Bartter puts its eggs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux basket

BARTTER PUTS ITS EGGS IN RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX BASKET 20% cost savings for 10-fold increase in system performance DEMANDS OF A DAILY FRESH BUSINESS Bartter Enterprises Pty Limited is Australia's second largest poultry producer, employing over 4,500 employees throughout its farming, processing, distribution and marketing and sales operations. Bartter manufactures and distributes fresh and frozen whole and portioned chicken and turkey products nationally. While Bartter classifies itself as a medium-size Australian company, the sheer volume of its transactions resembles that of a large enterprise. Each week Bartter ships more than 100,000 cartons of poultry around the country, which translates to approximately 20,000 invoices each week - a massive demand on its transaction processing capabilities. Logically, the technology Bartter uses for managing its order entry shipping requirements is crucial to its business operation. “Many vendors have underestimated our needs when it comes to transactional and processing requirements. We are a daily fresh business and our product needs to go out on the day, so our order entry shipping system – and the reliability of it – is critical to our business,” said Ms Janelle Endacott, Business Systems Director for Bartter Enterprises Pty Ltd. In order to improve the company’s ability to bring its product to market, Bartter had embarked on a rollout of Oracle E-Business Suite for its new order entry shipping system. It was to be introduced in a phased approach around the country, however Bartter first needed to ensure it had the best possible infrastructure to support it. With an existing HP Tru64 Unix environment, Bartter had initially planned to stay with the Unix platform for its software deployment. However, it still needed to update its server and with its transaction volumes, Bartter faced a difficult decision to accurately determine the scale of server hardware it would require. “With Unix you really only get one shot – if you oversize it you pay too much, yet if you undersize you get into trouble,” commented Ms Endacott. It was at this point that Ms Endacott realised an alternative was to start with Oracle RAC or clustering technology, which would enable Bartter to use multiple small servers and therefore negate the need to find the right capacity in a large single server. For this to be a cost effective solution, Bartter needed to re-consider its Unix platform and compare it against the alternatives. THE LINUX ALTERNATIVE Using six commodity HP servers, as opposed to relying on one large single server was a particularly attractive proposition for Ms Endacott. It meant Bartter could grow its hardware as it rolled out its Oracle E-Business Suite application - only deploying hardware on a needs basis. If it needed more processing capacity then more servers could be added. Now faced with the prospect of a new network design, Ms Endacott quickly became aware of the value that a Linux platform could offer over Unix. “Using the Linux operating system was clearly a better cost proposition. In fact, it initially enabled us to save around 20% on our overall spend on hardware and we expect to continue saving through the reduced maintenance requirements. “With Unix we would have been paying for features like redundancy, which were already a given with multiple servers. So really, we would have been paying more for Unix, for no added benefit.” THE RED HAT DIFFERENCE As the leading platform for open source computing, Red Hat is able to combine the innovation of open source technology with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. However, Bartter had next to no experience with Linux, the Linux community or Red Hat’s model for bringing Linux to the enterprise. “Understanding how Red Hat worked and delivered technology from a wider community of dedicated developers and enthusiasts, was the real turning point for us,” commented Ms Endacott. “We could see very definite benefits in the community having a hand in developing and perfecting the technology, and likewise, in Red Hat’s subscription-based business model which ensures reliability and security are not compromised.” Red Hat’s unique subscription model provides confidence in knowing software applications and hardware are fully certified. Access to updates offering additional features, as well as the latest bug fixes and security errata are available through Red Hat. Telephone support is also available with unlimited incidents. “The Linux model offers more credible guarantees around how the technology is going to perform, especially in terms of ensuring the technology is quality controlled and robust. While proprietary systems still offer the upgrades and patches, Linux offers this and more in a cost effective manner. “Being responsible for an enterprise technology infrastructure, that gives me a lot of confidence,” said Ms Endacott. PROOF OF CONCEPT Experiencing just how the solution would work proved to be beneficial. The new system had to run at least as fast as the previous Unix environment, and in fact, the proof of concept showed the solution could offer 10 times the performance speed. That was proof enough for Bartter and the production system went live in September 2005. SOURCING THE SKILLS Red Hat is widely recognised as offering the most acclaimed certifications in the Linux space and with Bartter’s new Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform came the opportunity to obtain valuable new skills. “To date, three of Bartter’s Unix-trained staff have taken part in courses with Red Hat to obtain open source certification, further contributing to the company’s smooth transition to Linux,” said Ms Endacott. BARTTER LOOKS TO THE FUTURE Successfully running Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a number of months, Bartter is now looking forward to the additional, ongoing benefits its Linux open source deployment will offer. “Red Hat’s open source proposition is a strong alternative for the enterprise and with the success of Linux in our backend infrastructure, there is now plenty of opportunity for us to benefit from open source in other areas of the business.” “The next step for us is to move towards using more open source tools, making a gradual departure from our use of proprietary tools. In doing so, I expect there are more cost savings to be had. From there, who knows, we may even end up extending Linux to our desktops in future refresh programs!” concluded Ms Endacott.