Running a Business on Open Source
One client of The Root Group needed help in deploying a new eCommerce site using a number of Open Source technologies. They had varied degrees of experience with the products and needed to make sure that when they had all of the pieces assembled, they had a highly available production-ready web site. The Root Group engineer working with them was instrumental in helping them select, configure and deploy a robust architecture that included 2 Dell servers running Xen 5.0 with 5 virtual machines connected to a Left Hand Network SAN. CentOS was a guest operating system in the Xen configuration and the front end architecture had 2 Apache Web Servers. The back end servers hosting the MySQL database server use multiple databases replicating to each other. The Firewall was configured on 2 Dell servers running OpenBSD using Open PF as the firewall using SSL connections for session persistence. The architecture also included Tomcat 5 for Middleware and KonaKart as the shopping cart application. Disk to disk backups are done using Amanda open source software.
Large Data Center Move
The Root Group worked with a large school district that had to move more than 30 servers along with 25TB of storage and a host of large Foundry load balancing and core networking gear over two weekends. The move was high profile because it was a complex administrative computing system running SAP R3 on Oracle 9 and it was being moved while school was in session. The move involved relocating two sites running a campus cluster 5 miles apart. The move was a success as all systems came up on Monday morning when school reconvened.
Automated DR Network Failover
One long-standing client had a business requirement for highly available internet access. The solution required The Root Group to design and implement a fully redundant self-automated network failover at the client's DR facility. The technical components of the solution involved building a BGP routing scheme for their internet access which fails over to a 3G wireless backup internet service. We architected the solution to use HSRP between two external routers with a virtual IP that talks to redundant firewalls. Stackwise switches were used on either channel and the outside networks can do site-to-site VPN failover between either the 3G or the main internet service. The design has no single point of failure and the business requirement was met with a high degreee of automation that does not require IT staff intervention. |
