Sun blackboardwp10 1_07

BLACKBOARD ON SUN
REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE
OPTIMIZING eLEARNING
White Paper
October 2007

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Table of Contents
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
The Sun advantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Scope of this white paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Performance maturity model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
The Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
Reference architecture components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Key benefits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Designed for high service levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Application tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
Database tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
Storage tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
Management tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
Best-of-breed monitoring and management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Validated configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
Small campus configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Medium campus configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Large campus configuration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
The Sun advantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
For more information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

3 Executive Summary Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 1
Executive Summary

Recent technology advances have brought a new generation of Web services and col-
laborative communities that are changing the way that people work, live, learn, and
create. Sun refers to this new era as the “Participation Age”—an age where partici-
pants aren’t just acquiring information from the Web, but are also contributing to the
information, refining it, and sharing it.

The Participation Age has indeed changed the shape of education. Today's students
have the ability to access educational resources and content from anywhere, with a
high degree of sharing, collaboration and participation. Student participation in online
courses and communities is rising due to a number of factors:
• Globalization
The Web has enabled people from diverse cultures and backgrounds to participate in
each other's learning, enriching the experience for both students and teachers.
• Growing population of learners
The overall population of learners is rising as children of the Baby Boomer genera-
tion are now reaching college age or are already in the workforce where they need
continuing education. In addition, online learning enables participation by students
in remote locations around the world who might otherwise not enroll in courses.
These growth factors are pushing the limits of the current worldwide infrastructure
for onsite classroom learning and are forcing institutions to consider alternative
ways to serve the growing student population.
• Digital natives
A term coined by Marc Prensky of the University of North Carolina, digital natives
refers to a new generation that has grown up with digital technology, and uses it in
ways that previous generations do not. Digital natives tend to do many things at the
same time and can function well with multiple simultaneous modes of interaction.
They expect to have digital content and want their online learning experience to be
multimedia, self-directed, and entertaining.

The net result of these trends is that eLearning is no longer an experimental or
optional program. Indeed, eLearning has become a mission-critical application in
many institutions, often second only to email in terms of the level of user activity and
IT system resources required. Its mission-critical nature has created some new require-
ments from an IT perspective. Today’s enterprise eLearning initiatives are deployed
using sophisticated Course Management System (CMS’s) with requirements such as:
• High availability
• Consistent and rapid user response times
• Conservation of data center floor space, power and cooling
• Scalability to support rapid growth
• Easy provisioning and management of resources

4 Executive Summary Sun Microsystems, Inc.

To meet these requirements, an eLearning solution must be based on a scalable hard-
ware and software architecture that can be easily optimized to deliver high perform-
ance while improving the utilization of IT resources and reducing power, cooling and
floor space requirements.

Sun and Blackboard have defined a reference architecture that can help customers
reduce the time, cost, and complexity of deploying and optimizing their eLearning
solutions. The architecture utilizes proven components that offer maximum perform-
ance and scalability, making it much easier for customers to achieve consistently high
service levels when deploying Blackboard Academic Suite™ software. Sun Fire™ servers
with CoolThreads™ technology provide the foundation for the scalable architecture and
are deployed in a horizontally scaled application tier that offers extremely high
throughput. Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers have been shown to deliver outstanding
price/performance for Blackboard Academic Suite software and are the industry’s most
efficient platform in terms of power and cooling requirements.

Sun and Blackboard have also validated the performance of specific configurations of
the architecture for small, medium and large campus environments. The validated
configurations can help customers reduce risk and save valuable time in designing and
deploying an eLearning solution.

The Sun advantage
The Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture takes advantage of Sun technologies
that can help customers more easily optimize their IT infrastructure and reduce risk.
Institutions can gain the following benefits by deploying Blackboard on Sun systems
and utilizing the network computing expertise of Sun Services consultants:
• Reduced risk through proven reliability and scalability as well as unbeatable
performance
• Lower TCO due to outstanding price/performance and dramatic savings in space,
power and cooling
• Investment protection with an IT infrastructure that can easily scale to support
future needs and systems that are based on open standards with support for
multiple operating systems and a choice of multiple CPU architectures

Scope of this white paper
This white paper provides an overview of the Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture
and its benefits as well as pointers to help institutions make wise choices to optimize
their eLearning environment.

