SpringOne 2009: Case study – European Patent Office

European Patent OfficeDisclaimer: This entry has been written while listening to the talk. Please forgive me any typographical or grammatical errors resulting from this approach.

Roland Nelson and Pearse Coulter are going to talk about the European Patent Office (EPO) used Spring in oder to implement an extremely high-volume web based offering.

Sadly the talk was very sparsely visited, partially maybe due to the somewhat hidden room. AMS (version 1.0.6) seems to be one of the focal points of the talk – I personally hope for a detailed indepth look at what they build.

EPO is already today bigger than the EU because more states are involved in patent law.

Here are a few statistics about the applications running:

  • 7000 employees from 30 nations at five sites in four countries. EPO earns the money it spends itself.
  • More than 400 million records in over 100 databses, morte than 6000 journals.
  • esp@cenet, the central application, is used by 700.000 users with more than 8.900.000 searches resulting in a traffic of more than 150 GB.
  • For Open Patent Services (OPS) they recommended to use the AxionSoapMessagingFactory and not anything DOM-based since this will kill the server in high volume applications.
  • At least eight different physical backend systems (from mainframe to databases) are used in buildin typical web pages due to the variable amount of information involved in patents.
  • About 100 JBoss instances are running in production, about 500 of them are running in total when development, testing, etc. is included.
  • There are 7 P-Series servers and 130 LPARS running AIX 5.3 with 45 VMWare ESX host servers and about 50 virtual machines.
  • All the patent data sits in two backend mainframes (Z10 with 8225 MIPS, Z10 with 180 MIPS + 27 backup CPUs).
  • Storage includes 2 x 150 TB mirrored data.

Roland stressed that AMS is a great help for them for deploying to a rather vast cluster of systems with varying technologies and very intense usage patterns. The licensing costs for alternative solutions from SpringSource competition according to Pearse was prohibitive and usually these other solutions covered but some of the requirements. The solution from Nagios was rather work-intensive and did not provide enough drilldown data when using reporting. ITIL adoption added more monitoring and reporting requirements.

One day of patent outage at the patent office means a loss of 10 million euros – thus the high needs for efficient monitoring. Pearse stressed how easy and efficient it is with AMS to both add new plugins as well as configure alerts. Auto-discovery also is a big plus considering the fact that they are running more than a hundred JBoss instances. Basic monitoring needs by now are covered by the AMS setup, now EPO looks into deeper integration like ITIL reporting, SLA monitoring, etc. Finally they stressed their concern with cost reduction – technology makes only sense if it helps to reduce costs or provide direly needed other benefits.

The sample patents BTW were very interesting (a baby patting machine, a rifle with a mounted whisky glass and a van with internal room for people and the horse pulling the van) and served as a nice sidetrack.

To sum it up: I liked the case study, I found the insights interesting and honest and thus am a happy visitor.

Comments are closed.