrease power consumption and space used.

The flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization enabled Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center to customize, scale, and automate their business management functions without sacrificing performance speed. Their migration from VMware also resulted in reduced hardware needs and fewer licensing and maintenance costs. The system monitoring and alarming built into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization will enable Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center to scale their business sustainably.