CASE STUDY : IT MANAGEMENT

One of the largest health and sciences publishing companies with a global footprint of over 5,000 employees in over 20 countries, providing many of the world’s most distinguished journals and references to over 20 million users in the healthcare and academic fields.

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Cloud-based infrastructure platform for next generation product offering

Control Group designed and delivered an infrastructure solution that combined the elastic and self-healing capabilities of Amazon EC2 with the powerful on-demand provisioning of virtual machine instances using Puppet. Akamai Global Traffic Management is employed to route a user or institution to the closest EC2 region. Each regional data center can dynamically scale up to meet traffic requirements and scale down to reduce hosting costs during off hours. Additionally, traffic can be redirected manually or dynamically within or between regions.

Virtual machine instances are no longer upgraded or maintained, they are simply terminated and new instances, configured at runtime with the latest patches and software, take their place. Each instance automatically enrolls in its respective cluster or load balanced farm without user intervention. Machine instance configurations are managed alongside application codebase within a source code management system and deployed as a fully tested configuration assuring uniformity of environments from development and QA through to production.

The application designed and implemented by the client takes advantage of Oracle Coherence clustered L2 caching and leverages Solr for search, moving extremely rich and complex content closer to the user. Once authenticated, all media and small objects are served to the client over Akamai’s global CDN.