5 Introduction Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 2
Introduction

Rapidly growing demand for eLearning applications has created the need for a robust
and scalable enterprise eLearning infrastructure. The success of an eLearning initiative
is thus dependent on achieving predictable high performance and reliability for the
Course Management System (CMS) software and the servers and storage systems on
which it operates. Yet many educational institutions are operating with CMSs that are
neither architected for scalability and performance, nor managed with the kinds of
enterprise datacenter disciplines that have proven successful with other mission-critical
applications.

With limited IT budget and staff resources, most institutions cannot afford to overprovi-
sion hardware resources or assign a big IT staff to support their eLearning environ-
ment. Instead, they must find ways to squeeze more out or their eLearning
investments to deliver high services levels. IT teams that manage the eLearning envi-
ronment are often stretched thin and end up reacting to performance issues in “fire-
fighting” mode rather than taking proactive measures to stem problems before they
affect users. Furthermore, as eLearning solutions have grown larger and require more
hardware, they are subject to new constraints that affect today’s datacenter facilities.
Thus it has become important for eLearning implementations to minimize the need
for power, cooling and datacenter floor space.

In summary, institutions must achieve the following objectives for their eLearning
initiatives:
• High service levels—Systems must operate 24X7 with little downtime, planned or
unplanned and must be able handle spikes in user demand without degrading
response time
• Low TCO—Systems must be cost-effective to own and manage when considering
everything from hardware and software license costs to the system’s impact on
datacenter power and cooling costs
• Scalability—With a growing population of students and an ever-growing demand
for online delivery, the eLearning infrastructure must be easy to scale in support of
higher levels of throughput, more users and more online courses
• Easy to manage—With limited IT staff to assign to the project, it must be easy to
deploy and manage the solution so that service levels can be met without an exten-
sive IT staff

Achieving these objectives requires that institutions optimize their application and
operational environment for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. The first step in
this process is seeing the possibility for greater efficiency and identifying a roadmap
to get there. To that end, Blackboard has defined a performance maturity model that
includes five levels of development.


Performance maturity model
Performance maturity for Blackboard installations is dependent on how the organiza-
tion manages the following:
• Hardware servers, storage and network components
• Blackboard application environment
• Technical and IT operations processes
• Business processes
• User experience

Figure 1 highlights five levels of performance maturity that can be achieved by
Blackboard customers. As an organization progresses from one level to the next, user
service levels continue to increase and the time and cost required to achieve those
service levels continues to decline.

Blackboard Performance Maturity Model

Figure 1. Performance maturity model levels

The levels of the performance maturity model can be defined as follows:
• Level 1—Reactive and Exploratory
Organizations at this first level are reactive in their approach to service level man-
agement and tend to focus on component availability rather than availability or
performance of the application services. These organizations often have very few
processes in place. They are likely to have a backup and recovery policy, but most
likely do not have dedicated personnel for the Blackboard solution, nor processes and
tools for its management. Availability of infrastructure system components is generally
monitored in a somewhat manual fashion. Little or no action is taken unless an inci-
dent is reported by a user or a component failure is detected by the IT team.


