SPH Search is a collaboration between two media powerhouses - Singapore Press Holdings Group (SPH) and Schibsted Group. The two companies, headquartered in Singapore and Norway respectively, have long been in the business of giving people information and, significantly, the context which makes the information more useful.
Both companies have also established reputations of delivering accurate information speedily. Their joint venture, SPH Search, aims to become the premier destination for anyone seeking information about Singapore, its people and businesses.
Incorporated in September 2006, the company is located in News Centre. It has its own technology team who are working on producing a system which allows users of personal computers, PDAs and mobile phones, easy access to SPH Search's search and directories tools.
Starting from scratch, SPH Search wanted to replicate the success of www.sesam.no, which Schibsted launched in Norway in 2005.
It had a very short time to get the search engine business up and running. "As we only had six months, we could not afford to make wrong choices," said Patrick Ng, Chief Technology Officer of SPH Search.
Top priority was given to the choice of technology platform, in particular the choice of operating system to run on its Intel-based servers. Clustering was another important requirement as there is the need to load balance among multiple machines.
"We need a reliable and secured system with constant and frequent updates. The enterprise product offering must be unified, well-integrated, extensible, and the vendor must be able to provide good, local technical support," said Ng.
SPH Search's criteria were stability of product, support and growth of product, especially in terms of regular patches and updates. Having considered various Open Source operating systems, the company decided on Red Hat.
Ng is impressed with the extensibility and scalability of the Red Hat solutions, which are supported by major vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SGI.
"Red Hat is pretty aggressive in Asia, which is a good sign. It gives us confidence and shows us that we can get support when we need it," he said. "Through its acquisitions, Red Hat has shown that it has a clear strategy."
Besides Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, SPH Search's open source-based platform includes Java, Apache, MySQLPostgres, Oracle, and Tomcat running on HP's Intel Xeon-based servers.
Several Red Hat products were chosen, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and Red Hat clustering GFS for shared file storage.
The solutions were rolled out in July 2007 and now run on about more than 140 servers, mainly the Intel Xeon processor HP ProLiant DL360, BL460c and BL480c servers.
"We are very pleased with the entire implementation process. We trusted Red Hat to do the things that needed to be done for our hardware and infrastructure and it delivered well. The easy to use graphical user interface facilitates easy installation and configuration," said Ng.
"Red Hat is a good fit and they deliver great technical support round the clock - which is an important factor in our business. Red Hat also provides constant software updates and patches that come with detailed information to ensure that our solutions are always tweaked for maximum performance and security. What's best is that it's easy for us to find and contact Red Hat certified system engineers and Red Hat does have an office in Singapore," he added.
The combination of the Red Hat solutions and the numerous Intel Xeon-powered HP servers was just what SPH Search needed to drive its business.
"We needed to get our network and infrastructure right from the start and the Red Hat-Intel combination gives us the necessary power, performance, scalability, and security needed by our search engine," said Ng.
Since the roll-out of the system, SPH Search has launched its search engine services and tested its database servers. The company practises good risk management with security penetration and performance load testing.
Its trust in relying on the open source platform has proven to be a wise move. The results have been as expected and the system was launched successfully in March.
The company subscribes to the Red Hat Network and applies relevant patches to its RHEL-based machines, especially the internet facing servers.
With the system in place, Ng is pleased with its stability, support from Red Hat Network and compatibility with other solutions.
"Cxrus Solutions, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, helped us a lot with the implementation and ensured that our servers ran smoothly," he said.
According to Chua Boon Wee of Cxrus Solutions, Red Hat has been part of his company's Linux strategy since 2003.
Cxrus has helped many enterprises build robust Linux infrastructure, including the busiest and biggest online cinema booking system in Singapore for Golden Village.
"SPH needed a trusted and competent company to build the infrastructure for its mission critical system. It selected us because of our Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP) partnership with Red Hat. This partnership is an endorsement that our services are enterprise class and meet Red Hat's stringent requirements," he said.
The Infocomm Development Authority's iLIUP programme is aimed at fostering partnerships that result in enhancing local infocomm capability and competitiveness, leading to increased market share and revenue for multinational company (MNC) partners.
"Cxrus helped to set up the infrastructure, namely the operating system and the network for SPH Search, which later required a high performance storage that can be accessed concurrently by few servers. Cxrus then helped to build three GFS clusters for the company," said Chua.
Going forward, SPH Search will be sending its staff for Red Hat certification training.
"Open source is very reliable with lots of community support. In Singapore and across the region, we can find many good technical engineers and developers," said Ng. "We are continuously working on deploying new search services to serve our users and continuously optimising and pushing the limits of our infrastructure and solutions to power ever more new services."