The New Data Center Awards, co-sponsored by AFCOM and Network World, yielded these four notable enterprise data center designs.
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St. Luke’s Health System, Kansas City, Mo.
At St. Luke’s Health System, the mission is to become paperless. Under the direction of manager Harold Sirls, the company moved from a mainframe network to a newly built, state-of-the-art data center equipped with a mix of Unix and Windows environments. The data center supports the sharing of hundreds of gigabytes of information daily, including digital imagery, among medical professions across the Midwest. Some highlights of the new design:
• Hosts real-time streaming video for intensive care patient monitoring.
• Features 24/7 network and security monitoring, as well as sophisticated disaster recovery and failover technology.
• Uses open source applications and Windows platforms to enable cross-training of data center IT team.
• Acts as the hub of a 100-mile SONET ring.
FreshDirect, Long Island, N.Y.
FreshDirect, an online fresh food manufacturing and delivery services outlet, was spinning its wheels with its legacy architecture of RISC servers. The company had big expansion plans for its e-commerce business, so CTO Myles Trachtenberg spearheaded a complete overhaul of the company’s data center. The lynchpin of the new design is the use of open source Egenera blade servers and VMware virtualization software to support FreshDirect’s Oracle, BEA Systems and Apache e-commerce applications. With Trachtenberg’s bold initiative, the company has seen impressive results such as:
• Checkout time for customers reduced from 14 seconds to 1.5 seconds.
• Software upgrades that used to take up to five hours and require a full system shutdown now can be done on-the-fly in less than 30 minutes.
• The company claims $1.2 million in savings in licensing fees and administration costs.
Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Boston
The Massachusetts Department of Revenue recently retooled its online filing and payment system for taxpayers. At the heart of the “WebFile for Business” project is a significant redesign of the agency’s data center to support Web services . The DOR has been able to process almost 700,000 tax returns and $2 billion in payments in the first 10 months of operations. The DOR employed sophisticated security techniques to protect vulnerable Web-based architecture:
• Implemented a security gateway from DataPower to filter XML and Simple Object Access Protocol traffic.
• As a best practice, the DOR added application-level inspection of Web services transmissions.
• Custom-built an application for centralized monitoring of traffic generated by the SOAP services.
PHH Mortgage, Mt. Laurel, N.J.
A provider of private-label retail mortgages, PHH Mortgage depends on its e-infrastructure to drive business. Its high-profile client list, which includes large financial institutions, prevents the company from suffering outages of any type. To attain high availability, the company completely restructured its data center operations, home to its call center and other mission-critical applications. Some highlights of the new design:
• A two-tier approach that features a primary and secondary data center.
• Sophisticated failover architecture that can handle a complete data center failure without an interruption in business.
• Replication of data in real time from mission-critical systems in the primary data center to identical systems in the secondary data center using Windows Server 2003 clustering.
• The two data centers feature redundant heating, cooling and power systems, as well as 24/7 network and facilities monitoring and closed-circuit surveillance.
