Hilti Migrates Critical Systems to Red Hat Solutions

Hilti Corporation has migrated its critical systems running SAP applications from Tru64 UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat (News - Alert) Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System.

 

The move translates into increased performance and reduced electricity costs for Hilti, a world-renowned manufacturer of technology for the global construction industry. The migration to Red Hat solutions has also provided them with a long-term platform strategy that aims to enable the Hilti IT team to be highly responsive to the increasing requirements of a global manufacturing sales and service organization.

 

Explaining the rationale of the move Red Hat explains that Hilti was searching for an alternative platform for its critical systems when HP decided to discontinue development and support for Tru64 UNIX and Alpha Server in 2004.

 

According to Michael Hagmann, head of Enterprise Server Technology (News - Alert) at Hilti Corporation, trying to extend the lifecycle of the Tru64/Alpha platform was not an option, as they would quickly run into maintenance and hardware issues. The company then began to evaluate alternative platforms and ultimately decided upon Red Hat solutions.

 

Martin Petry, CIO at Hilti explained that they migrated to SAP (News - Alert) applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers after evaluation and testing. The move has increased performance by more than 100 percent.

 

Petry noted that they have also reduced IT costs with a commoditized architecture.

 

“Having a tight level of integration between the Red Hat and SAP support organizations gives us the confidence to continue along this path and further reduce our costs by migrating all of our SAP environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

 

According to Helge Deller, head of the SAP Linux Lab, SAP, their customers are keen on using open, standards-based platforms to create scalable, high-performance business applications.

 

It is important for SAP customers to support open source alternatives, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the current economic scenario. Deller added that running SAP solutions together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers added value to customers that meets their business and technology needs.