As an $11.1 billion diversified automotive company, JM Family Enterprises uses information strategically to grow its business. In fact, the Florida-based business has been listed by InformationWeek as one of the 500 leading technology innovators from 2003 through 2007.

Because reliable information systems are vital to the success of its many businesses, JM Family is constantly seeking new ways to optimize its IT infrastructure. So when the aging systems that ran its BEA middleware and critical Oracle 9i databases were about to reach their end of life, the enterprise currently ranked by FORTUNE as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" started weighing its options.

Although its current systems had performed well and delivered good reliability, JM Family's IT engineers had to invest considerable time in managing and maintaining them. Moreover, when the company needed to boost performance to meet growing customer demands, its only option was to add more processors to systems, a "scale-up" approach that was expensive and time-consuming.

A high-tech bake-off

To assess which platform would deliver the best performance and flexibility for its critical applications, JM Family tested Dell PowerEdge servers running Red Hat Linux against the offerings of two leading competitors. "Our goal was to determine which solution was the most efficient and most cost-effective," says JM Family Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Rajeev Ravindran, "so we set up a proof-of-concept exercise in which we load-tested BEA WebLogic on similarly sized systems."

As a long-term Dell customer, JM Family ran many of its enterprise Windows applications on hundreds of Dell PowerEdge servers and was familiar with their performance and reliability. Recently, they had introduced VMware virtualization technology to improve utilization and disaster recovery and had hundreds of virtual machines running in their production Windows environment.

"We have a great relationship with our Dell account team, and asked them for support with our proof-of-concept," says Ravindran. "They really delivered, lending us evaluation equipment to do the testing, providing extensive expertise including detailed briefings in Austin, as well as bringing in resources from Red Hat and Oracle to ensure that all aspects of our POC went smoothly."

Enterprise-ready Red Hat Linux

JM Family was not entirely unfamiliar with Red Hat Linux. One of its divisions, DataScan Technologies LLC, which develops accounting and risk management solutions, uses Red Hat Linux extensively. Moreover, JM Family knew that Dell had a strong partnership with Red Hat and used Linux throughout its own enterprise systems.

"We were convinced, both from Dell's own experience, as well as from many case studies detailing other organizations' practices, that Red Hat Linux was a robust and reliable platform for enterprise computing," says Ravindran. "What we didn't expect was the degree to which Dell PowerEdge servers running Linux would outperform the other platforms in our test."

Indeed, during the three months in which JM Family evaluated the competing systems using BEA WebLogic applications, Dell servers running Red Hat Linux delivered 50 percent faster performance than the competition. But this was not the only benefit that the Dell solution brought to the table.

Scaling Out with Dell PowerEdge Servers

JM Family depends on BEA middleware to run its many portal-based applications, which support critical dealer operations, such as loan origination and financing programs. The systems that run this middleware need to be scaled quickly to accommodate new applications and respond to a changing business environment.

"Dell's PowerEdge servers enable us to scale out flexibly by simply adding more servers when and where we need them, rather than being limited to scaling up, as we are with proprietary UNIX systems," says Ravindran. "Using Dell servers to support our WebLogic and Oracle services will allow us to maintain a single platform, quickly redeploying hardware where needed. Now we can leverage our VMware infrastructure to host Windows and Linux systems and no longer be tied to OS-specific, proprietary architectures."

As part of the proof-of-concept, JM Family used Dell PowerEdge servers to functionally test Oracle 10g with and without Real Application Clusters, which provides a clustered database environment. Although its workloads don't currently need the capabilities of Oracle RAC, the company is considering moving its data warehouse to RAC at some point in the future.

Virtualization, however, will play a large role in JM Family's move to Dell servers and Linux. "Our middleware servers are rarely used to capacity, so we are looking to virtualize several of these middle-tiered applications onto one physical server," says Ravindran. "As we continue to test new Linux applications, we anticipate expanding virtualization for better asset utilization as well as for its disaster recovery benefits."

Delivering on the "sizzle"

JM Family also appreciates the easy manageability of the Dell-Red Hat Linux environment. "Marketing 'sizzle' doesn't always translate into reality, but Dell's solution has really delivered-we're working a lot smarter and spending a lot less time managing our environment," says Ravindran, who notes that the company is looking to move its SAS reporting and resource applications to Linux, as it continues to retire its aging UNIX systems.

Throughout the project, JM Family valued the support that Dell's account team and Professional Services engineers provided. "Dell really fast-tracked the process for us, from walking us through best practices to helping set up an automated installation process that we could replicate in a consistent way," says Ravindran. "When we had questions, Dell found us the answers, which saved us a lot of time and effort-that meant a great deal to us."

With its new Linux environment up and running, JM Family can focus on growing its business, confident that its IT system can scale to support new projects and initiatives. "With the reduced management demands of Dell servers running Linux, we're working a lot more efficiently and proactively, which is great for us and the business," concludes Ravindran.