LAMP Proposal ¶

A draft spec for the BRICCS services is attached at the end...
Discussion points, not in any particular order:

Live Production Systems ¶

Following details are required:

• Number of users
• Hours of use during the day
• Peak or sensitive periods
• Level of activity (transactions per day)
• Quality of service
  1. Speed of response for a user
  2. Speed of restore after failure
  3. Can we afford to lose transactions?
  4. Turn around time for a support request
• Type of data stored and usage

VM's and Applications ¶

To keep applications separate, it would be a good idea to have one application per VM.

Is this a good idea? Can anyone see variations on this? For example:

• Does it apply to test systems?
• Does it apply to dev systems (eg: TRAC, svn)?

Managed versus Capacity only Systems ¶

This is my (Jeff's) understanding of this. "Managed" is seen from an RCS point of view. That is:

• A "Managed" system would be one administered by RCS.
• A "Capacity Only" one is seen as being administered elsewhere. RCS supplies only the capacity.

I'm not sure exactly what this would mean in practice. Perhaps it's just a rule of thumb. But there are important considerations behind this...

• Will the live production systems (eg: Labels Webapp, caTissue, i2b2) be administered by RCS? If not BRICCS must supply the admin side of things.
• The level of admin might need to vary. Take test systems. This could be Unit testing, Integration testing, or Acceptance testing. I can see this range of testing being required where the admin side of a live system is complicated. See next point.
• Whoever manages the i2b2 data warehouse (University or UHLT), the live systems cannot be administered in isolation. The two systems must be synchronized in some way. A failure on one side will have ramifications for the other.
• The i2b2 side can support numbers of projects and within a project, numbers of ontologies. What constitutes a project is open to debate, but a good first idea is to take a source/stream of data (eg: the Onyx questionnaire) as a project. Now each project has its own set of SQL tables, and each ontology within a single project can have one or more ontology SQL tables. So one could expect over time that a live system would change the number of SQL tables within its remit, which would suppose some DBA activity. Who would own that activity?

I cannot see a simple way through this wood at the moment. If I were asked to administer a system, I would like to have some say before I took it over, even if it were only to vet and test the procedures.

Acquisition of VMs ¶

It seems unlikely there will be creation and access to new VM's on demand. So there would need to be some forward planning of what is required for a given future period.