"Grid Control" Helps Water-Quality Watchdog Pool Resources

It seems only natural for water-quality regulators to pool their data resources. That is why the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Middleton, Wis., emphasizes sharing IT services within government. Now, this resource pooling philosophy has reached fruition, thanks in part to Oracle Database 10g and Enterprise Manager Grid Control.

The pooling concept grew out of the understanding that communities sharing borders have a common interest in public safety. After all, if a manufacturing plant dumps toxic sludge into a stream, its pollution flows across jurisdictional lines through lakes, rivers and groundwater, becoming a common problem.

According to Harry House, group leader at the U.S Geological Survey Wisconsin District Data Center, the shared services model "offers the best of both worlds by encouraging creative initiatives in a governmental agency."

The approach is paying off. House noted that the data center is two-thirds funded through offering its project services to other agencies. It not only spares each agency the hassle of IT development, administrative time and equipment costs, it ultimately helps the environment by opening floodgates to research information previously locked in each individual agency's databases.

Fine Tuning
Managing a growing data center with limited resources hasn't been a problem for the USGS. All databases in the Middleton data center run on Database 10g, which the IT team manages with Grid Control. Jim Statz, DBA for the data center, said he appreciates having a single, comprehensive display of the center's entire infrastructure and believes it holds promise for managing USGS Oracle servers around the country from centralized sites. "Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g offers new functionality, never before available, such as tuning advisories and automatic patching. We now have more fine-grained capabilities in choosing types of recoveries and the ways we run backups. It's much easier to access any server's performance and investigate issues as they occur."

House's team deployed Grid Control immediately prior to a USGS security inspection. When asked how the center handled patches and what versions of software they were on, House pointed to Grid Control's browser-based interface, which instantly gave the security inspectors most of the information they needed. "The inspectors practically fell off their chairs," House said. "I explained that if they had a browser, a login and a firewall set up to communicate with our Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, they wouldn't have to ask me - they could just take a look and see everything we're running. It quickly answered many of the security inspectors' questions and could help assure them that the system was secure and up-to-date."

In addition, Oracle Database 10g's self-management and automated administration capabilities arrived just in time, House said. "As more agencies report data into our systems, we must ensure that we meet our customers' demands. Just because customers don't have a lot of resources doesn't mean they don't have high expectations," House continued. "They see what's on Google or Yahoo, sites that have millions of dollars behind their systems, and they want us to create something like that for them. We have to figure out ways to supply as much as we can for as little cost as possible. That's how having systems such as Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Enterprise Manager with Grid Control helps."

Easing the IT Burden
Formed in the mid-1990s, the data center now manages approximately 40 percent of the USGS internal and external Web servers, plus several interagency water quality projects. Its growing list includes projects that are local, regional and national in scope and originate inside and outside the USGS.

The data center's responsibilities range from developing and managing infrastructures for mercury pollution analysis of water systems throughout the United States to beach health information for the Great Lakes in Wisconsin, which monitors dozens of beaches and issues alerts to bathers when pollution rates threaten health. Additional cooperators include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state agencies such as the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District.

The USGS data center's production and test databases run on Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server, while its application servers run primarily on Windows. "We chose Linux primarily for its stability and better performance in load balancing," House said. "We switched from Windows to Linux despite having only one person on staff with Linux skills when all others knew Windows, because the extra stability was worth it."

Why Oracle?
The USGS Middleton data center required a solution that was easy to deploy and manage and could scale to meet its growing requirements. "We chose Oracle Database 10g for self-management features like automatic memory tuning," House said. "Its comprehensive set of advisors makes management easier, which is important because we have only one DBA to manage all our servers. Oracle Grid control has been a huge hit with our DBA. Using proactive alerts, availability and performance issues were significantly reduced. Once a problem is diagnosed, the tool provides expert recommendation and contextual help. In many cases, the corrective response can be fully automated. He has more time to spend on strategic projects, which is a boon for the whole IT management team as well."

"Philosophically, I prefer to choose a single vendor with a wide range of products so our team won't have to modify code and learn new skills. Also, I feel it is more likely that all the various technologies a typical project may require will install easily and work together. In my experience, a best-of-breed approach has been problematic at times. It can be difficult to get an accurate assessment of breed rankings, which can change often. If you decide to switch technologies, that is usually extremely expensive in terms of licensing, retraining and redeployment costs."

Implementation Process
Apart from some initial assistance, House and his staff didn't require the help of outside consultants. "We used Oracle Consulting when we first started," he said. "Our consultant was an excellent program architect for our data warehouse and helped us get that off the ground. It worked well for us because at that time we were babes in the woods regarding architecture and data systems. Our Oracle consultant also trained us in best practices as part of the deal. That experience provided a strong foundation for us to work from as we moved forward on future projects ourselves. It was well worth it."

United States Geological Survey, Water Resource Discipline

Headquarters: Middleton, Wis.
Industry: Government
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