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Open Source Industry Australia

Case Studies of Open Source in Australian Industry

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At this time Suncorp's Red Hat Java platforms run approx 330 JBoss instances and approx 200 Tomcat instances, consuming approx 200 RHEL servers. Both platforms continue to grow at a steady rate.

- Brian Wallace, JBoss Platform Suncorp.

Suncorp Case Study

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Industry Insurance, banking, superannuation & investment

Geography Australia and New Zealand

Software Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)

BUSINESS CHALLENGEIn 2009 Suncorp needed a new J2EE platform to replace its out-of-support application server platform as the strategic platform for Java applications.

Suncorp has numerous Java development teams supporting hundreds of applications and servicing diverse financial services lines of business. At the time these was no formal Java developers "community" at Suncorp that could be engaged to gather the desires and requirements of the Java developers

SOLUTIONWe created the JBoss Advisory Board, composed of developers from a broad variety of Java teams, to provide input to the project. Later these developers were given formal product training and became the 'JBoss Champions', charged with championing migration to, and adoption of, JBoss in their individual development departments.

JBoss was selected as the technology, and Red Hat's Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) was selected as the commercial open source product.

In short order the Middleware team gained sufficient familiarity with the EAP product to make the basic design decisions necessary to start building Suncorp's JBoss shared platform. Modifications were made to the out-of-the-box build to ensure efficient use of Suncorp's infrastructure platform of virtualised Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers, and to ensure the platform could be managed by a small number of Engineers once it had scaled to thousands of JVM's.

Other build modifications allowed satisfaction of requirements such as being able to run multiple instances of JBoss per RHEL server whilst allocating and monitoring resources at the per instance level. During this project we collaborated extensively with Red Hat's support staff and on-site consulting Architects and Engineers. Ultimately we supplemented the available knowledge by bringing an Amentra consultant from the US to work with us on-site for some months.

Through the JBoss Champions and with the assistance of Suncorp's Applied Research department, extensive application profiling was conducted to determine which applications were expected to be simple to migrate and which would be more complex/expensive. Once the EAP platform was open-for-business the legacy application server platforms were placed into 'Contain' & 'Exit' statuses. Attention now turned to migrating applications to EAP.

BENEFITSTo provide an easier migration path for legacy applications we decided to build a new shared Tomcat platform based on Red Hat's Enterprise Web Server (EWS) product. Many of the learnings from the EAP project were transferable to the EWS project allowing this new platform to be delivered in a much shorter time than was the case for the EAP project. To date most application migrations have been to EWS rather than to EAP, although some of the EAP applications consume large numbers of instances.

The application migrations continue and are gathering pace. We eagerly await the release of EAP version 6 (JBoss 7) which introduces a modular micro-container and load-as-required operation which is expected to eliminate the class loading issues that have slowed the move of legacy applications to JBoss.

Suncorp Group includes leading general insurance, banking, life insurance, superannuation and investment brands in Australia and New Zealand. The Group has around 16,000 employees and relationships with nine million customers. It is a Top 25 ASX listed company with over $95 billion in assets. Suncorp has five core businesses: Personal Insurance; Commercial Insurance; Vero New Zealand; Suncorp Bank and Suncorp Life. These are supported by corporate and shared services divisions.

Santos Case Study

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Industry Oil and gas exploration and production, geoscience

Geography Australia and Asia

Software Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.6, TurboVNC and VirtualGL, Paradigm

We’ve been burned in the past by opting for proprietary solutions only to have them rendered unviable through being acquired by a larger player with a different agenda. So for Santos, the move to open source — and to Red Hat — also provides us with a solid anchor. We can be assured that no one can breeze in and blow our solution away; open source is owned by the world and is not for sale. Introducing Red Hat has really provided us with a win-win situation.

– Andy Moore, IS Manager for Subsurface, Santos Limited

BUSINESS CHALLENGESantos’ IT infrastructure was based on proprietary systems and distributed between data servers, application servers, and application workstations at several national sites. However, the company reached its breaking point when it began juggling four very serious issues.

