Indian Express Migrates to Red Hat Solutions to Cost-Effectively Scale for the Future

Monday December 15, 8:00 am ET

Media Firm Implements Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for High Availability, Security, Reliability and Flexibility

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT - News), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that The Indian Express Group, one of India’s most well-known media firms that maintains several well-known national publications in the region, has migrated from Novell Netware to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to provide a solid foundation to cost-effectively scale with accelerated company growth. Red Hat solutions have helped Indian Express Group to carve costs out of its IT infrastructure, while maintaining high availability, reliability, security and transparency.

Indian Express Group’s backbone LAN servers were previously powered by the Novell Netware 3.12 operating system. With Netware, the group faced obstacles, including the limitations of client licenses. It was also challenged by complex and expensive maintenance that limited its critical agility. It was clear that Indian Express Group needed to evaluate a solution that would not only meet existing needs cost-effectively, but give the group the reliability it needed for the future.

Faced with the challenge of adapting to consumer and technological demands in a competitive media industry, Indian Express Group turned to Red Hat to carve out costs, while simultaneously scaling its critical IT infrastructure. Indian Express Group implemented SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to streamline business processes, enable easier management of its systems and achieve information transparency across its many locations around the country.

“Our top priority was to ensure uniformity, standardization and compatibility of operations, while building the IT foundation for us to accelerate quickly in the future without any limits – either imposed by technology or the vendor,” said Tridib Bordoloi, CIO, Indian Express Group. “In the media industry, we cannot afford to have downtime. Hence, high availability is a critical need. We also evaluated platforms with respect to the TCO, future readiness, and ability to scale. We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because the solution could deliver on all of our needs, and we had internal familiarity with the solution because we’ve effectively run our file and print servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for some time.”

“The selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was an obvious choice, as it fulfilled all the requirements we envisioned for building a future-ready platform. We are all for open standards, and did not want to be tied down to a single vendor. Red Hat gives us the flexibility to change to a different hardware platform, if necessary,” said Bordoloi.

With ease-of-use, the opportunity to preserve existing investments and the ability to scale cost-effectively without subsequent investments in hardware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has given Indian Express Group the ability to move forward with its business goals without technology constraints. Like other national newspapers, the smooth transfer of stories and pages within the organization and across locations is vital.

“In addition to high availability and reliability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 gives us access to features such as clustering and integrated virtualization that would otherwise have only been possible through the purchase of additional third-party solutions,” said Bordoloi.

The group uses Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 10g as its database, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as the platform. This combination provides the group increased flexibility and significantly reduced operational costs. For example, the Express Group can now dynamically provision nodes, storage or CPUs to lower costs and improve utilization.

“With the combination of cost, flexibility and reliability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has truly exceeded our expectations. When compared to contemporary solutions, the TCO is very low. More importantly, Red Hat's security features enabled through the Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality, has given us peace of mind, vis-à-vis other platforms that are facing new vulnerabilities and threats almost every day,” said Bordoloi.

Indian Express Group is a trendsetter in the open source industry in India with its early implementation of open source technologies. Including mail servers, file servers, SAP and even the company’s website, the group has utilized Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the backend for many years with success.

“The Indian Express Group happens to be one of the earliest users of SAP on RAC in the region,” said Bordoloi. “The Express Group has always been on the forefront of publishing high-quality articles that can positively change the society we live in. Hence, when it was revealed in a recent Network World test that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was named the Greenest Operating System, pulling as much as 12 percent less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware, we were overjoyed with our choice and the small contribution we are making to make the world a better place to live in,” said Bordoloi.

To read the full Indian Express Group case study, visit www.customers.press.redhat.com.

To learn more about how Red Hat can help customers carve out costs in their IT infrastructure, visit www.redhat.com/carveoutcosts.com.

For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

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