Australian University Migrates IT Systems to Red Hat Solutions

CQUniversity in Australia has migrated its critical IT systems to Red Hat solutions. Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite have delivered a number of benefits to CQUniversity including significant cost savings, increased performance, ease of management and reliable, ongoing support.

 

The University offers a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on-campus and through distance education. With ten campuses and more than 21,000 students and staff, CQUniversity needs a reliable and stable IT infrastructure that can support standard operation throughout the day.

 

Their existing HP Tru64 UNIX system was not able to cope with the increasing needs of the University as it expanded and demanded more from its technology infrastructure.

 

Bruce Young, PeopleSoft systems engineer at CQUniversity said that they soon recognized the need for more than eight CPUs for a single database server. The cost of the alternative was also important due to budget constraints.

 

While searching for more cost-effective alternatives for expanding their capacity, the CQUniversity’s IT team came across solutions from Red Hat and in 2006, they decided that from both a hardware and software perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its operating system of choice.

 

“The HP Blade Servers together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided a winning combination that met our needs,” noted Young.

 

The University now runs 12 HP Blade Servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its databases and ten additional Blades run CQUniversity’s middleware solutions to support its applications. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also been extended to their research students and staff by using Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat’s reliable systems management solution. Through this extension, the university is able to efficiently manage its IT deployment and keep it updated without spending money on additional, costly resources.

 

Young said that they are impressed with the initial cost savings and the boost to server performance, and CQUniversity also expect further long-term savings on licensing costs.

 

Encouraged by the results, the Australian University intends to transition additional systems to its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

 

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