First, over time, Santos’ environment became very complex to manage. Systems and users stretched across six national and international sites with discrete islands of storage, backup, and database infrastructure that needed nightly synchronisation to ensure everyone had the latest set of data — or at least yesterday’s set of data.

Second, Santos was faced with a data explosion. Thenature of the geoscience business means that Santos’IS department must handle very large seismic data sets that can be acquired at short notice. Put simply, the company needed a faster highway for data to reach users.

Third, and not unlike many Australian organisations, Santos was feeling the burden of licensing and maintenance costs associated with its proprietary thin client software. Cost pressure was being driven by the need to reduce operating costs for legacy reserves in order to add funding for additional development and growth.

Finally, Santos was suffering from support and reliability problems. In the process of deploying new data interpretation software, the distributed nature of the infrastructure led to multiple points of failure and administrative overheads.

An Australian energy pioneer since 1954, Santos is one of the country’s leading oil and gas producers, supplying customers across Australia and Asia. With over 2,800 employees across its offices and field operations, Santos is headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, with offices in Brisbane, Perth, Jakarta, Singapore, Port Moresby, Hanoi, New Delhi, Dhaka, and Bishkek. The largest supplier of natural gas to the domestic Australian market, the company reported sales revenue of $2.53 billion in 2011.

SOLUTIONAfter looking at several proprietary thin client offerings, Santos found that none of them satisfied all of its technical requirements for the delivery of high-performance, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics across LAN & WAN connections. The company turned to the open source community for an answer and found it in the TurboVNC and VirtualGL open source projects. For the first time, Santos became a major sponsor of open source development and over a six-month period, members of its IS team worked with the developers to get the TurboVNC solution to rock-solid enterprise standards.

Testing the new open source thin client replacement revealed that the solution was out-performing Santos’ traditional 64-bit desktop workstations. Geoscientists were happy to run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based desktop via TurboVNC on their laptops and soon requested that their workstations be removed to give them more space. As more users came online, additional Red Hat servers were added to the TurboVNC/VirtualGL farm to handle the load.

BENEFITSThe innovative solution was a refreshing change for Santos because it immediately delivered a faster, cheaper, and more stable platform.

The result of Santos’ migration to the new open source thin client was a much faster data path for all users due to the processing power living in the same room as the NFS storage. Data management was also massively simplified because all Australian users could use the same set of servers, applications, disks, and databases, with no need to synchronise data between national sites.

Santos believes its success largely came from the fact that it was prepared to look beyond Microsoft and the traditional software vendors within the industry, and had the vision to work with the open source community, which it believes has the potential to deliver extraordinary value to an organisation.

QUICK FACTS

The National Archives decided very early that any software developed for digital preservation shouldbe released under an open source license. Open source software offers the prospect of collaboratingwith other interested parties without barriers to engagement and helps in getting the software in frontof the largest possible audience. Open source development allows our small team to create largesoftware projects by building on top of existing open source tools.

- Michael Carden, Assistant Director, Operations Innovation, National Archives of Australia

National Archives Case Study

Industry Australian Government

Geography Canberra, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney,Melbourne

Software Linux, Java, Xena, DPR

BUSINESS CHALLENGEThe National Archives selects, maintains and preservesAustralian Government records of enduring value, andmakes them available for public access under theconditions specified within the Archives Act 1983.

In a rapidly changing digital environment, meeting thisresponsibility is a real challenge. Hardware and softwareobsolescence requires the National Archives to interveneactively to maintain digital records and provide access tothem long after their creation.

Consider the type and volume of records governmentagencies create in their day-to-day operations. TheDepartment of Finance and Administration, for example,generates numerous records each day, dealing with Budgetmatters, financial initiatives and reviews, and financialadvice and training for all of government. Some of theserecords are paper but many are digital. The digitalrecords comprise many formats: word-processingdocuments, spreadsheets, emails, images and so on.

Some 18 Australian Government departments, withresponsibility for 187 agencies, generate a vast number ofrecords each year. Generally, no more than 5 per cent ofrecords are deemed to be of archival significance andtransferred to the National Archives for safekeeping andfuture access. That 5 per cent of records will eventuallycomprise more digital records than paper records.

