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  • P.L. Ferrari Deploys Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for a More Effi...

P.L. Ferrari Deploys Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for a More Efficient IT Infrastructure

Maritime insurance specialist chooses leading enterprise open source virtualization solution to support business critical applications and provide around the clock customer support

GENOA, ITALY - —

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that P.L. Ferrari & Company, the world’s largest and oldest specialist broker of protection and indemnity (P&I) insurance for the maritime industry, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to replace its VMware-basedinfrastructure to help them achieve easier management, cost savings and improved disaster recovery.

P.L. Ferrari is one of the most respected insurance brokers in Italy and we’re pleased to expand our long-term relationship. P.L. Ferrari relies on Red Hat to deliver mission critical services and applications across its multinational network, and we’re proud to power its entire virtual infrastructure.

Gianni Anguilletti

Red Hat Country manager, Italy

P.L. Ferrari advises its shipping industry clients on best placement policies, strategic goals and risk management, and also assists with claim handling. As these claims can suddenly arise from unforeseen events such as collisions, groundings, oil spills or stowaway discoveries, P.L. Ferrari needed a solution offering high levels of reliability, availability, simplified management and disaster recovery capabilities in order to enable its team of 90 P&I professionals to respond to clients with a 24/7 service. The majority of these systems are run from the company’s Genoa head office and are accessed by employees based in Genoa, Monaco, Piraeus, Naples, Ferrara, and London via the web or virtual private networks (VPNs).

Although P.L. Ferrari had previously used virtualization software from VMware to consolidate multiple servers onto an integrated hardware solution, a refresh of outdated infrastructure prompted P.L. Ferrari to take a fresh look at its approach to virtualization. With some workloads already running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, P.L. Ferrari decided to extend its commitment to open source software, recognizing the power of community-driven innovation and its positive experience working with open source databases such as PostgreSQL.

Following a consultation with Red Hat Advanced Business Partner Delphis Informatica, an IT systems integration company based in Genoa, P.L. Ferrari decided to migrate its VMware-based infrastructure to a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment while also updating its hardware infrastructure.

The migration of P.L. Ferrari’s virtual machines to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was smooth, with full tolerance and no data loss. Today, all of ]the company’s production systems, including their newly established disaster recovery site in Naples, are centrally managed using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and the customer has reports major improvements in cost efficiency, reliability and ease of management of its virtualized environments.

Supporting Quotes
Andrea Guerrieri, Deputy IT manager, P.L. Ferrari & Company
“We need to run our systems in ‘always-on’ mode. Services like our management software and our email systems can never stop, because a client could call from anywhere in the world, at any time, and the specialist dealing with their case will need to access these systems straight away. We wanted to explore ways of achieving even better reliability at lower cost and with easier management.”

Maurizio Priano, CIO, Delphis Informatica
“At Delphis, we help our customers get the best value for their money in their projects, so it made sense to install the IBM Flex System hardware in Genoa, move the BladeCenter hardware to Naples, and install Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on both. This solution enables P.L. Ferrari to gain real cost savings.”

Gianni Anguilletti, country manager , Red Hat Italy
“P.L. Ferrari is one of the most respected insurance brokers in the country and we’re pleased to be expanding our long-term relationship. PL Ferrari relies on Red Hat to deliver mission critical services and applications across its multinational network and we’re proud to be powering its entire virtual infrastructure.”

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