Host Europe Host Europe Managed Hosting: No Interruptions Thanks to Red Hat

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Red Hat's competitors don't even come close to providing the same range of services and support. It was an easy decision for us to choose Red Hat solutions. - Patrick Pulvermüller, Host Europe

Background

Host Europe develops and markets Internet services for private and commercial customers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The company provides customers with a fail-safe infrastructure, a comprehensive range of scalable and high-quality Internet services, as well as customer-focused support. In order to make this range of services available, Host Europe focuses on partnerships with experienced technology companies. Over 25% of companies quoted on the German stock exchange, DAX, use services provided by Host Europe.

Opportunity

Host Europe was looking for a means of offering its customers cost-effective and highly available managed hosting solutions. For this, the company relies on technology partners whose solutions guarantee problem-free operation around the clock. This was one of the main criteria during the selection of partners for the implementation of the project. During an evaluation period, Host Europe closely examined a number of options. Red Hat's bid was ultimately accepted due to its combination of price/performance ratio, high technical reliability, and high level of support. Patrick Pulvermüller of Host Europe, recalls how the decision was made: We saw a great need in the market for high availability web applications at a sensible price and with excellent service facilities. It was only possible for us to provide this kind of service with Red Hat. Other bids showed clear weaknesses either in terms of price or service, or in some cases, both.

Solution

Red Hat solutions lie at the heart of the completely restructured high-availability solution provided by Host Europe. Along with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, Host Europe uses Red Hat Global File System, and Red Hat Cluster Suite. All technologies are licensed under the General Public License (GPL) and are updated in cooperation with the open source community. Global File System allows several computers within a cluster to access the same physical data blocks simultaneously. In this way, each server in a cluster obtains direct access to the storage devices, to which it can read and write. In order to achieve this, Global File System connects the application server to a storage area network (SAN), which was supplied by EMC. The Red Hat Cluster Suite enables both the transfer of services from a server that has failed to another server and the distribution of the load between the cluster nodes. In addition, a load balancer from F5 comes into action. The whole infrastructure for the managed services runs entirely on Dell hardware. The certification of Red Hat solutions on this costeffective, quality hardware was another important decision-making factor.

Pulvermüller is clearly satisfied: Even during the evaluation phase and implementation, the consultants from Red Hat made an excellent contribution. With their support we were able to set up the complete infrastructure in only five working days. Whenever a minor performance issue occurred during the initial phase, the Red Hat consultants quickly identified and promptly rectified the cause. No major problems of any kind arose during the subsequent period; Red Hat support earned top marks in terms of operative production.

Benefits

Following completion of the first project phase, over 600 servers at Host Europe were operating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Customers of the Internet service provider mainly use the managed services for highly available web applications, especially for web shops. For this reason, online retailers run their eCommerce applications on the systems and take advantage of their high availability. Even Host Europe itself entrusts its web shop and Web 2.0 video platform to Red Hat solutions.

Host Europe and its customers stand to gain from the reliability of the systems and the reasonable costs. The Red Hat solution is also scalable in all respects without causing any downtime. Within a few hours Host Europe can provide its customers with new services or expand existing ones. Pulvermüller sums up the current stage of development: With the current level of development, we have come a long way in achieving the range of services that we anticipated. We will double the number of servers within the foreseeable future. We are also confident that we will not experience any problems in the course of this expansion with Red Hat.