Northwest Airlines, Inc

• Won approval of an Image Server Replacement project over an Andersen Consulting bid.   The proposal was won by convincing management to perform a limited risk prototype, a project which tests the most risk prone areas of the implementation.  Successfully designed an architecture to manage 600,000 image groupings on a mixture of magnetic disk and tape without the use of a relational database.  The architecture consists of a Sun Sparc 1000 system (sextuple cpu with 500 Megabytes of memory) with 1.2 Terabytes of RAID 5 magnetic disk storage (DEC Storageworks system) and 10 Terabytes of Digital Linear Tape (ATL products 2640 tape silo, quantity two).  Developed a multi-threaded image server in the C programming language.  Also developed FAX3 to TIFF image conversion software, image acceptance software and Hierarchical Storage Management interfaces to Alphatronix systems management application.
• System was put into production 3 months after the arrival of the hardware.  Production highlights include;
  • The ability to request newer images from the Open System platform while older images are served from the legacy platform.
  • Sub-second delivery of online images.
  • Near on-line access to all images as compared 1/7 realized in the optical system.
  • Maintenance costs lowered to 1/6 of support for the optical system.
  • Media costs lowered to a fraction of that observed on the optical system.
  • Ability to send images to the Open Systems platform in parallel to the legacy platform during a stabilization period.
  • Ability to decommission and sell on the used market products used in the legacy system.
• Analysis of a co-existence (legacy to open systems) application led to the implementation of a physical storage layout, increasing the application performance by 12%.  Behavior of the Unix system indicated the existence of a over worked single drive.  Implementation of RAID 0+1 increased performance and was implemented transparent to the application.