YTL Communications and Red Hat Transform the Way Students are Educated in Malaysia with E-Learning

Red Hat enables YTL Communications to deliver flexible learning opportunities in schools on schedule and within budget

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – September 18, 2013 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the completion of its collaboration with telecommunication service provider, YTL Communications to deliver a scalable, cost-effective cloud platform for e-learning in schools. Red Hat’s enterprise open source solutions have enabled YTL Communications to complete the cloud platform project – known as 1BestariNet – six months ahead of schedule and within budget, while achieving lower cost of ownership and reducing project risks.

“Red Hat was selected as a key partner for the 1BestariNet project due to its ability to provide a cost-efficient platform by leveraging open source software. Red Hat’s highly scalable, affordable, open source model was the most effective in running a large-scale cloud deployment project like the 1BestariNet,” said Wing K. Lee, CEO, YTL Communications Sdn Bhd.

According to Damien Wong, general manager, ASEAN, Red Hat, “Our alliance with YTL Communications has been a very fulfilling experience for both parties. Red Hat’s ability to deliver enterprise-ready, reliable open source solutions enabled YTL Communications to achieve greater efficiency in services and cost-savings on their IT infrastructure for this project. We expect more businesses to adopt open source solutions as it is a mainstream technology that not only liberates resources, but at the same time, provides an IT infrastructure that is secure, robust, and agile.”

Building a virtual learning infrastructure for 10,000 schools in 12 months

In December 2011, YTL Communications was contracted by the Ministry of Education to equip 10,000 primary and secondary public schools in Malaysia with a virtual learning infrastructure and provide high speed 4G Internet network access in just 12 months. Meeting the aggressive timeline required an unconventional departure from the traditional approach of deploying application servers in schools, to a cloud-based approach where 10,000 virtual learning environments (VLEs) and schools are deployed into the 1BestariNet cloud. This approach would enable all schools to access their individual school’s VLE via 1BestariNet or through any Internet connection.

YTL Communications based its search for a cloud solution based on criteria such as reliability, support, performance, and scalability. After evaluating solutions from various vendors, YTL Communications selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Red Hat Satellite Server, which met all of the above requirements.

The 1BestariNet VLE system currently runs on 60 Dell and Intel Xeon-based servers with 2,400 cores for virtualization hypervisors to support the distribution of applications to the schools.

Flexibility and Scalability with Enterprise Open Source Technology

Built on a flexible Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization infrastructure, the VLEs can continue to scale and support additional processing or storage capacity as and when needed. “This can be achieved by scaling out horizontally and through adding more physical processing and storage capacity to the virtualization farms,” Wing explained.

Cloud Environment Increases Efficiency of Application Deployment

Adopting a cloud-based approach has enabled YTL Communications to standardize and control its IT infrastructure, as well as roll out new applications, application modules, updates and content to schools in an efficient manner – all which contributes to meeting its deployment and budget requirements.

With Red Hat’s open source solutions, VLEs for 10,000 schools were built and deployed within the first six months of the project. Today, 5.5 million students, 500,000 teachers, and 5 million parents have access to the cloud-based VLE in 1BestariNet.

The success of this project has spurred YTL Communications to take the VLE one step further. “We are in the midst of rolling out further applications and promoting the use of mobile devices to access the cloud environment,” said Wing.