Odyssey Logistics & Technology Combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel® Xeon® Processors to Boost Reliability, Scalability and Performance While Carving out Costs

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that global transportation provider Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation (OL&T) has achieved cost savings, performance enhancements and expanded scalability with its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 33 multi-core Intel® Xeon® processor-based IBM xSeries servers.

OL&T is a leading provider of global logistics management services for the chemical and process industries. It delivers a comprehensive portfolio of logistics services to its clients so their products can be delivered safely, reliably and economically, with the advantage of shipment visibility and actionable data across all modes. OL&T today moves products for clients between over 60,000 locations in North America, and to more than 200 ports globally. In addition to its deep industry expertise, OL&T has built a technology platform that enables it to provide detailed metrics and visibility into its operations for some of the world’s largest chemicals manufacturers.

Previously, OL&T primarily ran its business technology platform on HP-UX and Windows systems and was looking at ways to enhance its infrastructure to support its growing business. Adding proprietary UNIX hardware to handle its rapidly growing transaction volumes was prohibitively expensive, so OL&T began looking at other ways it could handle growth.

“For us, UNIX and Windows are not the friendliest environments to operate,” said Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services for OL&T. “With the growth we were experiencing, we had a lot of concerns about the stability and scalability of our UNIX and Windows systems.”

To address these challenges, OL&T decided to do a complete infrastructure refresh, including migrating all of its HP-UX and Windows systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs on 33 virtualized Intel® Xeon® processor-based IBM xSeries servers. It also implemented Red Hat Network Satellite to manage provisioning and administration of its Red Hat systems.

“Red Hat is the market leader in open source, period. Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat,” said Massey. “We began the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with our Oracle database and our HP-UX batch processing and were so pleased with the results that we have continued to progress toward making as much of our infrastructure as possible run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

After a smooth migration to Red Hat on Intel solutions, OL&T immediately recognized cost savings, scalability and performance benefits.