Equifax

In 2006, Equifax needed to reduce its application servers' licensing costs. In addition, the company had a long-term goal of building a portal to increase business agility and reduce expenses.

Equifax initially evaluated only application servers. The company found that the Sun Glassfish Enterprise Server (formerly Sun Java System Application Server) cost significantly less than other products and could provide for enterprise scalability, high availability, and load balancing. Equifax learned that if it purchased Sun's application server through the Java Enterprise System (Java ES) licensing model, the company could deploy other Sun software components to address other IT challenges including a portal and an identity management solution. "As we started looking at the cost savings that we would realize from the application server and the identity management components in Java ES, we found that we would get Sun Java System Portal Server for free," explains Galas.

In 2007, engineers from Equifax worked with Sun Professional Services to design the architecture for the business-to-business portal called ePORT. “Sun Professional Services helped us build an architecture that could address concerns involving management and performance,” Galas says. “Sun engineers also provided insight into best practices for the deployment and modifications of all of our applications.”

In October 2007, the portal went into production on 8 physical servers and 16 virtual servers and Equifax has realized numerous benefits from its portal.

Along with cutting application and portal server costs and overall software expenditures, the new environment is also highly available. "We have taken and applied a large amount of expertise from Sun Professional Services as far as how to design mission-critical J2EE deployments," says Galas.

When evaluating hardware to support its business-to-business portal and identity management solutions, Equifax sought a system that could deliver high performance and minimize costs. After reviewing its options, the company chose to build its architecture on Sun Fire T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. Sun Fire T2000 servers could deliver faster Web processing than other platforms, thanks to the system’s UltraSPARC T1 processor with Chip Multithreading Technology. In addition, Equifax could significantly reduce hardware costs, streamline system administration, and provide for hardware governance by using the built-in virtualization features in the Solaris 10 OS Containers.

The new hardware infrastructure has reduced the company’s datacenter footprint. In addition, Equifax has reduced the number of servers it needed to purchase. “With our former environment, we would have had to purchase four more servers to handle the transaction load of portal servers,” Galas notes. The Containers features in the Solaris 10 Operating System also provide for a governance solution whereby business units are billed for hardware usage on an application-by-application basis. “We can count the amount of CPU and memory that each one of our business units is running,” explains Galas. “They essentially get a hotel bill every month that says here’s what you did on this day and here’s how much you’re being charged for it.” As a result, business units are more careful about how they write code and have rewritten applications that monopolize or crash systems. Administrators can also manage capacity better because they can compare the revenue forecast of business units with their hardware usage and know what server resources will be needed. Business units can view their current utilization through a Web interface — and request restrictions. “If a business unit only wants to pay for X number of CPU minutes per day, we will restrict them so they get that capability,” says Galas.

Employees are also more efficient. “Productivity has dramatically increased with the Solaris 10 capabilities,” Galas notes. “We’ve also been able to reduce the time to market for new services because we can provision Containers very, very easily.”

In March 2007, Equifax worked with Sun Professional Services to build master directories for human resources, customers, and employees using Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition. Next, engineers used out-of-the-box and custom adapters in Sun Identity Manager to provision and audit existing technologies that include Active Directory, the Solaris OS, AIX, and the LDAP protocol. Adapters were also used for Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel Customer Relationship Management system, and HP Project and Portfolio Management software. Database adapters for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Flat Files were also used. With the core architecture in place, the team used Sun OpenSSO Enterprise to methodically configure access privileges to internal applications. In addition, engineers built an identity management portal to provide a single point for managing access, provisioning, and collecting audit information. Initially developed on repurposed Sun Fire V880 servers, Equifax deployed its identity management solution in October 2007 on 10 Sun Fire T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 OS and Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition.

The identity management solution has increased productivity in numerous ways. Access privileges can be automatically granted or revoked when information is entered into HR systems, or managers can click a single button in the system to immediately terminate system access privileges for an employee who has been fired. Managers can also provision access to specialized systems when they receive an electronic form submitted through the portal. “It used to take two to three weeks for employees to get access to the resources they needed to start working,” says Galas. “Today, when a new employee walks in the door, he or she can go to a desk and immediately start to work.”