THE ROOT GROUP Case Study

eCommerce

Open-Source
Infrastructure Design
Systems Integration
High-Availability
Network Security
Backup and Recovery

Client

One client of The Root Group needed help in deploying a new eCommerce site using a number of Open Source technologies.

Problem

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.

Solution

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
  
• a Left Hand Network SAN
  
• CentOS as the guest operating system in the Xen configuration
  
• Front-end architecture with 2 Apache Web Servers
  
• Back-end servers hosting MySQL database server with multiple databases replicating to each other
  
• The firewall was configured on 2 Dell servers running OpenBSD using Open PF as the firewall
  
• SSL connections used for session persistence.
  
• Tomcat 5 for middleware
  
• KonaKart for the shopping cart application.
  
• Disk-to-disk backups using Amanda open-source software.