• Level 2—Monitoring and Management
Institutions at the monitoring and instrumentation level take a more proactive
approach to maintaining service levels by optimizing the application environment.
These organizations tend to have secure connections and distributed configurations
that involve load-balancing and advanced storage solutions. They generally have
processes in place for backup and recovery as well as operational plans for maintain-
ing system and application optimization. At least one dedicated person on the IT
staff is focused on the Blackboard solution and is responsible for its success. It is
likely that they have one or more tools to manage the application environment.
When incidents occur, they are often related to software configuration or mainte-
nance. Performance issues and other problems that affect users are usually man-
aged by a swat team to achieve a quick resolution. Rarely, however, are measures
put into place to prevent the issue from occurring again.
• Level 3—Performance Optimizing
Performance optimizing clients spend their time enhancing technical processes.
Problems occur, but are generally handled by dedicated staff who resolve the issue
and try to put preventative processes in place so that problems do not recur. This
group of Blackboard customers is focused on making the application environment
faster and more scalable. They have processes for everything. They utilize forensic-
oriented monitoring and analysis tools to understand characteristics of the applica-
tion environment. Operational management tools are also used to simplify
administration and management. Performance issues rarely arise due to the proac-
tive, preventative management of the environment. When they do occur, there is a
practical methodology for identifying the root cause.
• Level 4—Business Optimizing
At the business optimizing level, the success of the Blackboard installation is meas-
ured in terms of business outcomes for the institution. Organizations at this level
spend their time enhancing business processes. New initiatives are lead by business
teams versus IT teams. If the institution anticipates a change in adoption, the tech-
nology team performs due diligence to support the initiative. Processes are in place,
as well as an arsenal of tools for managing the application ecosystem. Monitoring
dashboards may show the status of business level processes as opposed to availability
of system level components. System models may be used to predict the scalability,
capacity, and response times for proposed changes or new systems. The IT team is
generally more aware of potential issues due to greater alignment with the business
needs of the institution. Optimization of the application environment is integrated
with business planning so that future business needs are taken into consideration
as capacity or functional requirements. As in the previous level, performance issues
rarely arise and if they do, care is taken to prevent a recurrence.


• Level 5—Process Optimizing
At the process optimizing level, organizations are focused on how people are
impacted by the Blackboard system. This level incorporates all of the activities of all
the previous levels and also adds performance optimization across all phases of the
IT project lifecycle from concept to production and maintenance. Initiatives are
based on delivering the best user experience to all users because the application
is a competitive differentiator for the institution.

Educational institutions have traditionally been very decentralized in their IT imple-
mentations and thus have not placed significant emphasis on optimizing datacenter
applications and procedures. It should come as no surprise then that most Blackboard
customers are at level one of the performance maturity model and less than 30 per-
cent qualify for level two. Institutions that qualify for level three comprise less than ten
percent of the total Blackboard customer base and very few are at level four or five1.

The key factors that keep institutions from advancing to higher levels include:
• Cost—Most institutions have not invested in the monitoring and performance man-
agement tools that are required to be more proactive about monitoring and analyz-
ing performance trends and optimizing the application infrastructure to proactively
improve service levels and business-level outcomes.
• Skill sets—IT staff are often in short supply in educational institutions and it can
be difficult to hire or keep IT staff that have significant expertise in performance
management.
• Level of effort—Moving out of a reactive management mode and into a more
mature level can require an increased level of effort. Even though the advanced levels
of performance maturity offer greater efficiency and ultimately require less effort,
getting over the hurdle to get there can be a big challenge without outside help.

The Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture
The Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture is designed to help institutions move
more easily to levels two and three of the performance maturity model. It provides
a vision for enterprise performance optimization and can be used as a blueprint for
successfully optimizing the deployment and management of Blackboard software.
The reference architecture also includes specific recommendations for hardware and
software components that can help improve operational performance and efficiency.

