Discount Tire Grows E-Commerce Business with Red Hat Solutions

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the world's largest independent tire and wheel retailer Discount Tire Company has achieved success with a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite for its rapidly growing e-commerce business. With Red Hat solutions, Discount Tire has experienced increased performance, reliability, staff productivity and scalability for its critical IT infrastructure.

“I’ve been in the IT industry for 20 years now, and Red Hat is far and above any other company I’ve ever worked with. Not only are its products of the highest caliber, but it is incredibly responsive to all of our needs. Red Hat Support is top-of-the-line”

In 2000, Discount Tire decided to bring the management of its e-commerce infrastructure in-house after having outsourced it for several years. The IT team originally tried building a new e-commerce system based on a Windows platform, but the solution did not meet Discount Tire’s performance, reliability and stability needs. Additionally, Discount Tire’s use of IBM Lotus Domino Server was a critical aspect of its daily ability to meet business demands. Previously running on Windows, the lack of reliability and consistent downtime of its Lotus software was critically impacting its day-to-day operations.

After extensive testing and load balancing, Discount Tire selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its critical systems. Since, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform has run Discount Tire’s entire e-commerce operation, as well as numerous internal applications, including its Lotus Domino application.

“Our e-commerce environment has to be available 24/7/365 at 99.99 percent availability, making it absolutely mission-critical. Our internal applications running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux include inventory management and email – things that people cannot live without. We have been able to trust Red Hat explicitly that everything will just work,” said Will Darton, senior server support administrator for Discount Tire.

"Now that we have deployed Satellite, I can enhance our e-commerce environment with its provisioning capability in minutes. This allows Discount Tire the opportunity to increase revenue through our e-commerce site in a shorter time frame. And as I mentioned before, Time is Money!" said Darton.

“By 2005, with extreme growth of our business, we realized that we needed help to manage the rapidly expanding number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers,” said Darton. “Provisioning and patching were beginning to use more and more of our team’s resources.”

To manage its 50 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, Discount Tire deployed Red Hat Satellite, an easy-to-use systems management platform. Built on open standards, Red Hat Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities such as management, provisioning and monitoring for large deployments. With Red Hat Satellite, Discount Tire has access to updates via Red Hat Network and can maintain local control over the management, administration and monitoring of its systems. This provides the company with the ability to easily comply with strict PCI security standards, increase staff productivity and successfully scale its e-commerce business.

“With the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite and the expertise of Red Hat Consulting, our systems are more reliable than ever. Satellite is my Swiss army knife – I haven’t found anything I can’t make it do,” said Darton. “Also, since migrating Lotus Domino to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, performance has increased and we’ve been able to free up IT resources to focus on more strategic issues.”

“I’ve been in the IT industry for 20 years now, and Red Hat is far and above any other company I’ve ever worked with. Not only are its products of the highest caliber, but it is incredibly responsive to all of our needs. Red Hat Support is top-of-the-line,” said Darton.

To read the full Discount Tire Company case study, visit www.customers.redhat.com.

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Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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