Guangdong Provincial Examination Center becomes the data center for candidates on the Sun platform

Customer name: Guangdong Provincial Examination Center

Project Name: Management Information System of Guangdong Examination Center

Main equipment: Sun Fire 3800 and Sun Fire F280 and other servers, T3 storage array and Sun ONE software, etc.

Application: Information Management

User evaluation: The Guangdong Examination Center can have today's informatization, on the one hand, it depends on the leadership's attention to informatization, and provides strong support in terms of funds and policies. On the other hand, it depends on the advanced, open, and easy expansion of the J2EE multi-layer structure. System building ideas. In addition, the stability of Sun hardware is also a guarantee that the entire system has never had any problems in three years.

Walking into the office of the Technical Statistics Department of the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center, the deepest feeling is that the "hardware" and "software" are quite different here. The so-called "hardware" is their simple office environment like many institutions, ordinary desks, some old chairs, and small computer rooms. The "software" is extremely advanced. Brand-new servers such as Sun Fire 3800 and Sun Fire F280, T3 storage arrays, imported marking machines, notebooks in front of everyone's desk, and more importantly, the people here are "configured" with the latest Ideas, state-of-the-art planning and the clearest goals for the future.

Stagger

Since 1997, the Guangdong Provincial Admissions Office (the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center was established after the institutional reform in 2000) has begun to do things that others did not expect to do. At that time, they purchased Sun's server and started the joint recruitment work for Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, mainly using it for admission on the Internet, which is convenient for Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan candidates to query information online.

Later, the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center successively entered the general college entrance examination, adult colleges, and technical secondary school admission information systems, and initially established a registration, assessment and admission system for the general college entrance examination, adult colleges, and general secondary schools in Guangdong Province. However, the Department of Technical Statistics In the words of personnel, it is a typical island of information. The various systems do not communicate and are not related, and information resources cannot be shared.

In 2003, the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center faced huge pressure of data management for candidates. There were 310,000 ordinary college entrance examination students, 300,000 adult college entrance examination students, and more than 1 million self-exam students. The data for online assessment alone exceeded 1TB. How to manage individuals?

They are prepared by themselves. As early as 2001, they realized that management must be informatization, information disclosure and resource sharing. The first thing they thought of was learning. After surveying several good provinces in the surrounding area, they had their own doubts and ideas. At that time, all provincial examination centers used a C / S structure. The client needed to install software. Once the system was upgraded, these software would have to be updated again. Users could only accept the system content unidirectionally, but could not form interactions. Connected, unable to share hardware resources, is still an island of information.

To solve these problems, the people in the technical statistics department realized that, under the premise that network bandwidth in Guangdong makes speed no longer an issue, it is necessary to abandon the C / S structure and adopt the already popular B / S. More importantly, from the beginning, it is necessary to apply a scientific three-tier architecture and set aside interfaces for future linking and expansion between systems.

This time, the people in the technical statistics department had a profile, and they began to select the type. Is it on NT platform or UNIX? Obviously, the operating interface of the NT platform is relatively simple and easy to use, and the UNIX platform is relatively stable. After careful consideration, they chose the UNIX platform and Sun.

The technical statistics department said that there were several reasons for choosing Sun at the time, mainly from the perspective of business and technology, because the admissions examination business has a high degree of social attention and is a very critical business. Any little mistake is all for a candidate. Technically, one is that the UNIX platform is obviously stable. In contrast, the experience of using NT often needs to be restarted after a period of time. They do n’t want to take this risk. Second, since 1996, Sun ’s servers have never been down. Give them a peace of mind; the third is the most important, the structure of Sun ONE has been proposed at that time, the portal and security certification of the front desk, the middle application server, the database and storage of the back office are the models that the test center hopes to build; four Sun is cost-effective, has long worked in the education industry, has a 90% market share, and has a good reputation and foundation.

So they decided to ask Sun for help, and everything started.

