David A. Chappell writes about a concrete example of one of Oracle’s customers, Verizon Wireless, who is in the process of going green by rewriting their fraud detection application using SOA, EDA, and Web 2.0, and as a result plan to eliminate 6 tons of hardware from their datacenter, and reduce power consumption by 99.5% from 200 kW/h down to 1100 W/h.
From a software and architecture perspective, this is an exciting story about how Verizon Wireless is building a new Fraud Detection application which uses Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), BPEL process management, a business rules engine together with a Web 2.0 style Flash/Flex UI to build what would be referred to in financial services as a straight-through processing application.
In the process of doing this, they are dramatically reducing the amount of code that has been written, and the amount of data that needs to be stored locally. As such, they plan to eliminate 6 E-class Sun boxes using ~192 processors and replace them with a single 8 core processor on a Sun UltraSPARC T1 using the Niagara chip architecture.
The old application is based on J2EE using what was available in the mid to late 90’s. It happened to replicate the entire data warehouse of call detail records for use by the fraud detection application. It also had a lot of procedural custom code that was hand written by 5 FTE over 2 years, some stuff that was ported from Forte to J2EE, and 100s of JSPs feeding (circa 1995) html 3.0 pages with data.
The author plans to provide more detail about their service architecture in the future, but here is the basic outline of the new application structure:
The BPEL process invokes a number of services, which includes going out directly to the source of the call detail records to get the information necessary to enrich the event data. It is then fed into a rules engine to check for violations, make decisions based on policy, and then on to generate more detailed reports. (This is the SOA part of it)
So, back to the “going green” part - They are working with a third party energy consultant to produce the final number on energy reduction once they go into production (they are in UAT stage now), but here is their best estimate given what is known today.
Read the complete article in XML.com.