1. Estimates based on observations of Blackboard install base.


Reference architecture components
The Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture consists of the following key components:
• Blackboard Academic Suite software—The Blackboard Academic Suite includes
Blackboard’s flagship Course Management System (CMS), the Blackboard Learning
System™ as well as four other core applications, the Blackboard Community
System™, the Blackboard Portfolio System™, the Blackboard Content System™ and the
Blackboard Outcomes System™.
• Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology—Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers
with CoolThreads technology deliver breakthrough performance with dramatic
space and power efficiency. Powered by the UltraSPARC® T1 processor, they support
up to 32 active threads for massive improvements in application scalability and
processor utilization. They are an ideal scalable platform for Web, application and
database server environments.
• Sun SPARC® Enterprise M5000 server—The Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server
delivers leading reliability, flexibility, and binary compatibility in a value-priced
rackmount server with up to eight dual-core SPARC64 VI processors. Designed to
provide enterprise-class service levels for medium to large databases, the server also
offers hardware partitioning using Dynamic Domains. (This server is for large
campus configurations only.)
• Sun Fire X4500 server—The Sun Fire X4500 Server is an ideal platform for high per-
formance I/O throughput applications such as streaming video or multimedia play-
back. It combines a high-performance, four-way x64 server with up to 24 TB of
storage in a single integrated system, creating a new class of data server. (This
server is an optional component and generally useful in larger installations.)
• Solaris™ 10 Operating System—One of the most advanced operating systems avail-
able, the Solaris 10 OS is the latest version of Sun’s industry-leading operating
system. Interoperable with Linux and Windows, the Solaris OS also offers binary
compatibility within each Sun server line, whether based on UltraSPARC®, AMD
Opteron, or Intel Xeon processors. As a result, all Sun servers running the Solaris 10
OS provide powerful features that can help reduce cost, complexity, and risk.
• Oracle database—Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition is a full-featured data man-
agement solution ideally suited to the needs of medium-sized workloads such as
Blackboard Academic Suite. It also includes the optional Oracle Real Application
Clusters for enterprise-class availability in a cluster environment.
• Quest Software—Quest Software’s broad array of software solutions for application
and database management are integrated with the Solaris 10 OS to provide com-
plete control and visibility of the IT stack for ease of management and the highest
possible application quality.
• Citrix Netscalar appliances—Citrix NetScaler Web application delivery solutions are
purpose built appliances that accelerate application performance through advanced
traffic management while delivering comprehensive web application security.


• Brocade SAN switches—The Brocade 200E Switch provides industry-leading perform-
ance and value in an 8-port or 16-port SAN switch that helps make SAN environ-
ments easy to deploy and manage.

Key benefits
The reference architecture combines the above mentioned system components with
the operational processes described in the Blackboard performance maturity model
to deliver the following major benefits to educational institutions:
• Higher service levels—The architecture is designed to optimize service levels and
provide a path to more mature operation of the datacenter.
• Reduced costs—Virtualization technologies enable consolidated solutions with
higher resource utilization and reduced complexity. Proper configuration and sizing
based on validated configurations also helps customers avoid overprovisioning.
Best practices for management can also reduce the cost of maintaining the solution
environment.
• Faster time to delivery—The reference architecture saves institutions the time
required for research or trial and error discovery of what works best for building
and managing an optimized environment for course management.
• Reduced risk—Validated hardware configurations and software partners can be
combined with best practices for operational performance to greatly reduce the risk
of unforeseen problems in a production implementation of Blackboard Academic
Suite.
• Simplified Management—Tools and best practices for maintaining high service
levels can save time and simplify the management process.

11 Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 3
Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture

The Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture is an implementation of Blackboard’s
vision for optimizing performance of Blackboard Academic Suite software. It takes
advantage of Sun and third-party technologies that can improve service levels while
reducing cost. It is also designed to support both small and large scale implementa-
tions with the flexibility for institutions to start with a small, cost-effective implemen-
tation and then easily scale to a large enterprise installation as demand grows.

Figure 2 shows a logical representation of the architecture with mandatory and
optional components defined across the application, database, storage and manage-
ment tiers.

Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture

* The Sun Fire T2000 server is replaced by the Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server in large campus
configurations.

Figure 2. The reference architecture utilizes components that can improve service
levels while reducing costs.

Designed for high service levels
The architecture is designed to support high service levels through the use of high
quality products from top-tier vendors and utilizes built-in redundancy on multiple
levels. The horizontally scaled architecture uses load balancing across redundant
servers in the application tier and each application server can run multiple instances


of the Blackboard Academic Suite software. The database server supports an optional
clustered environment utilizing the Oracle RAC database software and Sun cluster
software. Redundancy is also built into the storage environment with redundant
connections through a storage area network (SAN) and RAID support within the
disk subsystems.

