University of Cincinnati relies on Stratus Avance™ high-availability virtualization software for data collection on the northern edge of the world in Barrow, Alaska

Business situation

Meteorologists need comprehensive weather data from all over the world to predict dangerous weather events. Climatologists need the same data to create a historical record for studying long-term climate trends. Collecting and distributing this data is expensive and labor-intensive.

Conventional weather stations are usually composed of costly specialized instruments that store and communicate data in proprietary formats. Technicians have to venture into extreme heat and cold in every corner of the world to manually download weather data from the collection systems. The proprietary data formats make the information difficult to share.

To help improve weather data collection and sharing, the National Science Foundation awarded a grant to the University of Cincinnati’s geography department to develop a low-cost, automated data collection system. A geography department team lead by graduate student Andrew Rettig and Dr. Richard Beck envisioned a network of low-cost data collection appliances that automatically send weather data to databases that convert it into a universally accessible XML format. To accommodate areas with limited networking bandwidth, regional FTP servers would compile data from the appliances and hold it for as long as it took to send it over low-speed satellite links.

The geography department team hired LAN Solutions, a Cincinnati technology consultancy, to design the pilot network for the North Slope of Alaska, one of the coldest and remotest places on earth. The network consists of Linux-based weather data collection appliances made from off-the-shelf hardware and software. The appliances are networked to two servers at the Barrow Arctic Research Center (BARC).

Business objectives

The two main challenges in developing the automated data collection system were:

• keeping it inexpensive – around $4,000 for each weather station instead of the $20,000 cost of a conventional station; and
• making it failure resistant. Barrow is 320 miles south of the Arctic Circle, 500 miles from Fairbanks and 1,000 miles from Anchorage, which means IT expertise is in short supply. A server outage could knock the data collection system for several days, if not weeks, which would break the historical record and deprive forecasters of useful short-term information.

With those needs in mind, the project’s objectives were:

• near-real-time data collection;
• high application availability;
• high data security;
• industry-standard hardware and software to control costs; and
• minimal technical management requirements.

The Stratus Avance solution

LAN Solutions President Tim Rettig – Andrew Rettig’s brother – was the university team’s primary technology consultant on the project. To balance the university’s need for data integrity, reliability and low cost, he recommended a virtualized system. Two instances of the FTP application running in a virtual environment would replicate the data in real time. That eliminated the need for a costly storage area network to guard against lost data.

“As the geography department team developed the specs for the system, it became obvious they needed a virtualized system rather than a single Windows box that could fail,” Tim Rettig said. “They said they wanted to put in a high-availability server, and when I found out why they needed one, I asked if they had looked into virtualization. They hadn’t, and when I explained how it worked, they said that was perfect. As soon as I saw the Stratus product, I knew it was what they needed. It provided the right combination of availability and versatility. The plan was to put an infrastructure in place, then add to it as needed. Right now we have two virtual machines running on the Avance platform, but we could run a dozen if we needed to.”

Tim Rettig recommended Stratus Avance running on two Dell x86 servers. Avance delivers close to 99.999 percent availability (less than five minutes per year of unscheduled downtime) in a virtualized environment. Avance’s high degree of availability is an insurance policy against the BARC’s isolation from IT expertise. It also enables researchers back in Cincinnati to remotely deploy a virtual servers in Barrow whenever they need a new server for a special project.

“The remoteness was a big concern. The servers were going to be in a data center, but there was no full-time engineer on site. A server outage could knock out the system for several days, at least,” he said. “The center is staffed by scientists who are comfortable with technology, but they aren’t IT people. For a serious failure, we’d have the choice of shipping a server hundreds of miles at $700 a trip, or talking them through changing a drive or a fan.”

Tim Rettig uses Avance’s integrated monitoring features to manage the system from Cincinnati. “I can do almost anything from here that I could do on site, right up to upgrading the firmwear in the servers,” he said.

Business impact

Tim Rettig set up the Avance system the BARC in June 2009. University staff downloads data from the system once a week, but will eventually be collecting it daily. Since June, the systems has exceeded performance expectations and has experienced no unscheduled downtime.

“It has been rock solid. It’s sophisticated enough to do the work yet simple enough to be reliable,” Beck said. “The only thing we do to keep it running is update the operating system now and then.”

Andrew Rettig is developing a database to convert the weather data into XML so it can interoperate with weather mapping systems for near-real-time updates over the Web.

Quick facts

Solution profile

• Provides automated data collection from appliances deployed over hundreds of miles of Arctic landscape
• 99.999 percent availability ensures data integrity
• Integrated monitoring enables remote management of servers in an isolated facility with no engineer on site

Products

• Stratus Avance software
• Industry-standard x86 servers
• Database application

About Stratus

Stratus Technologies focuses exclusively on helping its customers keep critical business operations online without interruption. Business continuity requires resiliency and superior availability throughout the IT infrastructure, including virtual environments. Stratus delivers a range of solutions that includes software-based high availability, fault-tolerant servers, availability consulting and assessment, and remote systems management services. Based on its 29 years of expertise in product and services technology for total availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries. For more information, visit www.stratus.com.