U21Global migrates to Red Hat virtualisation solution
ConvergenceAsia staff
11/03/2009

U21Global, the world's premier online graduate school, has migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualisation to implement a reliable and affordable solution that could scale with growing business needs. It selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux to leverage its built-in virtualisation technology in order to reduce its hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility.

U21Global offers globally recognised graduate programs and is backed by an international network of leading research universities in 11 countries. U21Global has successfully enrolled students from over 60 countries around the world, including those from Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. To deliver high-quality, dynamic and interactive academic content, U21Global relies on a powerful IT infrastructure to provide high levels of availability for its online programmes.

U21Global’s datacentre, which is located at its global headquarters in Singapore, provides IT services to its students around the world, while simultaneously supporting the business-critical function of development and staging of courseware. Courseware developers, faculty members of affiliated universities and quality assurance professionals access the datacentre resources to develop content and carry out user-acceptance tests and certification.

In 2008, rapid business growth put pressure on the graduate school to scale its infrastructure to keep pace with user demands on its development and staging platform. At the same time, existing servers were also due for maintenance renewals. The cost of new hardware and renewals was substantial, causing U21Global to look for an alternative solution that could deliver a robust enterprise platform while also offering cost savings, reliability, ease of management and scalability.

U21Global decided to assess how virtualisation solutions could help it address its cost, scalability and system management challenges and evaluated three virtualisation options.

“We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualisation for its cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management and flexibility,” said Caven Yip, systems engineer at U21Global. “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we met our goals for a high-performance virtualisation implementation that is stable, reliable, scalable and secure."

Looking to expand its virtualisation best practices, U21Global’s Red Hat virtualisation solution was installed with the help of Red Hat Consulting. With Red Hat Consulting, U21Global was able to implement its Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualisation solution more quickly than had been anticipated at the beginning of the project.

U21Global also utilises Red Hat Network, an easy-to-use systems management platform, to help the company keep its open source environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and virtual servers. The system enables U21Global’s IT team to view the status of its servers at all times and allows the company to download important patches, configuration changes and updates as they become available through Red Hat’s subscription service.

“While a typical server can cater for up to ten concurrent users, with virtual servers, it is possible to re-allocate memory and compute resources on-the-fly to allow more users to log on to a server. The IT team is now able to provision servers and IT services in a timely manner,” said Yip.

“Virtualisation presented a great cost-saving solution. By migrating a number of our physical servers to virtual servers, we were able to reduce the number of servers in the datacentre, increase utilisation rates and reduce power consumption,” said Yip. “If we had not implemented virtualisation, we would have spent $24,000 on three new servers and continued to incur the cost of annual maintenance for the original ten servers.”

With its previous deployment, the IT staff needed to back up an old server before they could transition its applications to a new physical server. This was a tedious process requiring approximately two days. Virtual servers eliminated that entire process. And before implementing virtualisation, U21Global’s IT team had to connect remotely to the server or access the console directly in order to manage the system.

“Now, I only need to access the virtualisation manager from any Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system in order to access all the virtual servers,” said Yip. “It used to take days to provision new servers. Now, we can provision servers in just a few hours.”

“We have been using open source technologies since 2002 and have tried many different Linux distributions,” said Yip. “Today, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the enhanced security, the platform’s robustness and the flexibility of the operating system. We also enjoy very good Red Hat support.”

U21Global's affiliated universities include: North America: Tecnológico de Monterrey, University of Virginia; Europe: Lund University; University College Dublin, University of Birmingham, University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, University of Nottingham; Asia: Fudan University, Korea University, National University of Singapore, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Delhi, University of Hong Kong, Waseda University; Australia: University of Melbourne, University of Queensland.

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