Red Hat announced that the city of Vienna has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform of choice for its servers. Austria's capital is using the operating system for both mission-critical applications such as database servers and other systems including file servers. The decision to go with Red Hat as the platform of choice was made on the basis of extensive positive experiences in the past and a fundamental decision to deploy the most reliable and efficient technologies.

Linux has a strong reputation within Magisterial Department 14 of the city of Vienna. In many ways, its use of the open source operating system is exemplary of other public institutions and enterprises. From the early 1990s the city of Vienna has been running Linux servers. At the start, these were mainly systems with FreeBSD. However, as the city of Vienna looked to the future and the migration of mission-critical systems to Linux, it decided that required a reliable Linux platform, developed and supported by a professional vendor.

"Red Hat has always had a rigorous focus on the stability of its Linux platform, a commitment that has been apparent and appreciated by us ever since we began deploying Red Hat," explains Franz Brauneder, server management at the City of Vienna. "In addition, Red Hat could always provide the largest partner network and the most certifications from ISVs and IHVs. Not only was this a key factor for our choice of an operating system, but it is reflected in our own experience of the outstanding quality of the Red Hat software. Since the start of our use of Red Hat, we have not once had a critical problem connected with the operating system."

To date, the city of Vienna has migrated more than 100 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, principally deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and AS on HP hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES is used by the city of Vienna to power its Samba file servers and Apache servers, together with legacy applications written by the city of Vienna itself. For applications such as its Oracle databases, which need both a lot of resources and highly availability, the IT managers of the city of Vienna selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS. In the future, the city of Vienna expects to expand this area of its Linux installation with the imminent deployment of PostgreSQL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS together with the migration of its AIX-Unix databases to Red Hat's flagship solution.

To effectively manage its steadily growing Linux infrastructure, the city of Vienna uses the Red Hat Satellite Server with provisioning module. All Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems are being integrated into the management console of the Satellite Server and can be managed centrally. On-demand remote access is also easily possible. In addition, the provisioning module allows IT managers of the city of Vienna to set up new computers remotely over the network. For added security, Red Hat Satellite Server can also be run completely disconnected from the Internet and consequently provides an especially high degree of security from hacking attacks.

"The city of Vienna is a landmark cooperation for Red Hat," commented Werner Knoblich, Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat EMEA. "The city of Vienna has made a fundamental decision for an expanded deployment of open source software in order to, among other things, avoid vendor-lock-in. Fully open source and with no hidden costs, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not only the distribution with the fewest patches by far, but its maintenance by the community ensures Red Hat's customers are guaranteed the highest product quality and vendor-independence."