-
redhat.com
facebook.com/redhatinc @redhatnews
linkedin.com/company/red-hat
EDUCATION
MORE THAN
1,400 EMPLOYEES
BENEFITS
• Accelerated software
deployment from hours
to minutes to implement
customer feedback and
make updates faster
• Improved stability of
Kubernetes and virtual
machine (VM) environments
• Simplified and automated
IT management, increasing
staff efficiency and
improving resource use
SOFTWARE AND SERVICES
Red Hat® OpenShift
Container Platform
Red Hat Ansible® Automation
Red Hat Consulting
Follett School Solutions, a leading provider of educational
materials and technology applications
for PreK-12 schools, needed to modernize its software
development and deployment processes.
To shift from deploying apps to servers using CDs and printed
instructions to a virtual approach,
the company worked with Red Hat Consulting to migrate to Red Hat
OpenShift Container
Platform. With OpenShift, Follett can develop, deploy, and
manage applications faster and more
easily by taking advantage of technology innovation, including
containers and automation.
As a result, the company can make customer-requested changes and
launch new learning appli-
cations to schools faster.
HEADQUARTERS
“At this point, we can’t imagine deploying applications without
OpenShift.”
JERRY THOME
ARCHITECT, FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS
McHenry, IL, United States
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS SPEEDS APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT WITH RED
HAT OPENSHIFT
http://redhat.comhttp://facebook.com/redhatinchttps://twitter.com/redhatnewshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/red-hat
-
2redhat.com CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Follett speeds delivery of
leading educational apps with Red Hat OpenShift
COMPLEX DEPLOYMENT SLOWS INNOVATION
Follett School Solutions is the largest provider of educational
materials and technology solutions
for PreK-12 libraries, learning centers, and schools in the
United States, as well as a major supplier
to educational institutions worldwide. The company offers a
broad catalog of learning applications
for students. For example, its flagship application, Follett
Destiny, is a complete library and resource
management system available 24x7 from any location.
Follett Destiny was initially installed and updated using ISO
images, distributed via CDs. As this offer-
ing grew, additional applications were released using a similar
packaging and deployment process.
The creation and deployment process for these CDs was
time-consuming, required following detailed
instructions, and involved many manual steps. After development
teams generated the ISO images,
the operations team installed the software on each server in the
company’s many IT environments.
As a result, the company shifted to less frequent but more
complex releases that created new devel-
opment and deployment challenges.
To improve its processes and better support its applications,
Follett began a continuous delivery ini-
tiative. As part of this initiative, the company sought to adopt
a more modular IT architecture to help
developers iterate quickly, reduce bugs, and launch fixes to
production faster.
“Deployment was a very lengthy, manual process,” said Jerry
Thome, an IT architect at Follett School
Solutions. “Follett was a pioneer in agile development years
ago, but we we needed to realign our
processes and get features to our customers faster and achieve
high ROI [return on investment] on
software. We also needed to increase our system resource
use.”
OPENSHIFT OFFERS FASTER, EASIER APP CREATION
During the search for a more agile solution, Follett’s IT team
was drawn to Kubernetes — an easy-to-
use open source container orchestration platform for automating
application deployment, scaling,
and management — to support its new pipeline and container
strategy.
To take full advantage of these capabilities in a
high-availability configuration, Follett chose to
deploy Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as the foundation of
its application environment.
OpenShift Container Platform is the leading enterprise
distribution of Kubernetes, optimized for
continuous development and multitenant deployment. In addition
to speeding and simplifying appli-
cation creation and management, OpenShift includes tools for
long-term life-cycle maintenance of
teams and applications.
Follett also uses Red Hat Ansible Automation to orchestrate
builds and migrate code to prefabri-
cated virtual machines (VMs) for noncontainerized applications.
This solution supports a continuous
delivery approach and mitigates downtime for customer-facing
services and applications.
“We’ve tested using Ansible to automate management of our
JavaTM-based programs, create simple
scripts for complicated microservice deployments, and manage
software on build servers,” said
David Chwalisz, principal developer at Follett. “It’s extremely
powerful and easy to use.”
To deploy these software solutions as its environment for new
applications, Follett’s IT team
worked with Red Hat Consulting. “Our Red Hat consultants were
fantastic, very engaging, profes-
sional, and knowledgeable,” said Thome. “They helped us set up
OpenShift and make sure every-
thing was working well.”
“With OpenShift as our foundation, we have the
ability and confidence to get features to
production faster.”
