FAST FACTS
Customer: Landesbetrieb für Statistik und Kommunikationstechnologie Niedersachsen (LSKN)
Industry: Public Sector
Geography: Germany
Business Challenge: Needed a high-availability platform for the Lower Saxony Police to use as the infrastructure for its web-based case and operations processing application, Nivadis, while keeping operational and maintenance costs at a minimum
Solution: LSKN implemented Red Hat solutions to serve as the infrastructure for its mission-critical, web-based case and operations processing application, Nivadis
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Directory Server, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Consulting, BEA WebLogic
Hardware: HP ProLiant DL360 servers with standard x86 processors
Migration Path: Siemens-Fujitsu BS2000/OSD to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Benefits: Eliminated vendor lock-in; Increased scalability, availability, and performance; Achieved cost savings in operations, support, and licensing fees; Gained the ability to meet and exceed national regulations and requirements; Increased system security; Simplified management of systems
“Our main concerns are absolute reliability and cost effectiveness throughout the entire lifecycle of our server-based applications. Our decision to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be one of the best we have made in recent years.”
-- Dieter Meyer, Head of UNIX-Service-Center, LSKN
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BACKGROUND
Landesbetrieb für Statistik und Kommunikationstechnologie Niedersachsen (LSKN) is the state-owned service provider of statistics and communication technology for the German federal state of Lower Saxony. LSKN develops, manages, and operates the entire IT infrastructure for the state’s public authorities. Based in the state capital of Hannover, LSKN operates as a profit centre, serving clients across the country by running high-security datacentres, the state’s telecommunications network, an email infrastructure with more than 60,000 users, and much more. LSKN also provides IT consulting to its clients and is responsible for the central purchasing of hardware and software for the state authorities.
The Lower Saxony Police is a major client of LSKN. More than 11,000 employees across the state rely on a central case and operations processing system, Nivadis. Nivadis is a police information system built with Java that gives Lower Saxony Police the ability to record criminal events, process investigations, conduct research, and analyse related statistics through a single browser. The Lower Saxony Police relies on Nivadis to be available 24x7, 365 days per year.
The result of an effort to update the Lower Saxony Police information systems to comply with national and international standards, Nivadis is a joint development project with Mummert Consulting and was introduced in 2003. Nivadis replaced an older system that was expensive to support and incompatible with the national tracing and information system used by the central police authorities in Germany.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The underlying business challenge for the LSKN operations team is to provide a highly reliable and scalable IT infrastructure to state authorities and to minimise the cost to taxpayers.
LSKN needed an operating platform that could ensure the 24x7 availability of the mission-critical Nivadis information system in all 1,023 communities and 37 districts of Lower Saxony, home to eight million citizens. At the same time, the solution needed to be cost-effective over a long period of time to ensure efficient spending of taxpayer money.
SOLUTION
Red Hat Enterprise Linux was chosen specifically for its ability to run on 64-bit Itanium hardware. At the time, it was the only professionally supported Linux operating system that could support LSKN's hardware platform. Red Hat also offered central and secure management of the installation via Red Hat Network Satellite.
The original Nivadis setup used powerful 64-bit Itanium servers from HP to provide enough computing power to accommodate the increasing demand from the Lower Saxony Police as well as other authorities. However, during LSKN’s five-year hardware replacement cycle, standard x86-based HP ProLiant DL360 servers were introduced.
“It is quite challenging to find the right level of investment in computing capacities. Firstly, it must be affordable, and secondly, it needs to give us enough leeway for the duration of our replacement cycle to accommodate new customer requirements,” said Dieter Meyer, head of UNIX-Service-Centre at LSKN.
BENEFITS
Over the past seven years, LSKN has gained significant experience running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a mission-critical, security-sensitive, and highly available environment. “Having used Red Hat Enterprise Linux for many years now, we have realised several benefits of running an industry-standard server environment,” said Marcus Brand, head of Linux operations team at LSKN. “The x86 processors are affordable, very energy-efficient and offer excellent performance.”
With the help of Red Hat Global Support Services and Red Hat Consulting, which supports the LSKN Linux team on-site three days per month, LSKN has been able to achieve a high level of availability, an efficient use of its IT team members, and a significant cost advantage compared to alternative proprietary vendors. The migration to open source software has not only saved the taxpayers a large amount in licencing costs, but it has also minimised maintenance and support spending because of the reliability and efficient systems management provided by Red Hat Network Satellite.
“Low maintenance costs are a major concern for LSKN,” said Meyer. “We are very happy to see that despite the complexity of Nivadis, we have been able to manage it centrally with only three members of the Linux operations team.”
With the use of the Red Hat solution, the Nivadis police information and processing system is able to serve thousands of officials around the clock without failures, and ensure smooth operations of law enforcement in Germany’s fourth-largest federal state (by number of citizens).
“We have a small team that is responsible for a large number of government systems, which all need to run reliably,” said Brand. “We simply cannot afford downtime. Whether it’s ongoing monitoring, change management processes, or regular patches and updates, everything has to be quick and easy to do. Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us accomplish just that.”
LSKN has also benefited from the security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which has helped it to ensure the security of private, sensitive data of the state's citizens.
“Data security is of special concern to us,” said Brand. “Every day we deal with huge amounts of highly sensitive data about our state’s citizens that needs to be safe and secure at all times. For instance, during our regular patching process we connect our Red Hat Network Satellite Server to Red Hat Network only, completely locking out the Internet to avoid vulnerabilities. This is considerably more efficient than first copying patches to CDs and then deploying them to each individual system.”
While the Nivadis police application runs on 18 servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, LSKN also has Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments for other purposes. In total, LSKN has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 76 servers operating in its datacentres, which include email gateways and a data warehouse.
More recently, LSKN has migrated its LDAP directory for the Lower Saxony Police to Red Hat Directory Server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The original Sun Directory Server that ran on HP-UX had come to the end of its life and was no longer supported. Now, with the Red Hat solution in place, technical support is further consolidated and LSKN has a single point of contact for most of its Linux-based software.
Finally, long-term cost savings have been realised through affordable standard hardware with lower energy consumption and a much lower carbon footprint compared to the previous platforms.
”Our main concerns are absolute reliability and cost-effectiveness throughout the entire lifecycle of our server-based applications,” said Meyer. “Our decision to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be one of the best we have made in recent years.”
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