Breaking the legacy virtualization cycle: How Red Hat and our partners are transforming IT through open source

Across nearly every industry, organizations of all shapes and sizes are embracing digital transformation in an effort to modernize their IT departments. They want to deliver better, faster and more dynamic services to customers — and they’re starting from their infrastructure, up. But for companies locked into legacy technologies, transformation isn’t always an option.

Organizations with proprietary virtualization solutions know all too well how this technology can stifle enterprise IT innovation and advancement. For many, the cost of simply maintaining existing infrastructure investments ties up an overwhelming majority of budgets, leaving little room to invest in new technologies, and the closed vendor ecosystem can make integrating and adopting cloud-native solutions based on Kubernetes and Linux containers nearly impossible.

Rather than being a dead-end, Red Hat solutions built on open source can offer a pathway to investments in emerging technologies, whether it’s Linux containers, automation, or something else — whatever best fits an organization’s future IT goals. Many of our customers also place the same value in open technology that fosters innovation as we do, including:

• One of these customers is P.L. Ferrari, the largest and oldest specialist broker of protection and indemnity insurance for the commercial shipping industry that advises its clients on placement policies, strategic goals and risk management, and also assists with claim handling — everything from collisions, groundings, oil spills or stowaway discoveries. Given the volume and serious nature of claims P.L. Ferrari handles on a daily basis, the broker needed a solution offering high levels of reliability, availability, simplified management and disaster recovery capabilities in order to enable its team to respond to clients with a 24/7 service.
  
  Although P.L. Ferrari had previously used virtualization software from VMware to consolidate multiple servers into one integrated hardware solution, a refresh of its outdated infrastructure was still needed. With some workloads already running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, P.L. Ferrari decided to extend its commitment to open source technologies and take a new, community-powered approach to innovation. P.L. Ferrari migrated its VMware-based infrastructure to a Red Hat Virtualization environment, while also updating its hardware infrastructure. Today, the company’s production systems are managed using Red Hat Virtualization, and P.L Ferrari has experienced major improvements in cost efficiency, reliability and ease of management of its virtualized environments.

• Lafayette College, a private liberal arts college in eastern Pennsylvania, aims to provide its student with a learning environment that supports collaboration and critical thinking to foster intellectual, social, and personal growth. In an effort to support its mission, Lafayette College adopted a virtualized IT environment built using VMware, a Xen cluster, and a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) cluster. To avoid vendor lock-in and gain more flexibility and scalability, Lafayette College migrated to Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its new infrastructure. After success of the initial deployment, Lafayette College also implemented Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat infrastructure and environments, helping to keep them compliant with standards, running efficiently, and updated.
  
  By migrating to Red Hat Virtualization, Lafayette College eliminated licensing fees and gained greater flexibility in how it provisions and deploys virtualized resources. Lafayette now has nearly 300 servers deployed, and with the new virtualization environment, the college can continue to add and manage servers while shrinking its physical datacenter footprint, helping to further reduce costs.

• Intermountain Healthcare provides a broad range of services throughout Utah and southeastern Idaho, and its network is comprised of 22 hospitals, as well as 1,500 primary and secondary care physicians at more than 180 clinics. Connecting this extensive network of physicians, facilities and patient data is no easy feat. Intermountain was faced with managing an increasingly complex IT environment — resulting in delayed services delivery and increased operational costs.
  
  Rather than continue on with complex legacy tools, Intermountain’s IT team sought to transition to an open source infrastructure in an effort to provide capabilities that not only support its existing needs, but can give them the flexibility to address future requirements while avoiding vendor lock-in. As part of Red Hat Cloud Suite, Intermountain implemented Red Hat Virtualization to increase scalability of their infrastructure, increase cross-platform capabilities, help increase performance, and help provide return on investment faster than equivalent proprietary solutions. With the help of it’s Red Hat stack, Intermountain reduced IT deployment time, cut IT costs by migrating to open source software and improved cross-team DevOps collaboration.

• European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, provides freely available data from life science experiments to researchers worldwide with its Embassy Cloud project -- a cloud infrastructure to help researchers more easily and quickly access and share data.On an average day, EMBL-EBI receives more than 16 million requests for its data services. Currently, modern research requires access to huge data sets, and not every research institute has the resources in place to handle these requests. The institute had previously used VMware’s vCloud to power its offering, but was in need of a replacement solution that could scale IT resources dramatically. Recognizing OpenStack as an accepted standard in the research community, EMBL-EBI migrated to the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to deliver a scalable, flexible cloud platform that could support its objective of improving global research collaborations. The scalability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform has enabled EMBL-EBI to grow its support for research activities from the original 2,000 to 4,000 cores. The institute also has plans to grow its cloud infrastructure to 6,000 cores and four petabytes.

At Red Hat, we recognize the importance of open technology that doesn’t hinder digital transformation, and so do our partners. In collaboration with our robust partner ecosystem, we’re able to build ideal solutions for our customers that spark infrastructure modernization and transformation. Some of these partners include:

• Maxta: A provider of hyperconvergence software, Maxta is collaborating with Red Hat on its Hyperconverged “(Un)Appliance” for Red Hat Virtualization, a pre-configured system of Red Hat Virtualization and Maxta Hyperconvergence software bundled together on Intel Data Center Blocks hardware.

• Veeam: Develops intelligent data management, including availability software, compatible with Red Hat Virtualization by using agents, as well as physical and multicloud infrastructures.

• Trilio: The company provides native data protection for Red Hat Virtualization. Trilio's agentless, software-only solution enables point-in-time recovery of entire workloads in one click, directly from the Red Hat Virtualization dashboard. Trilio also supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments via native backup and recovery solutions for Red Hat OpenStack Platform clouds.

To learn more about how we’re helping our customers transform their IT investments, connect with us this week at VMworld Las Vegas. Stop by our booth 1536 where we will be showcasing a number of demos that highlight how IT optimization, automation and open hybrid cloud, among others, can help your organization break through the limitations of traditional infrastructure.