SOLUTIONDigital records are always mediated by the computingplatforms and software applications used to create orrender them. Over time, computing hardware hasundergone rapid evolution while operating systems andsoftware applications have seen similar high rates ofchange. These changes, coupled with the relativefragility of digital storage media, pose a threat to thelong term access to digital records. Researchcommenced by NAA in 2000 concluded that thepreservation of digital records should focus on theperformance of a record over time rather thanattempting to preserve the specific combination ofsource data and technology that represent a record atits creation.

The research team looked at the factors affecting thecreation of a performance of a record and concludedthat a means was required to move digital records awayfrom specific technologies and to represent digitalrecords in openly specified formats based on freelyavailable standards. This gave rise to the developmentof the XML Electronic Normalising for Archives (Xena)digital preservation software. The Xena software isdesigned to determine the file formats of digital recordsand to perform conversions into appropriate openformats while adding some preservation metadata.

With Xena at the core of the digital preservationprocess, the NAA then developed a sophisticated toolto manage a digital preservation workflow calling onXena and other tools while collecting an audit trail ofthe process. This tool is known as the DigitalPreservation Recorder (DPR) and like Xena, DPR is opensource software freely available for download. With thekey software tools in place, the team constructed acomputer server and storage facility to host a prototypedigital archive and that facility has been in daily usesince 2006, preserving the digital records of Australia’nGovernment.

The National Archives of Australia holds a fascinating array of material, one of the most important collections ofdocumentary heritage in the country. The Archives is the official repository for Australian Government records and thepersonal papers of people with close links to the Commonwealth, such as federal politicians and senior public servants.

The Archives preserves valuable records created by Commonwealth departments and makes them accessible to presentand future generations. Nationally, it stores millions of paper based and electronic records, mainly files, but also film andphotographs, magnetic tapes, maps and artefacts. Headquartered in Canberra with offices and reading rooms also infour state capitals, the Archives employs 465 staff and has a budget of approximately $75 million per annum.

Commodity hardware combined with free/open source software and a bit ofknow how has allowed Newstead to become a very connected town. Withoutopen source none of these projects could have gotten off the ground.

- Dave Hall,, Newstead's Resident Geek.

Australia's most open-sourced town

BUSINESS CHALLENGEIn September 2008, Dave Hall moved into the area and became involved with Newstead 2021, the local communitygroup guiding the implementation of many of the projects identified at the forum.

SOLUTIONThe town now boasts many projects which have been implemented using free/open source software, including a freewifi network, community managed website, community run internet cafe, an internet connected weather station andvarious blogs run by community groups. It even hosted the first StixCamp (a bar camp in the "sticks"). Most of theseprojects have received a combination of government and private sector sponsorhip.

The wireless network comprises 3 access points which run OpenWRT, a Linux distribution designed for running wirelessnetworks. The ADSL connections for each of the access points have been donated by Internode. The network hasproven to be very popular with locals and tourists alike, with around 40G of data consumed every month. The freenetwork is almost zero maintenance.

The Newstead community website is powered by the open source content management system, Drupal. Around 60residents aged between 16 and 70+ have been trained on how to manage content on the site, of those half a dozen orso are regular contributors. Drupal has allowed the town to build a site which is as unique as the town is, while providingan online voice for the small community.

BENEFITSTechnology and particularly free/open source software based solutions have made it possible to acheive a lot in arelatively short period of time. The town doesn't see itself as a technological backwater, but rather a place that wants toshow others what is possible. In Newstead technology is being used to overcome social disadvantage and theinconveniences and inefficiencies inherent in being a small town some distance from major urban centres. an onlinevoice for the small community.

Newstead, Victoria, is a small town with a population of around 450 people, located about 2 hours North of Melbourne.In 2008 the town held a forum on the same day as the Federal Government's Australia 2020 Summit. The town folkdiscussed our visions for the town. Quite a few of the ideas involved using technology to improve the town

QUICK FACTS

The National Archives decided very early that any software developed for digital preservation shouldbe released under an open source license. Open source software offers the prospect of collaboratingwith other interested parties without barriers to engagement and helps in getting the software in frontof the largest possible audience. Open source development allows our small team to create largesoftware projects by building on top of existing open source tools.

