Tool and equipment retailer recognizes 70% cost savings with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Founded in 1968 with the mission of delivering highquality tools at reasonable prices, the company is currently the largest tool and equipment catalog retailer in the world, having served 10 million customers in its more than 40 years of being in business. The retailer stocks more than 7,000 products—ranging from hand tools to power tools—from name-brand manufacturers to manufacturing its own private label tools. It operates 340 stores across the continental United States and accepts orders over the phone as well as through its web site.

The tool retailer reached end of life for its missioncritical business applications and embarked on an ambitious project to bring them up-to-date. “We were lucky. We had managed to stretch our technology 1.0 way past its reasonable lifetime, but it was time for an overhaul,” said the retailer’s director of infrastructure. One of the company’s top priorities was to create a new POS system to run 1,200 POS devices located in its retail stores. At the time, the systems ran on three different versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux—releases 2.0, 4.3, and 4.7—and needed a way to cost-effectively support the aging subscriptions. The retailer wanted to align its systems on the same version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to gain the most up-to-date features. Additionally, in December 2004, the first release of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) forced the leading tool company to begin planning how to bring its systems into compliance. It also had to act quickly whenever a patch was released for a particularly critical security vulnerability.
Solution

The retailer approached Red Hat with a request for a specific subscription for a supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its POS devices. “Our POS devices aren’t terribly sophisticated,” said the director of infrastructure. “We simply didn’t need the kind of support for them that would come with a typical current version of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. However, we did need everything to be uniform.” The issue was that the company used Red Hat Enterprise Linux in two ways and needed consistency across the enterprise. The retailer also deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux in its datacenter, where 50 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and 200 virtual servers were the foundation of the company’s IT infrastructure. “Both of these installations were very significant and very important to our business,” said the director of infrastructure.

As a result, Red Hat worked closely with the tool and equipment retailer to find a solution that helped it to meet the PCI DSS. The company was able to standardize on the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the time with a support subscription specialized for the business.

“Red Hat struck exactly the right balance of cost and support services and creatively worked with us to give us what we needed,” said the director of infrastructure. “Often, the world doesn’t fit into neat buckets, and this was one of those occasions. Red Hat is to be commended for realizing that.” The company has benefited from the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Our POS system is how our retail customers interface directly with us. If the system is down, we can’t swipe credit cards and can’t conduct business,” said the director of infrastructure. “It’s probably the most important system for a retailer. Since I joined the company almost two years ago, I can safely say I haven’t had a single case where I needed to troubleshoot an issue having to do with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” The retailer has also been impressed with the open source community. “With proprietary operating systems, you have to wait for the vendor to get around to delivering substantial change and innovation to the platform because the company is usually doing it on its own schedule,” said the director of infrastructure. “This is really a testament to the open source model that we could keep these aging systems going and consistently improving.” The rest of the company’s core business systems, including merchandising and warehouse management, are currently planning to be replaced with systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Through its use of Red Hat technology, the large retailer was also able to get over a significant cost hurdle— achieving more than 70 percent in cost savings. These cost savings were derived from implementing Red Hat solutions and utilizing Red Hat’s support subscription model rather than working with technology that requires upfront licensing costs and long-term maintenance costs. “Linux is absolutely a core technology, so we are certainly moving further in that direction, because that’s where our skills are,” said the director of infrastructure. The company noted that when choosing a platform for its datacenter—primarily to cut costs— the retailer had considered other Linux distributions and the variety of supported models they offered, including a self-supported one. However, the company recognized the benefit of Red Hat’s support subscription model. “Red Hat is an iconic company, and has been at the forefront of the Linux support model for 10 years. It has a welldeserved reputation for being a leader. It was the obvious choice,” said the director of infrastructure. Indeed, so successful was the engagement with the large equipment retailer, that Red Hat has used this model to come up with customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux contracts for other customers that don’t force them to “overbuy” support capabilities. “This flexibility and willingness to work with customers is what sets Red Hat apart from other vendors,” said the director of infrastructure.