Weathermen To Wear Red Hats At Winter Olympics 2006

Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT), the world’s leading provider of open source to the enterprise, announced today that Arpa Piemonte (Agenzia Regionale per la Protezione Ambientale) has chosen to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux to support applications that develop mathematic weather forecast models. As part of this implementation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be used to manage the IT infrastructure dedicated to providing weather forecast activities during the 20th Winter Olympic Games, due to be held in Turin in 2006.

The decision by Arpa Piemonte to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform for its real-time weather forecast modeling was driven by the high availability, manageability and security of the solution. Red Hat Network manages system updates.

“Weather forecasting is one of those things that if you get wrong there is no hiding place because the results are clear for everyone to see – it’s vital therefore that reliability is built into the system at every step”, said Vito Carambia of the Environmental Forecast and Monitoring Group in Arpa Piemonte. “By integrating with the other open source and freeway solutions that we already use, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is enabling us to build a new high reliability configuration while still keeping a tight control on our ongoing development costs.”

“Arpa Piemonte’s carefully deliberated choice of Red Hat is yet another proof-point of the reliability and security that our enterprise solutions offer”, says Roberto Semplici, Account Executive Red Hat Italia.

Arpa’s infrastructure is built using one HP ProLiant ML370 and two HP ProLiant DL380 with Intel Xeon DP processors. The latter work alongside an HP Modular Smart Array 500, to provide a simple and reliable RAID storage system, and Red Hat Application Server. Red Hat Cluster Suite is used to deliver a high availability configuration by clustering Apache, Tomcat, FTP and Postgresql applications. Test and development within Arpa is undertaken on workstations running Fedora Core 3.