JERRY THOME
ARCHITECT,
FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS
http://redhat.com
-
3redhat.com CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Follett speeds delivery of
leading educational apps with Red Hat OpenShift
RED HAT SOFTWARE STREAMLINES I.T. OPERATIONS
FASTER, MORE AGILE DEPLOYMENT
With OpenShift supporting its continuous delivery approach,
Follett migrates changes daily, instead
of monthly or even semi-annually. The company’s IT team
demonstrates new features for early
adopter customers on a biweekly basis to gather feedback and
quickly make improvements — some-
times completing daily bug fixes.
In addition, operations teams can now deploy the updated
software virtually in minutes, rather
than hours. Both development and operations teams can focus on
valuable, innovative work, rather
than routine tasks. As a result, Follett can rapidly deploy new
features to customers — and ultimately
better meet their needs.
“With OpenShift as our foundation, we have the ability and
confidence to get features to produc-
tion faster,” said Thome. “For example, our newest application,
Collections by Destiny, lets teachers
aggregate materials, like websites and PDFs, then turn them into
lesson plans. Our customers were
blown away by the number of positive changes we were able to
produce every two weeks.”
GREATER STABILITY
As a robust enterprise distribution, Red Hat OpenShift Container
Platform also provides a reliable
foundation for Follett’s customer-facing offerings — including
resolving occasional networking and
node issues with the company’s Kubernetes cluster. OpenShift
centralized logging, combined with a
third-party monitoring solution, helps Follett discover the root
causes of issues and fix them quickly.
Using OpenShift also helps reduce risk of system degradation
during peak use.
“Stability is a huge benefit of Red Hat OpenShift. We don’t have
to continually monitor systems or
restart nodes manually when they fail. OpenShift does it
automatically,” said Thome. “When our
Collections app went live, OpenShift was stable and did
everything we needed. When nodes went
down, OpenShift immediately and automatically brought them back
up. At this point, we can’t
imagine deploying applications without OpenShift.”
SIMPLER, MORE EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT
OpenShift Container Platform also helps Follett optimize its IT
resource use. Previously, the com-
pany’s VMs were not fully utilized. Follett’s IT staff sought
ways to be more efficient, especially as
development teams began building smaller services.
“We were simply guessing the number and size of virtual machines
we needed,” said Thome.
“Creating a new VM took a lot of work, and we didn’t really know
how many CPUs or how much
memory they were using. Now, using OpenShift to deploy and
manage our containers and container-
ized apps, we have real-time visibility into where containers
are being deployed, as well as how much
CPU and memory are being used by our VMs.”
http://redhat.com
-
Copyright © 2018 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, the Shadowman logo, and JBoss are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United
States and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of
Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java
based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks
of Oracle America, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.
NORTH AMERICA 1 888 REDHAT1
ABOUT RED HAT
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software
solutions, using a community- powered approach to provide reliable
and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage, and
virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning
support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in
a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source
communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies
that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the
future of IT.
EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST, AND AFRICA 00800 7334 2835
[email protected]
ASIA PACIFIC +65 6490 4200 [email protected]
LATIN AMERICA +54 11 4329 7300 [email protected]
redhat.com #f9716_0118
facebook.com/redhatinc @redhatnews
linkedin.com/company/red-hat
FOLLETT COMMITS TO AGILE, CONTAINER-SUPPORTED FUTURE
After its initial success with Red Hat OpenShift Container
Platform and Red Hat Ansible Automation,
Follett plans to continue deploying new applications on
OpenShift and is researching strategies for
eventually transitioning legacy apps to the Red Hat environment.
The company also plans to con-
tinue researching ways to expand its continuous delivery
approach and use of container technology.
For example, Follett is considering customizing OpenShift to
better meet business needs — such as
scaling based on different conditions for dramatic seasonal
traffic shifts.
With the agility and stability of OpenShift, Follett can
continue to mitigate operational issues and
instead focus on creating innovative applications for schools
and students.
“Our charter for the next year is to keep launching new
applications into OpenShift and keep getting
better at it, so that we can write the best applications for our
users,” said Thome.
ABOUT FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS
Follett is the largest provider of educational materials and
technology solutions to PreK-12 librar-
ies, classrooms, learning centers and school districts in the
United States and a major supplier to
educational institutions worldwide. Follett distributes books,
reference materials, digital resources,
e-books, and audiovisual materials, as well as pre-owned
textbooks. Follett also is one of the leading
providers of integrated educational technology for the
management of physical and digital assets,
the tracking, storing, and analyzing of academic data, and
digital learning environment tools for the
classroom focusing on student achievement. Learn more at
follettlearning.com.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Follett speeds delivery of leading
educational apps with Red Hat OpenShift
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://redhat.comhttp://facebook.com/redhatinchttps://twitter.com/redhatnewshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/red-hathttp://follettlearning.com