Close
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
Read Down
Sign in
Close
Welcome!Log into your account
Forgot your password?
Read Down
Password recovery
Recover your password
Close
Search
Menu
Search
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
More
    Home Applications
    • Applications

    Residents Get Flood of Data

    By
    Brian Fonseca
    -
    December 6, 2004
    Share
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Linkedin

      A lack of mutually accessible and consistent information about the water level of the Mississippi River at any given time compelled businesses and citizens along the river last year to demand federal action.

      At the core of the problem were an antiquated Web design and the network of water-control sites for the Water Control division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Specifically, the myriad sites in districts along the river offered distinctive, nonintegrated water-level data. And nowhere was there a destination that aggregated all that data.

      As a result, the barge industry, other businesses and the general public could not know the full extent of a potential risk. For the corps, the answer was clear: It needed to consolidate the information in a single repository that was robust enough to withstand the flood of traffic during inclement weather.

      “Within our corps and within our division, each district office had Web pages that were all somewhat unique, so it made it difficult for the public to plow through that information based on where you lived,” said Jim Stiman, chief of water control for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Especially during flooding season, people who lived along the rivers were concerned about when the rivers rise and how high they go.”

      Located in Rock Island, Ill., the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers division is primarily a civil-works district administering federal water-resource development programs in large portions of Iowa and Illinois and smaller portions of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Missouri. Primary missions of the military organization include navigation, environmental preservation, flood control, regulatory functions, recreation, meteorological information and federal real estate management, as well as mobilization for federal disaster response and national defense and for emergency operations.

      To address the Mississippi challenge, the corps built its own Web-based application called River Gages. The software features individually customizable content management modules, built using Macromedia Inc.s ColdFusion code-scripting tools, and runs on an Oracle Corp. 9i database and Application Server.

      Stiman said River Gages provided his department with a simple form of data input from nondeveloper personnel and dramatically boosted productivity levels by cutting down on isolated maintenance concerns at each location.

      “As security became more and more of an issue, it took more time away from engineering and operating projects because you kept busy patching servers and other security issues,” said Stiman. “From a water-control perspective, it allows us to spend more time on forecasts and operating projects, rather than having to deal with some of the information management issues.”

      The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers next step led to the recruitment of IBM technology reseller and IBM channel partner OpenDemand Systems Inc. and its browser-based OpenLoad testing software. The product was entrusted to make sure the throughput of the newly centralized IT system could handle thousands of hits and find potential bottlenecks in its Oracle environment.

      Next Page: Quick Implementation

      Quick Implementation

      The softwares easy-to-configure capabilities proved the perfect fit with the corps engineers programming skills level, said Donald Doane, president of OpenDemand, based in Newark, N.J.

      “They wanted test tools they could quickly implement and not have to spend a lot of time scripting—having to become testing experts. They just wanted something that could get it done very quickly. Thats really where IBM and OpenLoad came in,” said Doane. “The reality is [the corps] can spend all that time on data integration, but if users come in and they cant get a response, thats a major problem. They wanted to make sure it was meeting users expectations.”

      The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Oracle environment runs on Solaris servers and is Unix-based. OpenLoad is featured on a separate Windows box.

      /zimages/5/28571.gifClick here to read about an enterprise resource planning implementation used by the U.S. Army.

      The IBM and OpenLoad software was used to simulate hundreds of users hammering the corps system and accessing different parts of River Gages at different times.

      OpenLoad can be installed on a central workstation and accessed anywhere from a browser. The software creates scenarios or business processes emulating how a user navigates through an application, simulating different browsers, platforms and transaction speeds to determine if service levels are met for a myriad of possibilities.

      Following the OpenLoad implementation, it was soon discovered that a number of areas in the Oracle system required changes. For instance, servers monitored during OpenLoad testing revealed that a CPU on a server running the Oracle database was getting maxed out too quickly.

      “Its kind of funny. In this case, they used [IBMs] WebSphere and DB2 to find out how to run their Oracle system more efficiently,” said Doane.

      Doane said that a greater number of customers, including the Army, are finding that by testing their systems, they can save projected costs by reducing unnecessary hardware purchases.

      In terms of future development, OpenDemand will extend its monitoring capabilities to provide information across database, application and Web servers to offer drill-down diagnostics. The features will be part of the softwares Version 5.0 release in February.

      River Gages is setting a high bar for integrated data access and is drawing praise from other corps districts that are interested in using the technology.

      “They see our division Web site, and they say, How can we get involved with this?” noted Stiman. “Who knows, down the road this might be a model for standardized Web pages for the entire Corps of Engineers for the nation. There is some interest out there.”

      /zimages/5/28571.gifCheck out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis about productivity and business solutions.

      Avatar
      Brian Fonseca
      Brian Fonseca is a senior writer at eWEEK who covers database, data management and storage management software, as well as storage hardware. He works out of eWEEK's Woburn, Mass., office. Prior to joining eWEEK, Brian spent four years at InfoWorld as the publication's security reporter. He also covered services, and systems management. Before becoming an IT journalist, Brian worked as a beat reporter for The Herald News in Fall River, Mass., and cut his teeth in the news business as a sports and news producer for Channel 12-WPRI/Fox 64-WNAC in Providence, RI. Brian holds a B.A. in Communications from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

      MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

      Android

      Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro: Durability for Tough...

      Chris Preimesberger - December 5, 2020 0
      Have you ever dropped your phone, winced and felt the pain as it hit the sidewalk? Either the screen splintered like a windshield being...
      Read more
      Cloud

      Why Data Security Will Face Even Harsher...

      Chris Preimesberger - December 1, 2020 0
      Who would know more about details of the hacking process than an actual former career hacker? And who wants to understand all they can...
      Read more
      Cybersecurity

      How Veritas Is Shining a Light Into...

      eWEEK EDITORS - September 25, 2020 0
      Protecting data has always been one of the most important tasks in all of IT, yet as more companies become data companies at the...
      Read more
      Big Data and Analytics

      How NVIDIA A100 Station Brings Data Center...

      Zeus Kerravala - November 18, 2020 0
      There’s little debate that graphics processor unit manufacturer NVIDIA is the de facto standard when it comes to providing silicon to power machine learning...
      Read more
      Apple

      Why iPhone 12 Pro Makes Sense for...

      Wayne Rash - November 26, 2020 0
      If you’ve been watching the Apple commercials for the past three weeks, you already know what the company thinks will happen if you buy...
      Read more
      eWeek


      Contact Us | About | Sitemap

      Facebook
      Linkedin
      RSS
      Twitter
      Youtube

      Property of TechnologyAdvice.
      Terms of Service | Privacy Notice | Advertise | California - Do Not Sell My Information

      © 2021 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

      Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.

      ×