Achieving Cost-Savings & Proving Compliance after CentOS Migration

Compliance and Budget Constraints

Customer was faced with increasing compliance/audit concerns combined with corporate initiatives to decrease spending on operating systems.  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux had become a corporate standard at the center of an open source adoption strategy. Licensing and support from this contract proved challenging for both budget and technical execution.

The Customer spend on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was approaching 7 figures, while the support need from the company’s internal IT team had declined to critical issues only. 

Meanwhile, the IT team was expressing frustration at the difficulty in reaching real experts through the triage process with Red Hat Technical Support. 

Red Hat entitlements were an ongoing pain point related to rapid ephemeral workload growth and contraction. This led to unpredictable license costs and periodic trouble tickets just to enable entitlements to function correctly.

The Customer needed to move to CentOS. 

Their requirements for a move to CentOS included:

• Cut costs.
• Improve its IT support model.
• Retain its existing infrastructure.
• Make the most of its existing software stack.
• Minimize training costs.
• Avoid application downtime.

They achieved it with the help of OpenLogic.

The CentOS Migration Challenge

OpenLogic was brought to the internal IT team to help transition a large portion of workloads from Red Hat to CentOS. This would help eliminate some of the cost challenges. It would also enable agility by allowing the organization to be unencumbered by Red Hat entitlements. 

To balance this, the IT team also needed to prove to the business that they could continue to execute on the compliance and governance goals.

Smooth Transition to CentOS

With a brief Professional Services project, OpenLogic helped the customer transition the majority of their workloads from a Red Hat contract to a gold-level support contract with OpenLogic for the CentOS Infrastructure. Gold-level CentOS support at OpenLogic includes 24x7, one-hour response times and unlimited tickets and user count.  

“The website is a core, highly visible program for us,” says the company’s CTO. “Because that migration went so smoothly, it made both our IT staff and, more importantly, our executive team comfortable,” making it easier to move forward with the CentOS migration.

The transition was smooth and ROI instantaneous as the entitlements disappeared and replaced by a predictable, reasonably priced annual contract for break/fix and proactive tickets. This helped the company meet their compliance needs and execute on a an aggressive MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution).

“The cost savings were in line with our expectations,” says the CTO. “Frankly, the overall process was easier than we thought it would be, and the support we get from OpenLogic is better than what we previously had. They readily share their expertise with our IT team, giving us the feeling of being within a community of developers.”

Speedy Resolution Times and Architectural Insights

The Customer continues to have rapid resolution times and improvements to their SLOs (Service-Level Objectives), while also seeing a massive cost reduction from eliminating the Red Hat license and support fees.  

The Customer also enjoys the added benefits of architectural advice and regular OpenLogic industry updates that help them continue best practices and security diligence across the corporate CentOS deployments.

As the Customer transitions their workloads from a private cloud infrastructure to a large footprint in Microsoft Azure, they also enjoy the confidence of continued CentOS support and expertise in this cloud platform at no additional cost.

Migration Services and Extended Support for Enterprise Linux

Whether you’re migrating off RHEL, or need extended long term support for your end of life CentOS deployments, OpenLogic can help. Talk to an expert today to see how we can support your Enterprise Linux goals.

Talk to an Expert