Customers can decide the level of availability required for their environment and
then choose the configuration options that best suit their availability needs.

Application tier
The application tier contains the Blackboard Academic Suite software running on one
or more Sun Fire T1000 servers in a horizontally distributed architecture. When multi-
ple Sun Fire T1000 servers are deployed, the architecture utilizes load balancing to
distribute the user workload evenly across the servers.

A Sun Fire T1000 server with 6 cores and 8 GB of memory is the recommended server
for the application tier. It is an ideal platform for the application tier do to its low TCO,
energy efficiency, and high throughput for applications such as Blackboard Academic
Suite which are based on Java™ technology. Each Sun Fire T1000 server should be
deployed with four instances of Blackboard Academic Suite software to take maximum
advantage of the massive scalability of the 24 threads available on this configuration
of the Sun Fire T1000 server. By fully utilizing the server with multiple application
server instances, customers can achieve higher throughput and the best possible
price/performance. The Sun Fire T1000 server combines operational savings due to
its low power and cooling requirements with a low purchase price that is competitive
with comparably configured PC servers. It offers the highest available throughput of
any application server that has been tested with Blackboard Academic Suite software.

There are several ways to use virtualization technologies to deploy multiple instances
of Blackboard Academic Suite on the Sun Fire T1000 server. The simplest approach is to
use TomCat clustering, a feature of the Apache Web server. TomCat clustering enables
a single instance of the Web server to control traffic for multiple instances of the
Blackboard application. With this approach, all instances are running in the same copy
of the Solaris OS and share the same CPU and memory resources with no security
isolation. The benefit of TomCat clustering is that it is relatively simple to implement.

A second approach is to virtualization is to deploy a Web server instance for each
instance of the Blackboard application using virtualization technologies such as Solaris
Containers or Logical Domains (LDoms) to provide security and resource isolation
between the pairs of Web and application servers. In this situation, each Web server
instance has its own logical connection to the load balancing appliance which man-
ages the traffic across all Web server instances in all servers. Using Solaris Containers
or LDoms gives customers more control over resource allocation for application server
and Web server instances and also provides a higher degree of security and availability


as compared to the TomCat clustering approach. Readers interested in learning more
about these free virtualization technologies from Sun can find valuable information
at sun.com/ldoms and sun.com/solaris/containers.

Storage for the application tier is managed via a centralized storage pool that provides
an NFS mount for all application servers in the application tier. The Blackboard applica-
tion stores large artifacts at the application tier including multimedia course delivery
materials, student reports and assignments, and any other content that is submitted
for sharing between students and teachers. Application tier storage can thus be sub-
stantial. (See storage tier section below for more details.)

For institutions that have a requirement for a significant volume of multimedia storage
and playback, the optional Sun Fire X4500 server can be deployed as a digital media
server in the application tier. With up to 24 TB of storage in a 4-way AMD Opteron
server, the Sun Fire X4500 server is an ideal platform for the high capacity and demand-
ing I/O throughput requirements of streaming video. This powerful digital media
server can be NFS mounted for transparent access and high performance digital media
storage and delivery by any application server in the configuration.

Database tier
The database tier contains an Oracle database which is used to maintain user records
and indexes to application specific data such as course offerings, student profiles, test
results, etc. The database server requires vertical scalability because there is a single
large database instance used by all application tier servers. For the Blackboard
Academic Suite application, the most important performance criterion in the database
tier is I/O throughput from the storage subsystem (see storage tier for more details).

A Sun Fire T2000 server with 8 cores and 16 GB of memory is the recommended data-
base server for small and medium campus configurations. With record setting data-
base price/performance, low TCO, and high energy efficiency, the Sun Fire T2000 server
is ideal for medium size database workloads. The Sun Fire T2000 Server running IBM
DB2 database delivered an industry-leading 1781.37 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS when
tested under the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark2. This represents the highest per-
formance of any single processor database server, along with the best performance
per watt and leading database price/performance in its class.

