AGL is an integrated provider of essential services in Australia, delivering 4.5 million gas, electricity and telecommunications services to residential, business and wholesale customers. Drawing on a 185-year history of innovation and a passionate belief in progress, the company operates Australia’s largest electricity generation portfolio, with an operated generation capacity of 10,984 MW — approximately 20% of the country’s total generation capacity.
AGL has always aimed to run as efficiently as possible, and the recent global pandemic has further strengthened its resolve. The company is strongly focused on optimizing its operations and extracting the maximum value from its investments. In the IT sphere, AGL is engaged in a transformational, multi-year cloud migration project that will see much of its on-premises and co-located infrastructure replaced by cloud resources, mostly on Microsoft Azure.
At-a-Glance
Aiming to maximize operational efficiency, minimize downtime and support its migration to the cloud, AGL deployed SUSE Manager as a single toolset for managing both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Red Hat servers. Following the adoption of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Live Patching, AGL can apply critical kernel patches to its live systems, reducing disruption to the business and contributing to 100% coverage for security patches. The SUSE solutions work together to simplify the maintenance and administration of more than 100 Linux servers at AGL, empowering IT technicians to spend more time on value-added activities and on furthering the organization’s migration to the cloud. Ultimately, this helps the company to fulfill its commitment to innovation and progress for its customers.
Visibility and control
In 2018, motivated in part by its planned cloud journey, AGL chose to standardize on a single tool for managing its Linux server landscape.
Giles Riddell, hosting and infrastructure delivery manager at AGL, explains: “We had been running both Red Hat and SUSE Linux, and our architecture team wanted to focus on a single platform for efficiency, uniform tooling and a single skillset.”
AGL uses the Bring Your Own Subscription (BYOS) model with SLES, which means that it can easily see all its subscription commitments, both on-premises and in the cloud, as well as manage its SLES landscape in a uniform way.
“The ability to bring our own Linux subscriptions is important in driving to tight financial targets and also enables centralized control via SUSE Manager, which is a key part of our operations,” says Riddell.
“SUSE Manager is massively helpful in looking after our mixed environment, and the BYOS model has pulled what was a complex management task into a much easier conversation.”
Keeping key systems protected
Before the deployment of SUSE Manager, AGL and its services partner, TCS, were manually updating and maintaining the SLES landscape. This was time-consuming and costly for IT personnel. Worse still, the resulting planned downtime was disruptive to the business, and the lack of a uniform approach increased the risk of configuration errors.
“With SUSE Manager, patching both our large SLES landscape and our small Red Hat landscape is seamless,” says Riddell. “The TCS engineers really appreciate all the time savings, which allow them to spend more hours working on automation, again with SUSE Manager. We hope to get to a fully hands-off patching process soon.”
He adds, “Our security teams were initially surprised and are now extremely happy with the consistent 100% patching coverage that we’ve achieved.”
Clear, simple, efficient
The combination of the highly available SLES operating system and SUSE Manager makes it easier for a relatively small support team to manage more than 100 Linux servers, most of which run tier-1 systems, such as SAP. As AGL continues its cloud migration, it can manage the servers in the same way through SUSE Manager — and without any subscription headaches.
Riddell explains: “SUSE Manager is massively helpful in looking after our mixed environment, and the BYOS model has pulled what was a complex management task into a much easier conversation. We sit down quarterly with TCS and SUSE, look at where we are, plan for the future, and reconcile everything. Things are also much easier and more transparent from the software compliance perspective.”
With a number of critical business systems running on SLES and controlled with SUSE Manager, AGL has a highly available, low-maintenance platform for efficient business operations. By freeing up skilled resources from routine administration to focus on value-add activities, the SUSE solution helps the company to face the future with renewed confidence.
“We’re highly satisfied with both the technology and the service from SUSE,” concludes Riddell.