Booz Allen Honored for Exemplary IT Solution at Red Hat Innovation Awards
Three of the firm’s tech experts explain the unique client advantages of Booz Allen’s “cloud computing” infrastructures.
At the Second Annual Red Hat Innovation Awards held earlier this year, Booz Allen Hamilton was recognized for an outstanding IT solution that demonstrated creative thinking and inspired problem solving. The firm received the award in the Superior Alternatives category.
Red Hat, a provider of Linux and open source technology, sponsors the event to recognize technological achievements using Red Hat solutions to improve existing processes, overcome technical challenges, and increase client bottom lines.
“We developed the solution for a federal client that faced common data center issues such as inadequate power, cooling, and floor space,” explains Booz Allen associate Isaac Christoffersen. In addition, the client’s existing document management system had undergone a 600% growth in its user community, increasing its daily workload from 18,000 to 100,000 documents.
Booz Allen’s solution involved building a service-oriented document management system using technologies such as grid computing, storage clustering, and virtualization. This Grid Enabled Services Infrastructure (GESI) provided an elastic configuration of storage, server, and networking capabilities that could allocate resources based on need and priority without adding new hardware.
Combined with GESI’s layered architecture approach, this configuration created the platform necessary to provide storage, software, networking, and the database as separate services. The result was a highly dynamic environment that enabled the flexible integration of new and transparent removal of obsolete capabilities.
A panel of judges comprised of industry representatives determined that the GESI project produced the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives of all the Red Hat award nominees.
During the event, Christoffersen spoke on “Optimizing the SOA Enterprise: Using JBoss and RHEL Virtualization.” He discussed how Booz Allen’s service grid infrastructure improved service-oriented architecture (SOA) scalability and flexibility in the project, while also providing high availability, fault tolerance, and load balancing.
Senior consultant Henry Robertson and associate Christopher Dale also gave a highly technical presentation called “Implementing GESI: The Grid-Enabled Service Infrastructure,” in which they described the architecture and implementation of a “cloud platform” using a mobile demonstration configuration.
Cloud computing, which currently has no universally accepted definition, leverages services that are located “in the cloud” to complete IT tasks. Cloud computing can dramatically improve an enterprise’s ability to reuse capabilities that have been developed throughout an organization.
Dale says, “With this successful implementation behind us, we now look at new opportunities and know that we can provide solutions for clients that will take less time and fewer people, be capable and agile, and won’t cost clients even half of what they think they will.”
Surpassing Goals in Software Development Agility
The project for which Booz Allen was honored by Red Hat had its roots in 2004, when the client asked the firm to develop a proprietary-based proof of concept for a document management system.
The initial prototype consisted of a few racks of servers, storage and networking equipment, and customized software development. But as the system’s user community grew, the client believed it was essential to make the proof of concept available to a much larger user community. This effectively made the proof of concept into a production system.
It quickly became obvious that the traditional system design used in the proof of concept was inadequate to handle the increasing volumes of data in a production environment. The next-generation solution needed to be scalable, agile, and exceptionally efficient in terms of floor space, power, cooling capability, and cost.
The team’s redesign of the software architecture improved the system’s ability to handle data volume, but the infrastructure still prevented the system from scaling as needed. Today, however, the hybrid grid/SOA/virtual solution that Booz Allen ultimately provided can scale CPU and memory resources independent of network resources; scale network resources independent of system storage capacity and throughput; and allocate available resources to the task without jeopardizing the ongoing mission.
By implementing the new cloud platform architecture and migrating to a dynamic infrastructure, Booz Allen provided the client with the capability to use its spare capacity to host services for other organizations, as well as evaluate new commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), government off-the-shelf (GOTS), or custom software that previously would have been too expensive to implement.
“We successfully delivered to the client an environment that surpassed our goals in computer resource and software development agility,” Dale continues. “We also showed that effectively and efficiently implementing services in a cloud environment is best undertaken with the assistance of an experienced team that has already worked through the pitfalls.”
story posted October 22, 2008