- Michael Carden, Assistant Director, Operations Innovation, National Archives of Australia

National Archives Case Study

Industry Australian Government

Geography Canberra, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney,Melbourne

Software Linux, Java, Xena, DPR

BUSINESS CHALLENGEThe National Archives selects, maintains and preservesAustralian Government records of enduring value, andmakes them available for public access under theconditions specified within the Archives Act 1983.

In a rapidly changing digital environment, meeting thisresponsibility is a real challenge. Hardware and softwareobsolescence requires the National Archives to interveneactively to maintain digital records and provide access tothem long after their creation.

Consider the type and volume of records governmentagencies create in their day-to-day operations. TheDepartment of Finance and Administration, for example,generates numerous records each day, dealing with Budgetmatters, financial initiatives and reviews, and financialadvice and training for all of government. Some of theserecords are paper but many are digital. The digitalrecords comprise many formats: word-processingdocuments, spreadsheets, emails, images and so on.

Some 18 Australian Government departments, withresponsibility for 187 agencies, generate a vast number ofrecords each year. Generally, no more than 5 per cent ofrecords are deemed to be of archival significance andtransferred to the National Archives for safekeeping andfuture access. That 5 per cent of records will eventuallycomprise more digital records than paper records.

SOLUTIONDigital records are always mediated by the computingplatforms and software applications used to create orrender them. Over time, computing hardware hasundergone rapid evolution while operating systems andsoftware applications have seen similar high rates ofchange. These changes, coupled with the relativefragility of digital storage media, pose a threat to thelong term access to digital records. Researchcommenced by NAA in 2000 concluded that thepreservation of digital records should focus on theperformance of a record over time rather thanattempting to preserve the specific combination ofsource data and technology that represent a record atits creation.

The research team looked at the factors affecting thecreation of a performance of a record and concludedthat a means was required to move digital records awayfrom specific technologies and to represent digitalrecords in openly specified formats based on freelyavailable standards. This gave rise to the developmentof the XML Electronic Normalising for Archives (Xena)digital preservation software. The Xena software isdesigned to determine the file formats of digital recordsand to perform conversions into appropriate openformats while adding some preservation metadata.

With Xena at the core of the digital preservationprocess, the NAA then developed a sophisticated toolto manage a digital preservation workflow calling onXena and other tools while collecting an audit trail ofthe process. This tool is known as the DigitalPreservation Recorder (DPR) and like Xena, DPR is opensource software freely available for download. With thekey software tools in place, the team constructed acomputer server and storage facility to host a prototypedigital archive and that facility has been in daily usesince 2006, preserving the digital records of Australia’nGovernment.

The National Archives of Australia holds a fascinating array of material, one of the most important collections ofdocumentary heritage in the country. The Archives is the official repository for Australian Government records and thepersonal papers of people with close links to the Commonwealth, such as federal politicians and senior public servants.

The Archives preserves valuable records created by Commonwealth departments and makes them accessible to presentand future generations. Nationally, it stores millions of paper based and electronic records, mainly files, but also film andphotographs, magnetic tapes, maps and artefacts. Headquartered in Canberra with offices and reading rooms also infour state capitals, the Archives employs 465 staff and has a budget of approximately $75 million per annum.

Commodity hardware combined with free/open source software and a bit ofknow how has allowed Newstead to become a very connected town. Withoutopen source none of these projects could have gotten off the ground.

- Dave Hall,, Newstead's Resident Geek.

Australia's most open-sourced town

BUSINESS CHALLENGEIn September 2008, Dave Hall moved into the area and became involved with Newstead 2021, the local communitygroup guiding the implementation of many of the projects identified at the forum.

