Statoil migrates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced that Statoil, Norway's largest oil company with representation in 29 countries, has migrated its IT environment from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux realising cost savings of 50%. The cost savings stem from more efficient systems admininstration and improved performance of current applications. Today, 70% of Statoil's E&P applications are now running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the number of UNIX variations deployed within Statoil has decreaesed from seven to four.

Statoil's IT-environment was based on seven different versions of UNIX and Microsoft Windows, leading to a highly complex platform with considerable costs for systems administration. When the company performed a thorough evaluation of open standards-based alternatives available, the results clearly showed that a two step migration to Linux would both satisfy its needs and reduce costs while maintaining the required security levels. The first step was to migrate applications such as e-mail and dns for the UNIX environment. Phase two involved migrating specialist applications and systems such as its Schlumberger Eclipse, an application used for reservoir simulation which increased its performance by 10-40 fold following the move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux sytems.

"Statoil's demands for application quality and accessability are very high. This fundamental standardisation from seven UNIX variations to running only Linux and Windows will result in a much more efficient systems administrations department," said Johnny Roen, chief engineer at Statoil.

Statoil chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux and hardware from Intel due to combination of complexity and price levels, especially in comparison with RISC based platforms.

"We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the open OS and Red Hat's large market share. Compared with the alternatives, where SuSE was the main competitor, Red Hat showed other strengths as well. Red Hat has much stronger ISV and partner support meaning that there is not only more products and documentation available, but also that the competition among third party suppliers is bigger," continued Johnny Roen at Statoil.

"Statoil had very clear objectives when undertaking the migration from legacy Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux – consolidate on a single open platform, increase performance and decrease costs," said Werner Knoblich, Managing Director Red Hat Europe. "Statoil’s consolidation project is still running but they already diminished the number of Unix variations from seven to four. Today, 70 % of the services formerly run on UNIX are now running on Linux generating Statoil cost savings of over 50 % after the systems had been migrated from Unix to Linux on Intel. Statoil is a testament to what can be achieved when you combine a clear migration strategy with strong support from Red Hat and its partners."

About Statoil

Statoil is an integrated oil and gas company with substantial international activities. Represented in 29 countries, the group has about 24,000 employees. Nearly 50% of these employees work outside Norway. Statoil is the leading producer on the Norwegian continental shelf and is operator for 20 oil and gas fields. The group's international production is enjoying strong growth, and Statoil is a leading retailer of petrol and oil product in Scandinavia, Ireland, Poland and the Baltic states.

For more information please visit www.statoil.com

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications, and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's Open Source strategy offers customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.europe.redhat.com

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For more information please contact:
Andi Lustak,
AxiCom for Red Hat,
+44 20 8392 4058,
andi.lustak@axicom.com