City of Chicago

Finding a Better Way With Red Hat Enterprise Linux

One of the most well known cities in the United States, Chicago prides itself on finding a better way to do things - from strengthening public education to inventing Cracker Jacks, lowering crime to building the first skyscraper. Leading Chicago since 1989, Mayor Richard Daley has built on the city's desire for improvement, and has recognized the importance of technology in driving those improvements. Daley has sponsored such programs as the Technology Development Initiative to attract high-tech businesses and the Mayor's Council of Technology Advisers. In fact, Daley remarked at the 2003 Digital Frontier Conference that "the City of Chicago is applying technology to every area of the city government, from crime-fighting to graffiti removal."

At the center of these efforts is Chicago's Business & Information Services (BIS) Department, which "supports most of the city's enterprise-level applications that keep the city working," explains Amy Niersbach, Platform Architect for the City of Chicago. More than 15,000 city workers depend on BIS for fast, reliable access to the technology required to effectively perform in their jobs. In the spirit of finding a better way, the City of Chicago undertook a pilot project with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The city's infrastructure has historically been a multi-platform environment that included about 100 Solaris servers used to run a large number of Oracle Databases and applications. "Many of these servers are nearing the end of their life cycles, and when we replace them, we need to do so with cost-effective solutions," Niersbach says.

BIS had three primary goals when they began to consider Linux:

• Reduce the server hardware, maintenance and operating costs
• Prove that Linux could effectively run enterprise-level applications
• Increase flexibility in choosing hardware vendors for significant potential cost savings

Realizing the potential for open source technology to reduce the cost of hardware and IT operating costs, BIS partnered with HP, Red Hat and Systems Solutions Inc. (SSI) to kick off a Red Hat Enterprise Linux pilot project. SSI's systems engineers installed the HP DL580 G2 Server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.2.1, Oracle 9i Database, and HP MSL Tape Library with backup software from Legato.

"We liked the approach that Red Hat took to support the City of Chicago, SSI, and HP during our pilot project. The Red Hat Professional Services team was brought in for their expertise, and they provided technical assistance for the duration of the project. It was very effective," said Niersbach.

As part of the pilot project, SSI installed software that would allow them to evaluate system performance and scalability, and to test backup & recovery processes and interfaces to other applications. TPC Benchmark Software was also used to ensure an accurate assessment for the performance comparison.

Results were impressive. Sun Solaris benchmarked at 50,268 transactions per minute, while the HPDL580 G2 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux benchmarked at over 149,500 transactions per minute--nearly three times faster! When running the city's long batch cycles, Red Hat Enterprise Linux proved to be fifty percent faster.

Recently the City of Chicago expanded beyond the pilot project to migrate its Vehicle Registration System from the mainframe environment to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 and HP platform. BIS expects that the system will allow them to issue more than 1 million vehicle stickers per year.

The BIS team is now confident that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help them reach their goals:

"We're optimistic about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its ability to help us find a better way to deliver government services," says Niersbach.