First American Title Holding Company

Success Story

With Novell® Open Enterprise Server, First American Title Holding Company is making a smooth transition to Linux*, while maintaining the networking services they trust from years of using NetWare®. By moving to a SUSE® Linux Enterprise platform, the company has consolidated servers by 80 percent and estimates a 50 percent reduction in hardware costs.

Overview

First American Title Holding Company is a large title insurance agent in the U.S. with 50 locations in the northwestern United States. The company has been helping customers with real estate transactions for more than 100 years.

Challenge

With 50 offices, First American Title Holding Company needed a reliable network solution to support a dispersed enterprise. The company wanted to move to an open platform for greater flexibility, while also maintaining the network services and stability of NetWare.

In addition, the company's data center was rapidly expanding as each department requested a separate server to run new applications. The company doubled its number of servers in a year, prompting the IT staff to explore options for server consolidation.

Novell solution

"Novell is helping us move to Linux while retaining all of the networking benefits of NetWare we can't live without. We have found Novell Open Enterprise Server to be easy to administer and incredibly stable."

Dan McDougall
Corporate IT Director
First American Title Holding Company

First American Title Holding Company determined that Linux would provide the openness and flexibility for its growing business. The company selected Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 which combines the networking, security and management services of NetWare with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The company worked with both Novell Services and Novacoast, a Novell Platinum partner, on its Linux solution.

"We realized that we did not want a proprietary platform and that Linux is where the future is headed," said Dan McDougall, Corporate IT Director at First American Title Holding Company. "Anything other than Novell Open Enterprise Server would not have given us the flexibility we need. Moving to Linux allows us to plug the best products we can find into an open architecture."

First American Title is running its core network services and e-mail on Novell Open Enterprise Server running on Dell* PowerEdge* servers and has plans to move its Web servers to Linux as well. Using the Xen* virtualization included with Novell Open Enterprise Server, the IT staff has already consolidated 10 of its servers down to two.

"We were pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to set up a virtual server with Xen," said Kurt Johnson, network administrator at First American Title Holding Company. "We are already seeing how this will dramatically reduce the size of our data center, as well as our power and cooling costs."

Novell Open Enterprise Server was also a good choice for ease of use and administration across multiple locations. The IT staff is already familiar with NetWare management tools, and is eager to use Linux to expand their skill sets.

"Having a Linux enterprise creates new opportunities with open source applications," said McDougall. "We have a bright IT team that is excited about open source technology. Having a unified skill set with Linux also helps us with staffing as we can easily find experienced Linux engineers."

With Novell iPrint in Novell Open Enterprise Server, First American Title can free up IT staff from some mundane helpdesk tasks, such as helping users install printer drivers. Users simply click on the icon for the desired printer and can automatically print to any printer on the network. Traveling users can easily find and print to a local printer in any office without any help from IT.

Traveling users also benefit from Novell iFolder® which automatically syncs files from their local drives to the network. Novell iFolder provides a network backup for users and allows traveling users to access their files from any computer on the network.

Using Novell Cluster Services™, First American Title is currently running Novell GroupWise® on a Linux cluster and is also evaluating a business continuity solution for its two data centers.

"Clustering and virtualization with Novell solutions have given us unprecedented stability," said Johnson. "That's why we migrated to Novell Open Enterprise Server - Novell solutions have never failed us."

Results

"We were pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to set up a virtual server with Xen. We are already seeing how this will dramatically reduce the size of our data center, as well as our power and cooling costs."

Kurt Johnson
Network Administrator
First American Title Holding Company

Migrating to Novell Open Enterprise Server allows First American Title to make a smooth migration to Linux while retaining the networking, security and management services it trusts from years with NetWare. With Novell Open Enterprise Server, the company has a stable network platform to manage its dispersed enterprise and can take advantage of open source technology.

Using Xen virtualization, the company has consolidated servers by 80 percent and estimates a 50 percent reduction in hardware costs. Consolidation has also reduced power and cooling costs.

"Novell is helping us move to Linux while retaining all of the networking benefits of NetWare we can't live without," said McDougall. "We have found Novell Open Enterprise Server to be easy to administer and incredibly stable. Now we are looking forward to the opportunities we have with Linux."