Argonne National Laboratory

To conduct its 200-plus research projects, Argonne National Laboratory employs multiple datacenters, many of which rely on Argonne's core IT infrastructure for critical business applications.

Over the past several years, Argonne's IT division for Computing and Information Systems has pushed to standardize the core infrastructure to increase overall efficiencies for its business systems. "We were spending a lot of time dealing with disparate hardware and seemingly random operating system choices. We wanted to standardize as much as possible in order to focus on what the scientists need and the business applications that need to be supported," says David Salbego, director of IT Infrastructure at Argonne.

To begin its standardization efforts, Argonne received bids from Sun, HP, Dell, and other vendors for hardware. It ultimately chose Sun because the company has been helping Argonne fulfill its mission with innovative software, hardware, and support services for more than 20 years. According to Salbego, it made good business sense to stay with proven technology in standardizing the hardware environment. "We wanted something that was reliable, and we knew we would get that with Sun technology. It was also competitively priced. That's why we decided to continue with Sun," says Salbego.

To support its larger applications, Argonne upgraded to the SPARC Enterprise M4000 server. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 is a powerful midrange server that's optimized for 24/7 mission-critical computing and large shared-memory applications. Yet it's a compact package, so there's less energy consumption. "We've been impressed by SPARC technology for a long time. It's amazingly engineered," says Salbego.

For smaller to midsize applications, Argonne upgraded to Sun Fire X4200 and X4600 M2 servers. "These servers are well engineered, well built, and provide high levels of performance and reliability," says Salbego. "We use them on a variety of applications - from Web infrastructure to database systems."

Equally important is the smaller footprint of the new infrastructure. "We have limited space and limited power. Sun's energy-efficient hardware works well for what we're doing," Salbego says.

Argonne also opted to standardize on the Solaris 10 Operating System and Ubuntu Linux for its primary operating systems. "Solaris 10 is reliable and predictable - and has what we need in an operating system," Salbego says. The Solaris 10 OS allows multiple applications to be consolidated onto a single system through virtualization, which makes it an ideal solution for standardization. Virtualization features ensure high availability, which is critical to Argonne's environment.

To support the new platform, Argonne contracted for SunSpectrum Silver Support and Sun Software Premium Support.

The IT team also upgraded to MySQL Enterprise, gaining Sun support for the database software. "We had been using the MySQL Community Server for a long time and supporting it ourselves. When Sun 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, and Sun supports it. It's fantastic."

Salbego goes on to say, "A lot of information technology is overhead - work every datacenter needs to accomplish. Our job is to choose products and services to minimize those costs and efforts, allowing 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 homegrown applications. Each of these tools required a range of technical expertise and experience that taxed the capacity of the Argonne IT team. Adding further support headaches and user complexity were a 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 decision making.

Ross Pallan, Argonne's portal project manager, recalls the issues his team once encountered. "Our old system was really a hodgepodge architecture," Pallan says. "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 remembers. "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 the Argonne's key back-office and communications Web portals into a unified SSO intranet." 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 Sun Java System Web Server 6.1, Sun OpenSSO Enterprise, and Sun Java System 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 up to date and consistent across the datacenters. Most recently, Argonne upgraded to the Sun Glassfish Enterprise Server 8.1, available as an open-source software stack.

"We're a big Java development environment, so we run Sun's Application Server, now known as the Glassfish Enterprise Server," says Salbego. "We've consolidated on Sun Web Server for the most part. The Directory Server and OpenSSO form the backbone of a lot of our authentication and authorization solutions. And we've enabled single sign-on using this whole stack, a straightforward task with our many homegrown applications. Suddenly it looks like it's an integrated stack of applications. I love it."

In addition, Argonne purchased a Sun Software Premium Support agreement, which will help its IT team reduce the complexity of Argonne's software infrastructure while lowering the cost of software licensing and support.

Although a small portion of the central IT division remains to be standardized on Sun technology, Argonne is realizing significant benefits in many areas.

The Solaris 10 Operating System virtualization features provide the assurance of high availability and high hardware utilization for the business applications it supports. "There are a lot of different reasons for why you should be virtualized," says Salbego. "For us, it's the mobility of applications. We can't have things going down." Argonne has been taking advantage of the Solaris ZFS file system and Solaris Containers and is eagerly anticipating implementing Sun's xVM Ops Center 2.0 to enhance its virtualization capabilities. "We've talked to Sun about it," Salbego says. "I think it has a great future in our organization."

With a standardized infrastructure largely built on Sun technology, the Argonne IT team is confident that it can continue to deliver an open, standards-based, scalable, integrated IT capability to its high-tech users. As to the future, Salbego notes, "Our two primary development languages are Java and Ruby. Our Java developers use Java Application Server 8.1 as our application server of choice. We've been experimenting a bit with the GlassFish open-source application server and are in the process of building out a new infrastructure based on it. This environment is also load-balanced for high availability and redundancy." GlassFish incorporates the technology of the Sun Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 Application Server and its commercial counterpart, the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server. It provides a foundation based on open-standards Java technology that can be provisioned using open-source products.

"We love Sun's strategy of being part of a community that drives the creation of standards-based technology and offers it up as open source on the market," Salbego says. "Argonne takes a very hands-on approach to our infrastructure and development. We rely on our own people to solve our problems, and take pride in that. The manner in which Sun delivers, supports, and opens its products allows us to use that strategy with great success."

By implementing components of the Sun Java Enterprise System suite, Argonne was able to provide a scalable and reliable solution for its integrated Web portal, enabling Argonne to synchronize its IT investment with its business priorities and user requirements. Salbego says, "The feedback we've been getting from our user community indicates that the SSO Web portal is a big success. In fact, he continues, "We're anxious to try the latest version of the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise. This will allow us to bring our Apache-based applications, such as Wiki and many other homegrown applications, into the SSO fold."

The Web portal has helped Argonne consolidate its Java support contracts, which now provides predictable licensing fees with a 5% cap on increases. Pallan pointed out another important outcome for Argonne: "Sun's subscription model for deploying Sun Java Enterprise System software was much more economical than purchasing components separately, as offered by other vendors. As a result, we estimate a cost savings of more than $50,000 per year in licensing and support." Argonne also expects to achieve a 100% return on investment.

Additionally, Salbego says, "We recently implemented MySQL Monitor with great success, and the wealth of information provided by this tool is enormous. We're in the process of implementing MySQL replication using Sun's MySQL Enterprise to gain true fault tolerance and high availability. The fact that we have Sun's MySQL Enterprise support available if needed helps greatly."

Salbego concludes, "If you add up all the benefits, our decision to standardize using Sun products was a wise one."