Speed ​​up

They first clarified the development goals in recent years, and then, under Sun ’s consulting suggestions, according to their needs and Sun ’s suggestions, they inquired through various channels to build the entire online admissions examination system according to the structure of Sun ONE. The front desk is PORTAL, like a portal, doing digital authentication, the middle is middleware, and the backstage is the data storage management of provincial admissions office users, school users, and candidates. The business handled by each type of person is different, and the permissions and interface given after login are also different. The Provincial Recruitment Office is responsible for policy formulation and supervision. The school is responsible for the admission of candidates for the school. The city and county recruitment offices are responsible for their respective businesses. Candidates log in to this website to check whether they are admitted and how they score. All people, as long as they can access the Internet and are authorized and certified, can log in to the admission examination platform anytime and anywhere through a browser. The technical staff of the Technical Statistics Department admitted that it is relatively difficult to get started with UNIX, and it is difficult to master the operating system. Especially when developing on it, it involves the understanding of the kernel, but it can be overcome slowly.

In 2001, under the planning of the examination center, the system began to build and test. In 2001, the entire Guangdong college entrance examination was approved in advance, and the first batch of admissions has been carried out online, with a data volume of 20G; in 2002, the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center conducted an online assessment of the two college entrance examinations. Online admission, nearly 150G of data.

At the beginning, the test center only made online assessments for two ordinary high-level exam papers. The high-speed scanner scanned the candidate's answer sheets as an image into the system. The assessment teachers distributed in each assessment site conducted online assessments through the network. . The size of each picture is about 100K-300K, and the marking teacher is completely out of the tedious process of manual marking, which greatly improves the work efficiency.

The technical statistics department explained that Guangdong's network speed is very fast, so teachers will not have speed problems in the field. The current test center has 1000M of broadband. In addition, it also uses middleware technology and load balancing technology to distribute the load to each server. For load balancing.

For ordinary college entrance examination candidates, only online admission is currently available. Candidates can also enter the relevant information such as the test number, and can check their scores and admission status in real time. In addition, in 2002, during the online admission process of ordinary colleges and universities, candidates can also make up for their volunteers in real time, which is convenient for candidates to choose their own institutions, adjust and modify their volunteers.

Clear planning

In addition to the general college entrance examination, the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center intends to migrate the adult college entrance examination and self-study examination business to the Internet for the past two years. The staff of the Technical Statistics Department has calculated an account, and the Guangdong Province will organize 23 large-scale national unified examinations every year, which means that it will be averaged twice a month, and the general assessment and data will be kept for at least half a year. In other words, the amount of data that must be stored for two exams is about -2TB. The two existing Sun T3s obviously cannot meet the needs. They plan to purchase additional T3s in the first half of this year and migrate to the data center.

This is just a system procurement plan based on the amount of data, and more importantly, a system development plan. In 2003, the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center planned to conduct an online assessment of all 11 subjects in the general college entrance examination, and the amount of background data would exceed 1TB. In addition, they are also preparing for online registration and online admission for the adult college entrance examination. Of course, they will continue to refer to the successful experience of the ordinary college entrance examination, and gradually start the online registration and online assessment of the ordinary college entrance examination and self-study examination.

Coupled with graduate student enrollment management and transfer student enrollment management, the Guangdong Provincial Examination Center will become a data center with all the candidates' information. In fact, there is still a lot to be done by the technical statistics department. For example, because the system is open and extensible, they plan to develop the OA system on the basis of this platform, and then use a unified platform for login and management.

There are only 6 people in the technical statistics department. They need to manage devices and systems such as firewalls, DNS, application servers, load balancers, portal, databases, operating systems, middleware, network storage, and switching routes. In addition, ordinary colleges, adult colleges, and universities The management of a series of admission examinations such as college, graduate, and regular college entrance examination students, although very busy, but everything is in order.

The person in charge of the Technical Statistics Department said that being able to have today's informatization depends on the leadership's emphasis on informatization on the one hand, and provides strong support in terms of funding and policies. Expanded system construction ideas. In addition, the stability of Sun hardware is also a guarantee that the entire system has never had any problems in three years.