Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced that U21Global, the world's premier online
graduate school, migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated
virtualization to implement a reliable and affordable solution that
could scale with growing business needs. It selected Red Hat Enterprise
Linux to leverage its built-in virtualization technology in order to
reduce its hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility.
U21Global offers globally recognized graduate programs and is backed by
an international network of leading research universities in 11
countries. U21Global has successfully enrolled students from over 60
countries around the world, including those from Asia, Australia,
Africa, Europe and the Americas. To deliver high-quality, dynamic and
interactive academic content, U21Global relies on a powerful IT
infrastructure to provide high levels of availability for its online
programs.
U21Global’s datacenter is located at its global headquarters in
Singapore. It provides IT services to its students around the world,
while simultaneously supporting the business-critical function of
development and staging of courseware. Courseware developers, faculty
members of affiliated universities and quality assurance professionals
access the datacenter resources to develop content and carry out
user-acceptance tests and certification.
In 2008, rapid business growth put pressure on the graduate school to
scale its infrastructure to keep pace with user demands on its
development and staging platform. At the same time, existing servers
were also due for maintenance renewals. The cost of new hardware and
renewals was substantial, causing U21Global to look for an alternative
solution that could deliver a robust enterprise platform while also
offering cost savings, reliability, ease of management and scalability.
U21Global decided to assess how virtualization solutions could help it
address its cost, scalability and system management challenges and
evaluated three virtualization options.
“We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization for its
cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management and
flexibility,” said Caven Yip, systems engineer at U21Global. “We trust
Red Hat virtualization because it delivers immediate, real benefits to
U21Global. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we met our goals for a
high-performance virtualization implementation that is stable, reliable,
scalable and secure."
Looking to expand its virtualization best practices, U21Global’s Red Hat
virtualization solution was installed with the help of Red Hat
Consulting. With Red Hat Consulting, U21Global was able to implement its
Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization solution more quickly than had
been anticipated at the beginning of the project.
U21Global also utilizes Red Hat Network, an easy-to-use systems
management platform, to help the company keep its open source
environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and
virtual servers. The system enables U21Global’s IT team to view the
status of its servers at all times and allows the company to download
important patches, configuration changes and updates as they become
available through Red Hat’s subscription service.
“While a typical server can cater for up to ten concurrent users, with
virtual servers, it is possible to re-allocate memory and compute
resources on-the-fly to allow more users to log on to a server. The IT
team is now able to provision servers and IT services in a timely
manner,” said Yip.
“Virtualization presented a great cost-saving solution. By migrating a
number of our physical servers to virtual servers, we were able to
reduce the number of servers in the datacenter, increase utilization
rates and reduce power consumption,” said Yip. “If we had not
implemented virtualization, we would have spent $24,000 on three new
servers and continued to incur the cost of annual maintenance for the
original ten servers.”
With its previous deployment, the IT staff needed to back up an old
server before they could transition its applications to a new physical
server. This was a tedious process requiring approximately two days.
Virtual servers eliminated that entire process. And before implementing
virtualization, U21Global’s IT team had to connect remotely to the
server or access the console directly in order to manage the system.
“Now, I only need to access the virtualization manager from any Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 system in order to access all the virtual servers,”
said Yip. “It used to take days to provision new servers. Now, we can
provision servers in just a few hours.”
“We have been using open source technologies since 2002 and have tried
many different Linux distributions,” said Yip. “Today, we use Red Hat
Enterprise Linux because of the enhanced security, the platform’s
robustness and the flexibility of the operating system. We also enjoy
very reliable Red Hat support.”
To read the full U21Global case study, visit www.customers.press.redhat.com.
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