Booz Allen Leverages Red Hat Solutions to Deliver Flexible and Scalable SOA Deployments

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading strategy and technology consulting firm, relies on Red Hat solutions to deliver increased scalability and flexibility for its clients' mission-critical systems. Booz Allen recently delivered a solution combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to a government agency client to help it adapt to changes in its IT architecture. Over a one-year period, the client's data processing has increased from 1,000 documents per hour and 18,000 documents per day to more than 10,000 documents per hour and 100,000 documents per day. The number of the client's internal system users also increased 600 percent in the first year that the solution was deployed.

Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of strategy and technology consulting for more than 90 years. In 2004, Booz Allen was approached by a government agency to perform a proof of concept for a proprietary-based document-processing system. Although the proof of concept was successful, attempts to scale the solution up to a production-grade system encountered serious roadblocks.

"We went into the situation carrying a lot of 'baggage' due to short-cuts we'd made in the prototype system because of the lack of time and the resources we'd had during the proof of concept," said Christopher Dale, an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton. "But the system simply couldn't scale the way we needed it to."

When the agency secured funding to take the system to a new level of capability, the Booz Allen team knew it had to completely rethink its options. From the start, the team believed that open source was the answer, and virtualization clearly needed to be part of the solution.

"We knew we needed a clustered file system, as the old way of moving data back and forth was a real bottleneck," said Isaac Christoffersen, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. The solution also needed to be flexible in dealing with changing customer requests for additional functionality as well as scalability.

After assessing its options, Booz Allen decided to design a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based cloud platform using an enterprise service bus (ESB) for a variety of reasons. First, a highly clustered and highly virtualized architecture was needed to build the kind of agile grid of computing and storage resources necessary to scale to the extent that the client needed. Additionally, Booz Allen wanted to build a platform that it could leverage in the future for other client engagements.

"We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client's budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs," said Dale. "The combination of efficiency provided by the virtualization capabilities embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, the scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System, the clustering feature inherent in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice."

The Red Hat-based implementation provided the agency with the ability to consolidate 55 under-utilized servers into just eight servers. This reduced number of systems not only handled the existing processing load, but left capacity available for additional growth in the future.

"Among other things, SOA has greatly improved our ability to integrate commercial and government off-the-shelf (COTS/GOTS) products. Historically, around 50 percent of Booz Allen's development efforts were related to writing custom software to enable the integration of COTS and GOTS," said Dale. By selecting solutions that leverage commercial and open standards, Booz Allen's SOA approach reduces the need for this custom software and helps its clients achieve better reuse within their enterprise. Going forward, this new platform promises to be mission-critical to the way Booz Allen will provide its technology consulting services.

To read the full Booz Allen customer success story, visit www.customers.press.redhat.com. For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 60 offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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