Red Hat Solutions Provide Lower Saxony Police with High Availability Web Applications for Law Enforcement

Landesbetrieb für Statistik und Kommunikationstechnologie Niedersachsen (LSKN) is the state-owned service provider of statistics and communication technology for the German federal state of Lower Saxony. LSKN develops, manages, and operates the entire IT infrastructure for the state’s public authorities. Based in the state capital of Hannover, LSKN operates as a profit centre, serving clients across the country by running high-security datacentres, the state’s telecommunications network, an email infrastructure with more than 60,000 users, and much more. LSKN also provides IT consulting to its clients and is responsible for the central purchasing of hardware and software for the state authorities. The Lower Saxony Police is a major client of LSKN. More than 11,000 employees across the state rely on a central case and operations processing system, Nivadis. Nivadis is a police information system built with Java that gives Lower Saxony Police the ability to record criminal events, process investigations, conduct research, and analyse related statistics through a single browser. The Lower Saxony Police relies on Nivadis to be available 24×7, 365 days per year. The result of an effort to update the Lower Saxony Police information systems to comply with national and international standards, Nivadis is a joint development project with Mummert Consulting and was introduced in 2003. Nivadis replaced an older system that was expensive to support and incompatible with the national tracing and information system used by the central police authorities in Germany.

LSKN needed an operating platform that could ensure the 24×7 availability of the mission-critical Nivadis information system in all 1,023 communities and 37 districts of Lower Saxony, home to eight million citizens. At the same time, the solution needed to be cost-effective over a long period of time to ensure efficient spending of taxpayer money.

The original Nivadis setup used powerful 64-bit Itanium servers from HP to provide enough computing power to accommodate the increasing demand from the Lower Saxony Police as well as other authorities. However, during LSKN’s five-year hardware replacement cycle, standard x86-based HP ProLiant DL360 servers were introduced.

“It is quite challenging to find the right level of investment in computing capacities. Firstly, it must be affordable, and secondly, it needs to give us enough leeway for the duration of our replacement cycle to accommodate new customer requirements,” said Dieter Meyer, head of UNIX-Service-Centre at LSKN.

Over the past seven years, LSKN has gained significant experience running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a mission-critical, security-sensitive, and highly available environment. “Having used Red Hat Enterprise Linux for many years now, we have realised several benefits of running an industry-standard server environment,” said Marcus Brand, head of Linux operations team at LSKN. “The x86 processors are affordable, very energy-efficient and offer excellent performance.”

With the use of the Red Hat solution, the Nivadis police information and processing system is able to serve thousands of officials around the clock without failures, and ensure smooth operations of law enforcement in Germany’s fourth-largest federal state (by number of citizens).

LSKN has also benefited from the security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which has helped it to ensure the security of private, sensitive data of the state’s citizens.

Finally, long-term cost savings have been realised through affordable standard hardware with lower energy consumption and a much lower carbon footprint compared to the previous platforms.

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