SOLUTIONThe town now boasts many projects which have been implemented using free/open source software, including a freewifi network, community managed website, community run internet cafe, an internet connected weather station andvarious blogs run by community groups. It even hosted the first StixCamp (a bar camp in the "sticks"). Most of theseprojects have received a combination of government and private sector sponsorhip.

The wireless network comprises 3 access points which run OpenWRT, a Linux distribution designed for running wirelessnetworks. The ADSL connections for each of the access points have been donated by Internode. The network hasproven to be very popular with locals and tourists alike, with around 40G of data consumed every month. The freenetwork is almost zero maintenance.

The Newstead community website is powered by the open source content management system, Drupal. Around 60residents aged between 16 and 70+ have been trained on how to manage content on the site, of those half a dozen orso are regular contributors. Drupal has allowed the town to build a site which is as unique as the town is, while providingan online voice for the small community.

BENEFITSTechnology and particularly free/open source software based solutions have made it possible to acheive a lot in arelatively short period of time. The town doesn't see itself as a technological backwater, but rather a place that wants toshow others what is possible. In Newstead technology is being used to overcome social disadvantage and theinconveniences and inefficiencies inherent in being a small town some distance from major urban centres. an onlinevoice for the small community.

Newstead, Victoria, is a small town with a population of around 450 people, located about 2 hours North of Melbourne.In 2008 the town held a forum on the same day as the Federal Government's Australia 2020 Summit. The town folkdiscussed our visions for the town. Quite a few of the ideas involved using technology to improve the town

At this time Suncorp's Red Hat Java platforms run approx 330 JBoss instances and approx 200 Tomcat instances, consuming approx 200 RHEL servers. Both platforms continue to grow at a steady rate.

- Brian Wallace, JBoss Platform Suncorp.

Suncorp Case Study

QUICK FACTS

Industry Insurance, banking, superannuation & investment

Geography Australia and New Zealand

Software Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)

BUSINESS CHALLENGEIn 2009 Suncorp needed a new J2EE platform to replace its out-of-support application server platform as the strategic platform for Java applications.

Suncorp has numerous Java development teams supporting hundreds of applications and servicing diverse financial services lines of business. At the time these was no formal Java developers "community" at Suncorp that could be engaged to gather the desires and requirements of the Java developers

SOLUTIONWe created the JBoss Advisory Board, composed of developers from a broad variety of Java teams, to provide input to the project. Later these developers were given formal product training and became the 'JBoss Champions', charged with championing migration to, and adoption of, JBoss in their individual development departments.

JBoss was selected as the technology, and Red Hat's Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) was selected as the commercial open source product.

In short order the Middleware team gained sufficient familiarity with the EAP product to make the basic design decisions necessary to start building Suncorp's JBoss shared platform. Modifications were made to the out-of-the-box build to ensure efficient use of Suncorp's infrastructure platform of virtualised Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers, and to ensure the platform could be managed by a small number of Engineers once it had scaled to thousands of JVM's.

Other build modifications allowed satisfaction of requirements such as being able to run multiple instances of JBoss per RHEL server whilst allocating and monitoring resources at the per instance level. During this project we collaborated extensively with Red Hat's support staff and on-site consulting Architects and Engineers. Ultimately we supplemented the available knowledge by bringing an Amentra consultant from the US to work with us on-site for some months.

Through the JBoss Champions and with the assistance of Suncorp's Applied Research department, extensive application profiling was conducted to determine which applications were expected to be simple to migrate and which would be more complex/expensive. Once the EAP platform was open-for-business the legacy application server platforms were placed into 'Contain' & 'Exit' statuses. Attention now turned to migrating applications to EAP.

BENEFITSTo provide an easier migration path for legacy applications we decided to build a new shared Tomcat platform based on Red Hat's Enterprise Web Server (EWS) product. Many of the learnings from the EAP project were transferable to the EWS project allowing this new platform to be delivered in a much shorter time than was the case for the EAP project. To date most application migrations have been to EWS rather than to EAP, although some of the EAP applications consume large numbers of instances.

The application migrations continue and are gathering pace. We eagerly await the release of EAP version 6 (JBoss 7) which introduces a modular micro-container and load-as-required operation which is expected to eliminate the class loading issues that have slowed the move of legacy applications to JBoss.

