High Availability a High Priority at Olympics Games

by Alex Woodie

The homegrown Java application houses information about criminals and terrorists known to inhabit the greater Utah region, and is regularly used by more than 1,500 local police officers, state highway patrolmen, and agents of the USDA Forest Service. At any one time, dozens of law enforcement officials are accessing the application from their desks or patrol cars. During the Olympics, it was also available to FBI and CIA agents.

Before the Olympics, the Department of Public Safety housed the criminal information, along with 35,000 JPEG images of thousands of criminals and terrorists, on a single iSeries Model 820. The photos allowed law enforcement officers to see important identifiers such as birthmarks and tattoos. However, the application would occasionally go offline, usually because of router problems or other issues with the department's Internet service provider. The outages were rare, but just the same, the department wanted a second iSeries as back up during such outages. Funding for such a project was unavailable.

With the Olympics coming up, that was about to change. Security has obviously been a much bigger concern of our government following the September 11 terrorist attacks, and protecting high-profile events, such as the Olympics, has become a national priority. In fact, the fear of a terrorist attack on the Olympic Games prompted the U.S. government to spend $300 million for security, by far the most spent for security on any Olympic Games.

A month before the opening ceremonies, the news came in: Funding for the second iSeries had been approved by the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee. Normally it would take more than a month to install a high availability solution on an AS/400 or iSeries. But there was no choice in the matter. This would be a rush job, and it had to be done right.

The Utah Department of Public Safety contracted with Symatrix Technology to install the high availability software and configure the systems. Symatrix is a Beaverton, Oregon, company that installs and supports OS/400 high availability software from Vision Solutions, of Irvine, California.

Erik Knudson is a technical consultant at Symatrix who worked on the installation. "We had a very short window when the financials were approved to get the hardware and services in place," he said. "From the time when they installed the system, installed OS/400, installed Vision, and did a roll swap, it took 2.5 weeks, which is very fast."

For the target machine, Symatrix procured an older AS/400--a Model 640--from another customer that had recently upgraded. The fact that the two servers were two generations apart did not affect the performance of the systems, because they were both on OS/400 V5R1.

The AS/400 Model 640 was installed at a secure command center location 15 minutes away from the Department of Public Safety's primary data center, in downtown Salt Lake City. The exact location of the command center is kept secret as a precautionary measure, said Leroy Brown, the Symatrix account manager responsible for the Salt Lake City region.

"If there were an attack, the location where the storage system held records would be gone," Brown said. "That was the main drive to have the second [data center] in place, if something were to happen."

Thankfully, there were no wide-scale criminal or terrorist attacks--nor power outages or network glitches--during the Olympics. If the need had been there, the roll swap could have been completed in five minutes, Knudson says, a bit faster than you would normally find in high availability implementations, partly because the department's application was relatively straightforward.

The Vision Suite will also provide application backup for the Paralympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, a 10-day event starting March 7 in which disabled athletes join together to compete. Long after the Olympics are gone, the software will be used to eliminate downtime associated with upgrades, backups, and database reorganizations that often require up to a day to complete.

"The main intent of the installation was for the 2002 Olympics," said Brent Farr, the local team lead for Symatrix. "But it's still running. From now on, it's their baby."