Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the City of Kankaanpää, the main centre for trade, education and the commercial heart of Northern Satakunta, Finland, has increased scalability while simplifying and centralizing desktop and server availability with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.   

In 2008, the city’s information and communications technology (ICT) department faced several IT-related challenges. The management and configuration of individual desktops at several locations in and around the city, including diverse places such as public libraries and schools became very difficult to manage. In addition, there were numerous mission-critical solutions running on physical servers in its datacenter that presented a constant risk of downtime, which could directly impact business continuity. Lastly, the effect of running IT services on a limited number of physical servers increased complexity when deploying new applications, services or during hardware migration projects, which the city found to be both time consuming and expensive.

“We soon realized the need to re-draft the architecture of the city’s IT infrastructure by virtualizing and consolidating both server and desktop environments onto one, centrally managed platform,” said Jukka Ehto, head of ICT at City of Kankaanpää. “The city determined that by implementing clustering capabilities across servers to increase redundancy in the datacenter, we could leverage higher availability for mission-critical applications and services running on these systems.”

To simplify and centralize the management of desktops, Netorek, a Red Hat Advanced Partner, deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, which allows the city’s ICT department to deploy, configure and run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows desktops in public institutions throughout the city. To virtualize the city’s server environment, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers was implemented in the city’s datacenter.

“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops is a valued asset for the city of Kankaanpää to deploy virtual workstations efficiently across its entire organization. The quantifiable effects of implementing Red Hat virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops were remarkable,” said Ehto. “The project costs for deploying new desktops were cut by 50 percent and deployment time was reduced by 10 percent. In addition, the life span of existing desktop PCs has been extended, as they can now serve as re-purposed thin clients, hosting virtual desktops run in the datacenter, which requires less capacity from physical clients.”

The city of Kankaanpää has also improved the availability and stability of mission-critical applications running on virtualized servers in its datacenter since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, enhancing the reliability of the IT services provided to the city’s employees and citizens. The number of reported IT incidents has also decreased by 20 percent, freeing up support resources.

Cost savings and higher availability of servers are some of the project’s most tangible business benefits for the city of Kankaanpää. Running multiple workloads on virtual servers has increased hardware utilization from 10 percent to as much as 80 percent. Red Hat’s subscription model provides the city with access to reliable support services, as well as certified and tested solutions. Additionally, system-wide maintenance features easily allow the new Red Hat environment to be updated and patched with security updates, reducing downtime for end users.

To learn more about how the city of Kankaanpää is using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to support its mission-critical solutions, read the full case study at www.redhat.com/customersuccess.