Odyssey Logistics Migrates Systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, announced that transportation provider Odyssey Logistics & Technology (OL&T) has achieved cost savings, performance enhancements and expanded scalability with its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 33 multi-core Intel Xeon processor-based IBM xSeries servers.

Previously, OL&T primarily ran its business technology platform on HP-UX and Windows systems and was looking at ways to enhance its infrastructure to support its growing business. Adding proprietary UNIX hardware to handle its rapidly growing transaction volumes was prohibitively expensive, so OL&T began looking at other ways it could handle growth.

"For us, UNIX and Windows are not the friendliest environments to operate," said Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services for OL&T. "With the growth we were experiencing, we had a lot of concerns about the stability and scalability of our UNIX and Windows systems."

To address these challenges, OL&T decided to do a complete infrastructure refresh, including migrating all of its HP-UX and Windows systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs on 33 virtualized Intel Xeon processor-based IBM xSeries servers. It also implemented Red Hat Network Satellite to manage provisioning and administration of its Red Hat systems.

"Red Hat is a provider of open source, period. Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat," said Massey. "We began the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with our Oracle database and our HP-UX batch processing and were so pleased with the results that we have continued to progress toward making as much of our infrastructure as possible run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

After a smooth migration to Red Hat on Intel solutions, OL&T immediately recognized cost savings, scalability and performance benefits. With the replacement of its UNIX systems with the affordable and scalable, virtualized Intel Xeon processor-based IBM xSeries servers, OL&T was able to scale with its rapid growth without the need to invest more heavily in hardware or headcount.

"We've completely eliminated UNIX from our environment," said Massey. "Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is truly a rock-solid platform for us. Its reliability continues to impress us daily, and we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat and Intel with our most mission-critical systems."

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