Information Infrastructure
In 1996, Noblis established the Noblis Data Center to provide a secure central computing facility which includes all telecommunications and data network capabilities for the company headquarters facility. Since that time, the Data Center has been, and continues to be, a critical component to Noblis laboratory facility operations.Purpose
The primary purpose of the Data Center is to provide support for corporate email, file and printer sharing, infrastructure application support, and network and telephone services for the corporation, including all labs. The Data Center houses the UNIX and Windows 2000/2003 servers that are required for the day-to-day operations of the company, as well as the core network routers and the main telephone switch. Some of the applications and services supported include: Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, ADP payroll, Microsoft Exchange (email), JAMIS timecard, the KNOW (corporate Intranet), Ccure800 (building security), corporate firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN), dialup remote access, and our external Web server. In addition, test and development servers in the Data Center allow system administrators and developers to work on new projects and develop applications without risk to our production environment.
Closely related to the primary purpose of the Data Center are our backup operations to insure data protection. All production and development servers are backed up daily to provide a measure of protection against any data loss from hardware failures or other disasters. Two ALT M1800 tape libraries each with four SDLT 320 drives are used to capture this information on tape with tapes sent off-site daily for added disaster recovery security. The Data Center also houses the desktop backup server to backup all user desktops and laptops to ensure desktop data protection.
Capabilities
The Data Center provides state-of-the-art hardware and software to support the corporate infrastructure. Many of our servers are running on gigabit Ethernet which is provided by the fiber cable plant. The Data Center servers are all attached to a keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) switch which allows any server to be accessed from any one of four console stations. The Data Center also includes two EMC CX 500 Storage Arrays as part of the Storage Area Network (SAN). These units are two gigabit fiber channel-based storage systems that contain a total of over 12 terabytes of disk space in an RAID-5 configuration.
All of the Data Center servers are monitored with Computer Associates Unicenter 3.1. This Enterprise Management Suite allows staff to monitor predetermined thresholds for all hardware and/or software on a server. Using the tools included with Unicenter, emails and pages are sent to designated staff as soon as certain thresholds are reached, which decreases response time if a server requires attention. A Web portal using the Unicenter Portal technology has been developed. This portal allows staff to monitor systems from anywhere on the Noblis network via a Web browser. It contains a repository of information and documentation, as well as links to most Web-based applications, access to Windows terminal services, UNIX telnet sessions, the Data Center operations manual, and status information on our Veritas backups. The portal continues to evolve and is expected to grow and expand as more Web-based applications and features are added. All of our production and development servers are integrated into the Unicenter Enterprise Management Suite. This software allows staff to monitor hardware and software changes and automatically generates reports and notifications based on predetermined thresholds.
The Data Center provides a central location for all telecommunications and data network services. Housed within the Data Center is the Noblis Fujitsu 9600XL Public Branch Exchange (PBX) system, voice mail system, dial-by-name, and call accounting server which provides all voice capabilities for Noblis. Data communications for the headquarters facility, as well as remote site connectivity, are provided by using Cisco network equipment. The internal network backbone is carried via fiber, providing one gigabit service. The Data Center is the central termination facility for all cabling that supplies voice and data services to each floor. The Data Center is utilizing Verizon’s Enhanced IntelliLight Dedicated SONET Ring (E-IDSR) to provide connectivity to multiple service providers. The E-IDSR uses a combination of dedicated fiber-based facilities and advanced SONET equipment to connect multiple central offices to Noblis’ headquarters. This configuration eliminates transport failure within the “last mile” between Verizon and Noblis. In the event of a disaster, Alternate Routing E-IDSR instantly re-routes traffic to provide near 100 percent survivability with no reduction in bandwidth. The OC-3 E-IDSR SONET ring infrastructure provides increased uptime/availability, flexible bandwidth for growth, and redundancy. A SONET Mux is installed within the Noblis facility to further subdivide the SONET Ring into PRI and T1 circuits that support Noblis’ external telephone and data connections. Noblis controls the architecture of the E-IDSR and separates all providers between two CO’s which provides geographical, as well as carrier, diversity.
Current List of Equipment
The inventory of equipment in the Data Center is constantly changing as new technologies emerge. Corporate Information Management (CIM) is constantly assessing new products to provide the user community with optimum tools for assisting in their day to day tasks.
Servers (Production, Development and Test):
- Dell Optiplex (11)
- Dell Poweredge 1400SC (1)
- Dell Poweredge 600SC (1)
- Dell XPS P133c (3)
- HP Proliant D-Series (27)
- HP Proliant M-Series (10)
- Sun Blade 100 (2)
- Sun Enterprise 220R (1)
- Sun Enterprise 3500 (1)
- Sun Enterprise 4000 (2)
- Sun Enterprise 450 (2)
- Sun Fire V240 (8)
- Sun Fire V880 (2)
- Sun Ultra 5 (9)
- EMC CX500 (2)
- Brocade Silkworm 3800 (4)
- ATL M1800 Tape libraries (2)
- Avocent AutoView 400 (11)
- Avocent XP 4040 (2)
- Fujitsu 9600 XL PBX (Public Branch Exchange)
- Centigram voice mail server
- Fujitsu Dial by Name server
- Dell Desktop (4)
- Cisco 3660 – Internal Backbone router
- Cisco 360 – Internet/Transit LAN router
- Cisco 3640 – External Boundary router
- Cisco 3015 – Mobile device VPN access Router
- Cisco 3640 – Inbound modem pool router
- 3COM External – Boundary network switch
- 3COM Internal – Boundary network switch
- Blackbox – Transit Network switch
- Blackbox – Noblis Service network switch (DMZ)
- Cisco 7200 – Project Internet access router