Suncorp Group includes leading general insurance, banking, life insurance, superannuation and investment brands in Australia and New Zealand. The Group has around 16,000 employees and relationships with nine million customers. It is a Top 25 ASX listed company with over $95 billion in assets. Suncorp has five core businesses: Personal Insurance; Commercial Insurance; Vero New Zealand; Suncorp Bank and Suncorp Life. These are supported by corporate and shared services divisions.

Santos Case Study

QUICK FACTS

Industry Oil and gas exploration and production, geoscience

Geography Australia and Asia

Software Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.6, TurboVNC and VirtualGL, Paradigm

We’ve been burned in the past by opting for proprietary solutions only to have them rendered unviable through being acquired by a larger player with a different agenda. So for Santos, the move to open source — and to Red Hat — also provides us with a solid anchor. We can be assured that no one can breeze in and blow our solution away; open source is owned by the world and is not for sale. Introducing Red Hat has really provided us with a win-win situation.

– Andy Moore, IS Manager for Subsurface, Santos Limited

BUSINESS CHALLENGESantos’ IT infrastructure was based on proprietary systems and distributed between data servers, application servers, and application workstations at several national sites. However, the company reached its breaking point when it began juggling four very serious issues.

First, over time, Santos’ environment became very complex to manage. Systems and users stretched across six national and international sites with discrete islands of storage, backup, and database infrastructure that needed nightly synchronisation to ensure everyone had the latest set of data — or at least yesterday’s set of data.

Second, Santos was faced with a data explosion. Thenature of the geoscience business means that Santos’IS department must handle very large seismic data sets that can be acquired at short notice. Put simply, the company needed a faster highway for data to reach users.

Third, and not unlike many Australian organisations, Santos was feeling the burden of licensing and maintenance costs associated with its proprietary thin client software. Cost pressure was being driven by the need to reduce operating costs for legacy reserves in order to add funding for additional development and growth.

Finally, Santos was suffering from support and reliability problems. In the process of deploying new data interpretation software, the distributed nature of the infrastructure led to multiple points of failure and administrative overheads.

An Australian energy pioneer since 1954, Santos is one of the country’s leading oil and gas producers, supplying customers across Australia and Asia. With over 2,800 employees across its offices and field operations, Santos is headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, with offices in Brisbane, Perth, Jakarta, Singapore, Port Moresby, Hanoi, New Delhi, Dhaka, and Bishkek. The largest supplier of natural gas to the domestic Australian market, the company reported sales revenue of $2.53 billion in 2011.

SOLUTIONAfter looking at several proprietary thin client offerings, Santos found that none of them satisfied all of its technical requirements for the delivery of high-performance, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics across LAN & WAN connections. The company turned to the open source community for an answer and found it in the TurboVNC and VirtualGL open source projects. For the first time, Santos became a major sponsor of open source development and over a six-month period, members of its IS team worked with the developers to get the TurboVNC solution to rock-solid enterprise standards.

Testing the new open source thin client replacement revealed that the solution was out-performing Santos’ traditional 64-bit desktop workstations. Geoscientists were happy to run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based desktop via TurboVNC on their laptops and soon requested that their workstations be removed to give them more space. As more users came online, additional Red Hat servers were added to the TurboVNC/VirtualGL farm to handle the load.

BENEFITSThe innovative solution was a refreshing change for Santos because it immediately delivered a faster, cheaper, and more stable platform.

The result of Santos’ migration to the new open source thin client was a much faster data path for all users due to the processing power living in the same room as the NFS storage. Data management was also massively simplified because all Australian users could use the same set of servers, applications, disks, and databases, with no need to synchronise data between national sites.

Santos believes its success largely came from the fact that it was prepared to look beyond Microsoft and the traditional software vendors within the industry, and had the vision to work with the open source community, which it believes has the potential to deliver extraordinary value to an organisation.

OSIAosia.com.au

Open Source Industry Australia

Case Studies of Open Source in Australian Industry

OSIAosia.com.au