P.L. Ferrari advises its shipping industry clients on best placement policies, strategic goals and risk management, and also assists with claim handling. As these claims can suddenly arise from unforeseen events such as collisions, groundings, oil spills or stowaway discoveries, P.L. Ferrari needed a solution offering high levels of reliability, availability, simplified management and disaster recovery capabilities in order to enable its team of 90 P&I professionals to respond to clients with a 24/7 service. The majority of these systems are run from the company’s Genoa head office and are accessed by employees based in Genoa, Monaco, Piraeus, Naples, Ferrara, and London via the web or virtual private networks (VPNs).
Although P.L. Ferrari had previously used virtualization software from VMware to consolidate multiple servers onto an integrated hardware solution, a refresh of outdated infrastructure prompted P.L. Ferrari to take a fresh look at its approach to virtualization. With some workloads already running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, P.L. Ferrari decided to extend its commitment to open source software, recognizing the power of community-driven innovation and its positive experience working with open source databases such as PostgreSQL.
Following a consultation with Red Hat Advanced Business Partner Delphis Informatica, an IT systems integration company based in Genoa, P.L. Ferrari decided to migrate its VMware-based infrastructure to a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment while also updating its hardware infrastructure.
The migration of P.L. Ferrari’s virtual machines to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was smooth, with full tolerance and no data loss. Today, all of the company’s production systems, including their newly established disaster recovery site in Naples, are centrally managed using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and the customer has reports major improvements in cost efficiency, reliability and ease of management of its virtualized environments.