Server Hardware Transitions at IRIS DMC
The IRIS Data Management Center has been hard at work porting software
and services to new hardware this year. Two primary areas of upgrades
have been planned for this year. The first is the web server topology
and the second is the Oracle database server.
For the web server, we have moved from a single Sun server to a load
balancer network consisting of a Barracuda Load Balancer unit connected
to two cooperative SPARC multicore systems. The rationale for going to more than one machine is
twofold: 1) to provide a format for horizontal scaling of web transactions
to multiple machines, and 2) failover capacity for uninterrupted service
should one machine go down or need to undergo routine maintenance. We
still use a single, separate master machine for driving tasks to be coordinated
among the load balanced web servers.
 The Software, Operations, and System Administrator teams worked hard
from March through May before carrying out the switchover on June 4th.
The new Oracle database server is a much larger, enterprise scale server
consisting of 4 quad-core SPARC processors and 128GB of on board memory.
This new server will run Oracle 11g and on board memory utilization is
expected to increase by an order of magnitude. Data processing software
that shares CPU time with the current Oracle server will be completely
divested to other servers, leaving this machine to put all of its resources
into processing database transactions.
The database transition is scheduled to occur at the end of the summer,
before the end of Q3 2009. It is our expectation that this upgrade will
serve all facets of IRIS DMC operations through increased efficiency
and timeliness of data queries. More will be announced on the transition
schedule on the IRIS website shortly.
IRIS DMC Website :
http://www.iris.edu/dms/dmc/
Submitted by Robert Casey, IRIS DMC |
