Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Ferrotec, a global market leader in technologies based on the magnetic liquid Ferrofluid that is used in multi-phase motors, dampers for shaft ends and transformer cooling, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization at the core of its infrastructure. Through this Red Hat technology combination, Ferrotec is increasing scalability, flexibility and performance while lowering operating costs.

Headquartered in Japan, the Ferrotec Group also has a large presence throughout Europe. In line with the company’s growth and additional business requirements, its IT infrastructure expanded with the purchase of new servers and an increase in memory capacity. As the company's IT systems peaked, performance began to decrease, creating the need for a modern technology infrastructure to meet Ferrotec’s business demands.

In mid 2011, Ferrotec’s legacy systems and IT infrastructure could only be administrated with major effort. Therefore, Ferrotec’s IT team, together with its core management team, embarked on a fundamental modernization and transition to a virtualized infrastructure.

Ferrotec assessed possible alternative solutions together with GONICUS, an IT service provider out of Arnsberg, Germany, that has been working for Ferrotec for many years. GONICUS, a Red Hat Advanced Partner, specializes in infrastructure and virtualization strategy, and is one of the largest independent service providers for open source software in Germany. As Ferrotec began planning its migration strategy, one of the critical requirements for the new infrastructure was to continue the existing installation based on Linux. Ferrotec found what it was looking for from OpenV3 from Magirus, one of Europe’s leading providers of IT solutions and a value-added distributor of Red Hat, based in Stuttgart. OpenV3 includes solutions from Cisco, EMC and Red Hat in a best-of-breed strategy that combines into an infrastructure package that can be implemented rapidly.

Ferrotec’s new IT infrastructure has reaped several important benefits in areas such as administration, maintenance and service, especially when compared to its former, heterogeneous infrastructure. By consolidating its server landscape, Ferrotec is anticipating lower operating costs as the same number of staff can supervise a larger number of systems and applications.

“We analyzed other virtualization alternatives in the market, but the high-performance enterprise management feature set and low TCO Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization provides was an ideal combination for what we needed for our systems,” said Joachim Schwender, head of IT at Ferrotec. “We now have a fully functional datacenter with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization at its core. Our new virtualized infrastructure allows us to balance performance, flexibility and administration requirements. The revitalization of our IT operations with Red Hat has made us better prepared for the future of our business.”

The company’s new IT infrastructure also has enabled Ferrotec to map its critical business processes in a highly reliable and flexible manner.