There I was, sitting in the second row, alone in the small conference room, waiting for a customer panel to begin at Red Hat’s summit on open source solutions last week. The five panelists arrived early as well, shook hands with each other, found themselves at a loss for words and readily took their seats on their stools, staring straight ahead, maybe 10 feet away.

Well, this is awkward, I thought.

With nine long minutes to go before the start, I decided to break the ice and approach the panelists, introduce myself and exchange cards. Imagine my horror when the first panelist I approached, a man in a blue suit, appeared not to have a card on him. I raced back to my briefcase to retrieve several of my own, handed one to him and to two other panelists, along with a pen, and exchanged cards with the remaining two customers.

When the man in the blue suit was finished, he returned my card and inquired, “And who are you?” Embarrassed by the order of events, I told him about SearchCIO.com, its focus on the CIO’s point of view and my particular interest in cloud computing. I then collected the other cards and beat a path back to my seat.

Now, imagine my delight in the irony when I flipped over the card from the man in the blue suit to find the phone number and email of Jerome Bender, deputy assistant director at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) division. It just goes to show that when you need to get information, sometimes you have to resort to persuasive measures — in this case, peer pressure from card-carrying panelists!

The compelling story is the one Bender told the room once the panel discussion got under way.

CJIS operates national law enforcement services across 18,000 agencies, and has about a million end users, Bender said. The National Crime Information Center in Clarksburg, W. Va., where CJIS is based, processes 8.5 million transactions a day. These include fingerprint processing (200,000 per day) and background checks (14.5 million per year).

The speed with which these transactions are processed against a database of 68 million people with criminal records is astounding: 15 seconds to 2 hours. “The fastest checks are in support of homeland security as people are coming across the border — 15 seconds,” Bender said.

Yet that isn’t what’s most compelling about Bender’s story. A rapidly increasing need for capacity drove CJIS to move two years ago from a proprietary hardware platform to commodity servers running Red Hat’s open source solutions, he said. In doing so, the organization saved about $80 million — while adding four times the capacity.

It takes a lot of horsepower to zip through a database of 68 million people. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification, or NGI, system, a cornerstone designed to enable CJIS to become a global biometrics leader, is deployed on 2,600 hosts in a highly redundant architecture that operates 24/7, 365 days a year.

There were challenges and successes in the FBI’s move to open source solutions, Bender admitted. “Security folks are not used to open source; it tends to be a challenge.” On the other hand, the decision to “do everything diskless and move onto a storage area network to minimize moving parts” has resulted in just one hardware failure over 2.5 years.

“Life-and-death stuff needs to be high-availability,” Bender said, and by using open source solutions, CJIS is providing that in a cost-effective service.

It’s a vision endorsed by numerous businesses including Nissan, which plans to deliver cloud services to automobiles in the future. The Japanese car manufacturer expects to sell 10% of its vehicles with “AV telematics” connected to a data center 24/7 for service, according to Celso Guiotoko, vice president and CIO at Nissan. Since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the company has strengthened its plan to standardize on open source technologies and applications as a platform for disaster recovery, he said.

Just how much money can a business save by going with open source solutions? Red Hat’s website has a TCO calculator, but just by way of a benchmark, company officials estimate that an implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization costs about one-seventh what a VMware installation costs. The government of Brazil saved 80% by moving to Red Hat, the officials said.

Open source vendors offer software for free but charge for support — a licensing model that requires customers to license support for all servers in order to receive it for any one of them, according to John Giordano, a system administrator from Harris Corp. in Melbourne, Fla.

The world is moving fast toward transparency and collaboration. Politically and professionally, innovation happens when people come together. The U.S. government, a huge open source user, is responding to Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s cloud-first directive by consolidating data centers and looking for open source cloud solutions.

Red Hat announced two products — the CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service and the OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS). CloudForms repackages and enhances Red Hat’s technologies in concert with partners who offer open source application development, identity management, database, performance monitoring and other technologies, in order to provide enterprise customers with the tools to build an open source private cloud.

“Anyone with a private cloud today has had to do a lot of heavy lifting,” said Gordon Haff, cloud evangelist at Red Hat. “It’s our goal with CloudForms that you won’t have to do your own heavy lifting as you might have had to years ago.”

The OpenShift PaaS supports several development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP and Ruby; and is the first PaaS to plan support for Java EE 6. “It’s not a me-too offering but an industry-leading platform on day 1,” a Red Hat official said in a press conference. However, the PaaS is currently in developer preview, and at this time does not come with a service level agreement — a potential deal-breaker for enterprise developers.

Attendees at my lunch table at the conference were nonplussed about the “new” cloud focus, calling it a new name for virtualization. The two customers who spoke on a cloud panel — one from a health care company, the other from a small systems integrator — have built private clouds using open source technologies, but haven’t tried CloudForms or OpenShift. Judging by a show of hands, few folks in the audience have moved beyond open source virtualization to private cloud development (which entails automated provisioning of IT services and potentially, metered charges for those services).

One questioner at the final keynote drew chuckles by asking whether he, as a system administrator, would become obsolete by adopting the new cloud strategy — a question that also plagues system administrators of companies that use proprietary cloud technologies.

What are the risks to enterprises deploying open source technologies? Email me at lsmith@techtarget.com.