news Adelaide Festival Centre has chosen to shift its Red Hat Enterprise Linux system from physical servers to Microsoft’s Azure could computing platform.
The moves comes following a new partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat aimed to help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing and provide greater flexibility for customers.
The Adelaide Festival Centre has over 980,000 visitors to its shows and events every year, and these numbers are set to grow as a Adelaide Riverbank precinct upgrade approaches completion.
The centre’s website has run on Red Hat software for some time, so the news of the new partnership was “exciting”, said manager Andrew Wroniak in a statement issued by Microsoft.
“We’ve got a good relationship with Red Hat and have been using its services for many years, and obviously we want to continue that relationship going forward,” he said.
The decision to choose Microsoft Azure as the centre’s cloud platform became “obvious”, Wroniak added, since it avoided “costly” capital outlay.
“For years we have been lagging behind our Precinct partners significantly in terms of technology, and now I’d like to think that we are at the forefront of technology,” said Carlo D’Ortenzio, the centre’s Chief Operating Officer.
The existing server was located in a part of the Festival Centre which was earmarked for demolition, he explained, therefore the venue had to make a decision on whether build a new on-premise server or move to the cloud.
“Looking at the trends and doing the numbers, we found that moving to the Azure Cloud provided better value for money, and eliminated the need to replace capital equipment going forward – and we will have immediate access to the best available technology in future.”
Microsoft’s new partnership with Red Hat is aimed to address key requirements businesses building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software in the cloud.
Features include:
- Red Hat solutions are available natively to Microsoft Azure customers, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads.
- Integrated enterprise-grade support spanning hybrid environments.
- Collaboration on .NET for new application development capabilities, providing access to .NET technologies across Red Hat products.
- Unified workload management across hybrid cloud deployments, including integration between Red Hat CloudForms, Microsoft Azure, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on both Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure.
“Our IT team is excited about what the future holds and now we can also start thinking about our next project – deployment of Office 365 across our 300 staff,” said the centre’s manager.
The Office 365 deployment will help the Adelaide centre achieve some strategic goals set by D’Ortenzio and his team. One of which being to enable a mobile workforce and to support employees who want to work anytime, anywhere.
“As the leading arts and cultural centre in the state we need to take both a wide and long-term view of the most significant developments within business, relationships and society and pursue a strategy that is robust and flexible enough to meet our future needs – we believe that this type of technology will do it for us,” said D’Ortenzio.
Image credit: Ian Burt, Creative Commons