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- September 3rd, 2009
Where Is Glow?
- Joan Martin
- Comments: 9 Comments »Tags: Helpdesk
This is the first blog from the Glow National Helpdesk! We hope to keep you up to date on what’s happening technically with Glow and give you information about any changes that are coming along, whether these are technical or functional. We’ll also let you know of any planned maintenance periods when Glow will be unavailable.
For our first blog, we thought you might be interested to find out where Glow resides and what it physically looks like. Glow runs across two Datacentres, both located in Edinburgh. We have three environments: Live (in one location) comprising around 130 servers with a mix of Microsoft, Linux and Solaris operating systems, with a Disaster Recovery environment and Test/Approval environment in the other totalling around 120 servers. Most of the servers are blade based servers. On top of this we have two SANs (Storage Area Network) and two large tape based backup facilities.
What do all these servers do?
Well, we do duplicate servers of the same type, so if one fails, the Glow component continues to run – we want to be sure that Glow is available 24 x 7! We’ve got 11 servers running Glow Learn, 5 running Glow Meet, 8 running Glow Mail and 11 running Glow Messenger. There are 6 servers dealing with provisioning, 3 running search, 13 holding the database and a further 6 holding the National Directory and User Accounts. We have over 20 servers providing security and anti virus checks. In addition we also have 16 servers that we use to back up data, for maintenance and for monitoring and alerting plus many others with different functions. And this is only in Live!
So, we’re kept pretty busy looking after all this equipment in the Datacentre, in addition to investigating calls from Local Authorities.
We’d welcome any comments on our blog – is this information of interest? Are there other things that you would you like to see the Glow National Helpdesk blog on?
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Fascinating look behind the scenes, thanks. Who said I was a geek?
Looks pretty dull – not even a glowing light in sight
How many MIPS and MBPS are needed to support the system
The pictures above are of our disaster recovery and approval environment – it’s our live datacentre where all the real Glowing happens!
Glow is connected to the JANET network with a 1Gbps link – that’s 1024Mbps, the equivalent of 284 average* home broadband connections!
*based on an Ofcom report, published January 2009
Where are the hamsters in their wheels which provide the power? My S1 class want to know!
Next week: How we decided on the revolting colour schemes for the themes using a combination of purple purple and…puce.
PS: Mr Reid IS a geek. The geekiest geek in geekdom or at least Moray! But he’s OUR geek and we love him so!
Mmm… is this the infamous Glow cupboard of which we hear Katie Barrowman brag????
Someone buy that server a Glow Badge immediately…
Good news on the themes front, Dave… we’ll be having a competition really soon to design new themes! No limits to colour palettes then
There is an actual, real glow cupboard Neil – Sinclair has pictures! Katie denies all knowledge but it actually had a sign on the door that said Glow Cupboard!
is this the photo you meant? http://twitpic.com/abm03
};8)
It is indeed