IT Infrastructure
“Using Oracle’s Sun technology in key parts of our organization has enabled us to focus on our mission-critical work instead of on managing systems, which differentiates us from other IT shops. We spend more time on strategic tasks.”
David Salbego, Department Head, Infrastructure and Operations, Argonne National Laboratory
Simplify system maintenance and development
The IT team also upgraded to Oracle’s MySQL Enterprise. “We had been using the MySQL Community Server for a long time and supporting it ourselves. When Sun — now Oracle — offered the enterprise version, providing a standardized release structure, we decided to take advantage of it. It’s a reliable, stable version of the software,” Salbego said.
“A lot of information technology is overhead — work every datacenter needs to accomplish,” Salbego continued. “Our job is to choose products and services to minimize those costs and efforts, enabling us to focus on the technologies that are most interesting to Argonne and its research activities.”
Argonne’s central IT division also wanted to address the parallel requirement of a best-practices solution for its software infrastructure.
Over the years, Argonne project managers and team leaders had been using an array of development tools when necessary to build home-grown applications. Each of these tools required a range of technical expertise and experience that taxed the capacity of the Argonne IT team. Adding further to support headaches
and user complexity was the burgeoning population of individual and group Web portals that had to be accessed individually.
The vision for the Argonne Web portal was a unified development and deployment framework that would enable users to securely access key applications and information, as well as business-critical processes, for improved collaboration and decisionmaking.
“Our old system was really a hodgepodge architecture,” said Ross Pallan, Argonne’s portal project manager. “So many applications with separate user IDs and passwords also made it difficult and expensive for our help desk personnel to support our users. Our big goal was to consolidate our applications under one umbrella, with single sign-on (SSO) capability.”
“One of our key challenges was to provide more consistent support to our developers,” Pallan added. “We determined that it would be far more efficient if users only had to learn one language rather than bounce back and forth between several. And there were just too many disparate Web portals for us to adequately support each one. We integrated Argonne’s key backoffice and communications Web portals into a unified SSO intranet.”
40 | DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS |
www.datacentresols.com
To create this centralized authentication capability for Argonne’s roster of internal and external users, the IT team deployed a software infrastructure stack comprising the Oracle’s Sun Java System Application Server, Oracle OpenSSO Enterprise, and Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition. Because Argonne uses open-source tools to support many of its tasks, the IT team wanted to also ensure that its software was upto- date and consistent across the datacenters. To this end, Argonne upgraded to the Oracle GlassFish Server 8.1, available as an open-source software stack.
The upgrade enabled Argonne to take advantage of 64-bit Java for greater performance and flexibility. With Oracle GlassFish Server, Argonne has gained valuable session persistence and failover. Today, the laboratory is running a number of proprietary applications on Oracle GlassFish, including its performance appraisal system and a visitor gate pass application.
“We’re a big Java development environment, so we run Sun’s application server, now known as the Oracle GlassFish Server,” Salbego said. “We’ve consolidated on the Sun Web server for the most part. Oracle Directory Server and Oracle OpenSSO form the backbone of a lot of our authentication and
Winter 2010
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44