Mariner Supply Relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for Reliable, Affordable E-Commerce Platform

Industry: e-commerce

Geography: Seattle, Washington

Website:: www.go2marine.com

Opportunity: Determine a reliable, high-performing, and affordable platform on which to base its e-commerce website

Migration Path: Sun Solaris to Red Hat Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network
Hardware: Dell 1950 servers, Web/application servers quad core single CPU, Database servers dual core single CPU

Benefits: Realized reliability, high performance, cost savings, ease of installation and configuration, and enhanced security.

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Background
Mariner Supply Inc., formerly Go2Marine LLC, is a worldwide supplier of marine parts and products. It’s a pioneer in the online sales and merchandising of marine products through its Go2marine Division and its online store www.go2marine.com. It offers a highly-intuitive, easy-to-navigate user gateway to a database of more than 100,000 unique marine products and parts. Mariner Supply is committed to serving both the recreational consumer and commercial boater with boating supplies, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Opportunity
Mariner Supply first launched its e-commerce website on Sun Solaris servers in early 2001, but within one year, it experienced performance issues that affected the uptime of its website. Keith Fetterman, CTO at Mariner Supply, had experience employing open source solutions at three previous companies and recommended that Mariner Supply search for an affordable open source solution that could provide the necessary performance capabilities.

Solution
Mariner Supply quickly decided that Red Hat solutions would fit the performance and budget requirements for its IT infrastructure and in late 2001 rolled out Red Hat Linux 7. “We selected Red Hat software because I really trusted Linux in a space where computers are out on the Internet. Red Hat was one of the leading Linux providers at the time and it provided the necessary power and low cost,” said Fetterman.

In 2004, Mariner Supply decided to move office locations and purchase new, consolidated servers because it was rapidly running out of space for its hardware. “Our rack systems were going into a co-location center and we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 for our Web servers. Our Oracle database servers consisted of Sun’s second-generation Intel servers and we switched those to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 as well,” said Fetterman.

Most recently, Mariner Supply has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on its Dell 1950 servers.

Benefits
Mariner Supply selected Red Hat solutions for a variety of benefits, including reliability, cost savings, ease of support, and security. “We wouldn’t even be here today without open source solutions,” said Fetterman. “We need to rely on the open source service business, like Red Hat, to make our business possible. We need the security of reliable support and can’t afford to keep up with a free Linux flavor, or, if we had choosen a non-Linux platform, we would have had to purchase much more expensive licenses, more servers, and fail over hardware with the proprietary options on the market.”

Additionally, Mariner Supply has enjoyed the reliability and security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network. With Red Hat Network, the company receives timely patch updates and has the security of back ported editions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Red Hat solutions have allowed us to run a very efficient machine. We’ve never have to reboot our machines because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely reliable – I can count on it working all of the time. Even though we have backup servers in case of hardware failure, we have not had to add real-time fail over because Red Hat is reliable and provides incredible uptime.”

For the future, Mariner Supply plans to continue its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “We will always keep Red Hat solutions on our front-line tier. As we grow, Red Hat will grow with us, and as we get more and more orders coming in, we will need to build up our support,” said Fetterman.

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