Credence Systems

Success Story

Credence Systems reduces administration time for its Linux workstations by 95 percent with Novell® ZENworks® Linux Management

Overview

Credence Systems Corporation is the industry's leading provider of design-to-test solutions for the global semiconductor industry. With 1,600 employees in 20 countries, Credence delivers competitive cost and performance advantages to integrated device manufacturers, wafer foundries, outsource assembly and test suppliers, and fabless chip companies worldwide.

Challenge

Credence produces mission-critical systems for its manufacturing customers where downtime is simply not an option. The company has been moving much of its UNIX-based systems to Linux* to take advantage of more development tools, greater hardware options and enhanced desktop functionality.

The IT department at Credence supports 500 engineers who are working on many concurrent projects for a variety of clients. Most of those projects require custom workstation configurations, placing a huge demand on a small IT staff. Credence needed to automate desktop management for its Linux workstations to reduce administration time and ensure consistency among its project teams.

Novell solution

"We simply had to find a way to automate the management of our Linux desktops. Without ZENworks Linux Management, we would have had to choose a less capable and more expensive option."

Dan Anolik
CM Architect, Software Engineering
Credence Systems

Credence evaluated several options for Linux desktop management, including Red Hat* Satellite Server, Tivoli*, HP OpenView* and several open source products, before selecting Novell® ZENworks® Linux Management.

"ZENworks Linux Management was the most flexible option and was a leading candidate early on in our selection process," said Dan Anolik, CM Architect of Software Engineering at Credence Systems. "The deployment was lightweight, but powerful enough to fit our needs without a lot of heavy-duty infrastructure."

Credence implemented ZENworks Linux Management in only a few weeks to automate application delivery for all its Red Hat workstations. The IT staff can now test and distribute packages to update these Linux workstations at any time – and in minutes rather than hours. Each engineering project team can now be assured of consistent configurations to produce the best quality products.

"We now have a significantly more efficient and reliable method to deploy applications and configurations," said Anolik. "ZENworks Linux Management allows us to do both standard and customized configurations to give our engineers exactly what they need on their desktops. And we can do it on our own schedule."

The inventory capabilities of ZENworks Linux Management have replaced time-consuming manual processes for tracking assets, enabling Credence to easily create customized reports for all its hardware and software. Credence engineers use highly sophisticated and costly applications on their desktops so the ability to accurately track licenses helps the company effectively manage millions of dollars of software.

"ZENworks Linux Management has helped us eliminate most of the time required for managing Linux workstations," said Anolik. "With manual processes, we always felt behind. Now it's no longer time-intensive or expensive to deploy updates so our development platform is always up to date."

Credence uses KickStart, along with ZENworks Linux Management, to build and configure new workstations. The IT staff can build a new machine in about 30 minutes, rather than several hours. Now instead of spending hours troubleshooting a machine, the staff can simply re-image it in minutes.

"With ZENworks Linux Management, everything just works," said Anolik. "Going forward, we can add infinitely more Linux users and workstations, without having to significantly increase our IT bandwidth."

Credence has plans to migrate more of its engineers from Windows* and Solaris* to Linux as its primary development platform, an initiative which will continue to make its engineers and IT department more efficient.

Results

Credence Systems implemented Novell ZENworks Linux Management to provide engineers with more consistent workstations and has reduced administration time by 95 percent. The IT staff can now build a new workstation 80 percent faster and can more efficiently manage its inventory of millions of dollars worth of software.

The ability to quickly deliver new applications and configurations allows the company to maintain an up-to-date development platform to create high quality products. The company estimates that ZENworks Linux Management paid for itself in the first six months.

"We simply had to find a way to automate the management of our Linux desktops", said Anolik. "Without ZENworks Linux Management, we would have had to choose a less capable and more expensive option."