Etisalat Sri Lanka adopts Red Hat enterprise virtualization

BANGALORE, INDUA: Red Hat Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced that Etisalat Sri Lanka has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the foundation for its critical IT infrastructure that services 2.4 million subscribers across the island nation's cellular network, inventory management and distribution services for 30,000 retail outlets.

With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Etisalat Sri Lanka has gained expanded scalability, operational efficiency and performance for its systems.

Etisalat Sri Lanka previously maintained a heterogeneous IT infrastructure with solutions from various vendors that each presented different levels of management complexity for its IT team. As Etisalat Sri Lanka's business continued to expand, its IT team was faced with the challenge of procuring new hardware to address growth within short deadlines. Recurring fees for renewing licenses, rising power costs and shrinking space to accommodate new hardware was also a challenge.

After evaluating multiple virtualization solutions, Etisalat Sri Lanka chose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and successfully implemented the solution for its critical datacenter within one month with the help of Red Hat partner Visual Computing Systems (Pvt) Ltd (VCS) of Informatics Group of Companies.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Etisalat Sri Lanka was able to reduce its previous 40 servers down to just six servers, while hosting the same extensive amount of data,” said Hemesh Fernando, senior manager, Marketing, Visual Computing Systems (Pvt) Ltd. (VCS) of Informatics Group of Companies.

“We could not afford any disruption in services while our servers were being migrated. We needed an elegant, simple and powerful IT infrastructure that could eliminate multiple levels of cost and support and dramatically increases efficiency. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was an excellent fit,” said Chandrakanth Jayasinghe, Head of IT Systems, Etisalat Sri Lanka.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, we have witnessed a drastic reduction in TCO, enabling our IT team to concentrate more on our business. We've also seen an increase in stability, flexibility and scalability.”

The consolidation of servers onto fewer machines resulted in a dramatic reduction in space, cooling and power needs for the organization. The Etisalat Sri Lanka IT team was also able to quickly set up high-availability clusters of applications, improving the reliability of the datacenter.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization's ability to manage Windows virtual machines in addition to Linux, and the seamless transformation of systems from standalone, aged hardware platforms to the Red Hat platform, greatly simplified Etisalat Sri Lanka's IT management tasks.

“Our biggest achievement to date with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has been the ability to address server deployment requirements with short notice, saving time and money for our business. Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was a smart move. The future of Etisalat Sri Lanka is now looking bright as we encounter our expanding customer base,” said Sanath Pilapitiya, CTO, Etisalat Sri Lanka.