UAE Exchange, a leading foreign exchange and money transfer brand, has strengthened its datacenters by consolidating its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The centralised solution has enabled the Exchange to more rapidly scale its operations and open new branches across the globe and to also achieve the ISO 27001 certification for information security management, a statement said.

With more than 600 branches across 30 countries, UAE Exchange has a large and growing customer base. However, rapid expansion caused performance and availability concerns about the company's distributed IT systems, previously comprised of servers running various versions of UNIX.

To better support its fast growing portfolio of web-based applications for new services such as payment for credit cards, utility bills, subscriptions, airline tickets and others, the company needed to consolidate its environment on a single platform, according to the statement.

Supported by Red Hat Consulting, UAE Exchange deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite. Red Hat Satellite made configuration and provisioning easy and enabled the IT team to rapidly roll out Red Hat Enterprise Linux onto the servers in under one week, the statement said.

UAE Exchange now looking to build a new datacenter outside of the UAE, while simultaneously using virtualization to increase resource utilization. Having successfully used WildFly, the JBoss.org community application server, the company now intends to use Red Hat JBoss Middleware to help it build, test, and deploy applications faster, the statement said.

Sarath Chandra, CIO, UAE Exchange said: “The value of Red Hat Consulting lies in the team's ability to expertly aid the implementation while conveying best practices. Despite our own team being very technically proficient, their exposure was limited to working within our environment.”

“So the additional knowledge provided by Red Hat's industry experts helped us in a number of areas such as configuration, fine tuning, performance management and security. It was also a pride point for us as we could then match our systems to global benchmarks,” he added.

Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit, Red Hat said: “UAE Exchange’s success is a perfect example of how the right IT investments can be turned into a platform for business development and innovation.”

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux has offered the stability, flexibility, security and performance necessary to power UAE Exchange's aggressive expansion. Today, they are capable of opening new branches and growing their business at a faster pace, without being constrained by IT challenges,” he added. – TradeArabia News Service