The Future
HeC plans to add more applications to its customer services menu and is also moving to increase its customer base. The company has already introduced, or is about to introduce, expanded medical-provider services such as patient scheduling, billing, and collections; clinical and drug-interaction information management; prescription tracking; and other practice-oriented functions usually found in full-featured medical-practice software. To further protect sensitive medical information, HeC will soon offer customers the ability to log on using fingerprint identification. For HeC's insurance-side customers, document-imaging software will maintain and retrieve original employee enrollment forms, simplifying coverage confirmation.
Pedden says that down the line he'll probably buy another Datacenter server. "I would want another server, running far away, on the other side of the country, with a peer-to-peer relationship," he explains.
"But we can run a long time on one machine," he hastens to add. Pedden is working with Unisys to optimize the current system; HeC wants to tweak the operating environment for I/O and tweak the applications to take advantage of that increased power. "Unisys says they can get 200 to 400 percent improvement, even staying with 32-bit processors," he says. "I'll be able to handle 125,000 concurrent processes."
Cisco Systems
Mark Beaupre, systems administrator at Cisco, says there's a simple way to explain his IT department's mandate. "Everything we do is centered on availability and uptime."
Cisco maintains Windows, UNIX, and Sun Microsystems' Solaris servers throughout the company's international sites. Client logons are 60 percent NT 4.0 and 40 percent UNIX. A variety of software applications runs on all the platforms. "We want to provide an agnostic viewpoint for server platforms, so a business unit can come to us and say, 'We want to run this application,' and then IT will pick the best platform for the application," explains Beaupre.
The Problem
Historically, Cisco's high-demand applications have run on platforms other than Windows. However, Cisco's manufacturing division recently selected a Windows-based application, i2 Technologies' i2 Demand Planner, which ties in with the company's manufacturing processes. Beaupre describes the application as "a very low-level statistical forecasting and modeling application that does a lot of number crunching." The application is both processor and I/O intensive.
Cisco's IT department installed the application on a 4-way Compaq ProLiant 5500 with 4GB of RAM, running Win2K Advanced Server. A second, identically configured server provided a lab environment in which to test changes in the software before moving the new procedures into the production environment. When system monitors reported that the computer was operating at 80 to 90 percent for CPU and I/O activity, Cisco decided that upgrading to a Datacenter computer for the i2 Demand Planner application made sense.
The Solution
Cisco's IT department turned to Compaq for a Datacenter computer. Compaq, i2, and Microsoft worked together to match all the application's components and processes to Datacenter's standards. When Microsoft certified i2 Demand Planner for Datacenter, Compaq moved forward to fulfill Cisco's Datacenter order.
"We chose the ProLiant 8500, even though it has an 8-way limitation, because these computers are fantastic servers," reports Beaupre. To continue the company model of keeping one machine in production and another available for testing, Cisco purchased two identically configured ProLiant 8500s, each equipped with eight 700MHz Xeon processors with 2MB of cache and 16GB of RAM. Each server's internal disk is a RAID 0+1 volume with four 18GB disks, and an external disk on a Storage Area Network (SAN) is a RAID 5 volume with twelve 18GB disks and a hot spare.
The external disk space is divided into four active partitions: The C drive contains 8GB of disk space and holds the OS; the E, F, and G drives contain 35GB, 50GB, and 100GB of disk space, respectively, and each holds data. Some unconfigured drive space is still available on the internal disk. Processors run across all partitions.
After moving i2 Demand Planner into production on Datacenter, the IT department began monitoring the production system's performance. Using SNMP, the staff measures processor, memory, and disk utilization. The reports show utilization at about 10 percent for all counters. Beaupre calls the combination of the ProLiant 8500 and Datacenter "fantastic." The utilization figures reassure him that scalability won't be a problem.
Beaupre also praises Datacenter's service model. "The support paradigm is very appealing. We don't have to figure out whether we have a hardware or OS problem and bounce between vendors. The one-stop support at Compaq means I don't have to think about it."
The Future
Traditionally, Cisco doesn't install multiple applications on any server. Says Beaupre, "Single server, single application has always made sense to me. To host multiple applications on a single server, you need to make sure that application vendors understand more than how to avoid DLL Hell; they have to configure software for sharing a computer without causing problems. The operating system technology and the hardware technology have moved the cutting edge to a place where you can run multiple applications on a computer, but most applications are behind that cutting edge."
In accordance with this philosophy, Cisco plans to run only the i2 application on the Datacenter computer for a while. "However," says Beaupre, "the strength of the clustering in Datacenter means we'll probably expand its use and run more applications on that server. I'd like to get into the database area on the current Datacenter computer, for either SQL Server or Oracle. In the future, we'll probably add Datacenter Server computers for messaging and Web hosting."
When another application does run on the Datacenter server, Cisco's IT department will begin using Datacenter's features to reassign processors to processes. The staff will use scripts that monitor processor-to-process activity and automatically reassign processors.
But Beaupre says that to host multiple applications on one Datacenter server, he needs Microsoft to provide additional logons for Terminal Services in administration mode. All Win2K Server versions come with Terminal Services built in, and installing the component in administration mode permits two administrative logons.
At Cisco, multiple applications require multiple administrators, and more than two administrators will need to work on a server simultaneously. "My operational mentality is that whatever you use must be able to scale up and scale out," he says. "Datacenter Server provides all of that, but there's a bottleneck in the manageability."
Scalability on Your Terms
For both HeC and Cisco, scalability has been the primary motivation to move to Datacenter. For HeC, scalability means the ability to offer more software features to more customers. For Cisco, scalability means that the server system doesn't become a bottleneck for intensive use of a complex application. Datacenter clearly provides a solution for both of these scalability challenges.