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V-8 Horsepower!
By Meredith Randall, Director of Product Development, Atlanta, GA
In the fourth quarter of 2007, RSG purchased, installed and brought online a new Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server. This single, high-end server allowed RSG to retire seven smaller servers and deliver greater processing power and scalability as the demand on our servers increases.
 Steve LeCompte, Director of Enterprise SystemsRSG began planning for this major server upgrade in 2006. It was apparent then that the increasing number of clients upgraded to Sigma EncoreSM Oracle® version, and the addition of new clients, would require a significant increase in database server horsepower. Led by Steve LeCompte, Director of Enterprise Systems, the RSG team researched new technologies, authored documents on the vision for RSG hardware, and analyzed various alternatives. A benefit analysis, along with executive summaries of the business and technology arguments, were presented to c-level executives and approved.
Our negotiation with the manufacturer included trade-in of the retiring servers within 90 days of acceptance of the M8000 server. Due to the firm 90-day requirement, an aggressive 60-day implementation plan was written. It had to address several complex issues, including:
- Space was at a premium in the secure, climate-controlled, raised-floor data center computer room. Steve had to consolidate seven equipment cabinets into three and had to juggle all of the power, fiber optic and network connections in the cabinets. The M8000 had its own significant power, cabling and storage requirements as well. Many hours were spent under the floor re-routing and deploying new cable plants.
- Basic functionality such as the operating system, monitoring, backup and storage management software had to be installed, configured and thoroughly tested.
- RSG had to shuffle storage space for each of the databases and applications that would be copied over from the servers to be retired. This included thousands of client database tables. These steps had to be carefully choreographed to work with our available storage.
- The development environment had to be created and thoroughly tested. When it was solid, RSG repeated the steps for the internal test environment and then the RSG Operations environments. Finally, Steve was ready to do the client production environment. This progression helped us ensure the quality of the final product.
This plan required very close attention to myriad details and many late nights and weekends. Steve, who has more than 12 years experience with RSG and is a veteran of many server projects, was able to deliver ahead of schedule. The servers were returned to the vendor within 60 days, and our client community now benefits from increased server processing power.
The benefits of the M8000, many of which are transparent to the client, include:
- Increased capacity for growth and satisfactory performance from the database and application servers for a projected four years.
- Better isolation of client production environments from non-production activities.
- Settings for guaranteed minimum server resources available, ensuring performance for client production environments.
- Greater than a five-fold increase in overall processing power.
- More redundant hardware, so if there is any failed part it can be replaced with no downtime.
- Computing for the end-user continues without interruption during hardware maintenance such as addition of memory, cards or processors.
The enterprise server project was expertly executed from initial evaluation of server options through production implementation. RSG is thrilled with the M8000 and its tremendous increase in computing power, reliability and capacity.
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