The Government of the Canary Islands migrates to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

The new infrastructure, based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is designed to provide support for the telecommunications, information technology and computer communications infrastructure of the government. The migration improved the consolidation ratios of virtual machines per host and resulted in budget savings of up to 70 percent compared to the costs associated with the previous VMware virtualization platform.

As the Government of the Canary Islands’ previous virtualization infrastructure could not keep up with the organisation’s growing workloads, it set two objectives when it came to upgrading it. The first was to promote convergence between horizontal and vertical growth so the government could take its physical machines up to their maximum capacity and thereby reduce the number of hosts, increasing efficiency. The second was to adopt a virtualization solution that could respond to its requirements, reducing cost of ownership as much as possible and minimizing risks in terms of quality of service and future continuity.

Having evaluated its options, the public body found that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was more cost-effective and provided greater capacity and improved service levels and continuity. The proposal put forward by Red Hat provided cost savings of up to 70 percent compared with proprietary solutions, while enabling the IT department to adopt a modernization plan, well-suited to the requirements of the Government of the Canary Islands.
Preparing for the future, the government wanted to avoid being tied to providers with unpredictable costs, or to technologies that might not develop or even disappear over time. In these respects, the technological roadmap provided by Red Hat, the capacity that its clients have for influencing that roadmap in a collaborative fashion, the model of annual subscriptions with predictable costs, the fact that it is based on public, open source technology and the soundness of Red Hat as a company were all decisive factors in the choice made by the Government of the Canary Islands.
Once Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was installed on its IT systems, the government was able to increase from average consolidation ratios of seven virtual machines per physical server (7:1) to 27 virtual machines per host (27:1), in addition to making a saving of 10 percent in disk space, achieving greater reporting capacity and a general simplification of the architecture.

A key factor in this project was teamwork. Red Hat consultants brought significant expertise to bear on the solution and the automation and optimization of the data centre processes. Red Hat partner Qwerty offered the public body the best services at a local level, providing the greatest speed and efficiency possible. Thanks to this, the Government of the Canary Islands was able to successfully migrate a complex virtual infrastructure made up of almost 100 physical servers and 1,000 virtual machines, both Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in just four months, reducing costs and succeeding in improving operational efficiency and the service provided for citizens, both now and in the future.

“Virtualization with Red Hat offers a solid platform, in addition to a clear vision of its roadmap,” said Darío Iván Ortega Valido, computing, telecommunications and new technologies department for the Government of the Canary Islands. “What’s more, the budgetary sustainability provided by the Red Hat solutions and the positive results achieved in tests carried out with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization were of crucial importance when it came to changing our virtualization platform.”