Lower Saxony Police Force Opts for Vendor Independence

The Lower Saxony, Germany IT centre (Informatikzentrum Niedersachsen, or IZN) has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform to provide IT services for the police force in the province. IZN is the main systems center for IT and communications in Lower Saxony, providing 11,000 employees with access to the central case tracking system "Nivadis" at the central police headquarters and its departments. The Java-based Web application operates entirely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"The police force in Lower Saxony has decided in principle to base its IT infrastructure on Linux. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our servers offers us not only high performance on a 64-bit platform but also, importantly, efficient central management of the whole system," explains Michael Breest, head of department for client/server systems and processing at IZN. "Linux has come a long way in recent years. We plan to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for other new areas in the future. Red Hat Network makes managing and expanding the system a lot easier."

Nivadis was developed by the police in Lower Saxony in a joint IT project with the management consultancy company Mummert Consulting at the Hanover Police Office for Technology and Procurement. The system, programmed entirely in Java, replaced more than 20 separate applications, which previously had to be called up alongside the previous system, "Mikado", requiring intensive use of resources. To access Nivadis, the clients use the Mozilla web browser. All internal processes and database queries run centrally at IZN on 64-bit servers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In addition to the Nivadis project, IZN is setting up a central archive with full-text search function for the Lower Saxony police and this has also been installed on a Red Hat platform. There are currently a total of more than 80 servers at the IZN running various versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (AS, ES, WS); and they are all maintained and administered centrally by just three members of staff, via a Red Hat Network Satellite Server.

"We are delighted with this partnership with the IZN", says Werner Knoblich, Director of EMEA at Red Hat. "The selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux by IZN shows that our close cooperation with the community represents a superior model for further development. Red Hat was the first provider able to support the 64-bit platform. Since Red Hat also puts cooperation with the community above just developing particular features, our customers avoid dependence on one individual provider."