Case Study: Business Connexion achieves lower hosting costs and greater flexibility with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z

Business Connexion - Customer Case Study

Business Connexion, a South African IT services company, wanted to turn its internal helpdesk management system into a hosted service for clients, but its existing Solaris-based platform was too costly to scale. Oracle database licensing across many processors made it difficult to deliver the service at a competitive price, so it needed a flexible, low-cost, highly available hosting environment. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z was the product used.

Suse implemented SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z on IBM System z mainframes with z/VM virtualization and the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension to build an active-active geographic cluster across two data centers. The solution supported about 50 virtual machines and made it easy to clone and deploy new environments quickly. Business Connexion said the mainframe setup was equivalent to roughly 36 Intel-based servers, helping keep Oracle licensing manageable and enabling a competitively priced service with improved performance, flexibility, and reliability.

Business Connexion

Frans Labuschagne

Senior Manager for Open Systems Support Services