With more than 600 branches across 30 countries, UAE Exchange has a large, and growing customer base. However, rapid expansion caused performance and availability concerns about the company’s distributed IT systems, previously comprised of servers running various versions of UNIX . To better support its fast growing portfolio of web-based applications for new services such as payment for credit cards, utility bills, subscriptions, airline tickets and others, the company needed to consolidate its environment on a single platform.
Supported by Red Hat Consulting, UAE Exchange deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite. Red Hat Satellite made configuration and provisioning easy and enabled the IT team to rapidly roll out Red Hat Enterprise Linux onto the servers in under one week. Throughout the migration, UAE’s customer facing web-services remained up and running without impact on the company’s 24/7 global operations.
The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux server environment means that the IT team at UAE Exchange is no longer inhibited by the inflexibility of its old distributed systems. Because UAE’s mission-critical services and applications are web-based, new branches can now simply ‘plug and play’ to the IT infrastructure to get their services up and running. The solution’s scalability and reliability are proven: even with 80,000 to 90,000 users connecting at any given time, the services have not seen any drop in performance. Using Red Hat Satellite with Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables UAE Exchange’s in-house team to easily exercise full control over its new environment. This simplifies provisioning and configuration, while also automating routine tasks such as patch management.
As an added benefit, the security benchmarking and hardening of the operating system conducted by Red Hat Consulting helped the exchange to meet the stringent requirements of the ISO 27001 certification, an international standard for information security management.
To keep its aggressive growth and expansion goals on track, the company is now looking to build a new datacenter outside of the UAE, while simultaneously using virtualization to increase resource utilization. Having successfully used WildFly, the JBoss.org community application server, the company now intends to use Red Hat JBoss Middleware to help it build, test, and deploy applications faster.
Sarath Chandra, CIO at UAE Exchange, said, “The value of Red Hat Consulting lies in the team’s ability to expertly aid the implementation while conveying best practices. Despite our own team being very technically proficient, their exposure was limited to working within our environment. So the additional knowledge provided by Red Hat’s industry experts helped us in a number of areas such as configuration, fine tuning, performance management and security. It was also a pride point for us as we could then match our systems to global benchmarks.”