For large campus configurations, the rackmountable Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000
server is recommended to provide the throughput necessary to handle the load of
up to six fully configured Sun Fire T1000 servers in the application tier. The Sun SPARC
Enterprise M5000 server configuration contains eight dual-core SPARC64 VI processors
and 32 GB of memory. Institutions that prefer a deskside server over a rackmount config-
uration can choose a similarly configured Sun Fire V890 server as the database server.

2. A single Sun Fire T2000 Server configured with just a single, 8 Core UltraSPARC T1 processor and 32GB of memory
running IBM DB2 V8.2 was able to support a Sun Fire E2900 Server in delivering 1,781.37 JOPS for the
SPECjAppServer2004 Benchmark in the Standard category. The Sun Fire T2000 Server consumed only 321 watts of
power at peak and required just two database licenses, resulting in a database Price / Performance of $46.03 per JOP.
More details are available at sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/benchmarks.jsp#ibm_db2.


High availability in the database tier is supported through an optional cluster configu-
ration with a fully redundant database server. Customers can use Sun Cluster software
and Oracle RAC to provide database redundancy and can also configure the database
server to support automatic failover in the event of a critical fault.

Storage tier
The reference architecture recommends a consolidated storage environment that
enables an administrator to manage both application tier storage and database tier
storage in a single physical system. This approach greatly simplifies the task of creating
backups by allowing both tiers to be backed up with a single operation. It also provides
a cost-effective consolidated solution with a single Sun StorageTek™ 6140 array to serve
the needs of both tiers.

The storage architecture utilizes a storage area network (SAN) with dual connections
for all servers and storage devices. Application servers use a Network Attached Storage
(NAS) gateway to access specific disk volumes in the StorageTek 6140 array that are
configured for NFS mount by application tier servers. The database server then uses its
SAN connection to access specific drives that are configured as database volumes.

The StorageTek 6140 array is populated with two different types of disk drives to serve
the differing requirements of the application tier and the database tier. Blackboard
uses an average storage requirement of 1 TB per 5000 users when estimating the stor-
age requirements for the application tier, a capacity that is 5 to 10 times the required
capacity for database storage.

While storage capacity requirements for the application tier are significant, access
speed is less important. User requests to retrieve large files from the application tier
storage are generally not frequent enough to become a performance bottleneck with
the distributed architecture. In fact, as the files age, they tend to be accessed much
less frequently, providing an opportunity for cost savings using hierarchical storage
if desired. To address the need for cost-effective high capacity storage, Sun and
Blackboard have recommended 500 GB SATA drives for the application tier. These
drives are then configured as application tier volumes in the StorageTek 6140 array
and are accessible via NFS mount through the Sun Storage 5320G NAS gateway.
The number of drives required for the application tier can be computed based on
the total user population and the average capacity of 1 TB per 5000 users.

The database tier requires high performance disk drives and a large number of spindles
in order to handle the high volume of I/O read requests from the Oracle database.
Database storage is therefore configured with 146 GB fibre channel disk drives that spin
at 15,000 RPMs, enabling faster data transfer rates and shorter seek times.


Management tier
The reference architecture is based on open systems solutions with standard interfaces
that make it easier to provision and manage the IT infrastructure. Third party enter-
prise management solutions can interact with server and storage components using
simple network management protocol (SNMP) to manage the components within
a broader management framework. Administrators can also take advantage of Sun
management tools such as the following to manage the IT infrastructure:
• Sun N1™ System Manager—N1 System Manager provides comprehensive system
lifecycle management for Sun servers. It simplifies the discovery, provisioning, moni-
toring, and management of local and remote servers from a single web console.
• Sun N1 Service Provisioning System—N1 Service Provisioning System simplifies
application provisioning across heterogeneous platforms. It automates the process
of building, deploying, and provisioning the entire application infrastructure on bare
metal systems.
• Sun™ Management Center software—Sun Management Center software provides
in-depth monitoring and management capabilities for the entire line of Sun servers.
Customers can utilize in-depth diagnostic information as well as analysis and report-
ing to improve system performance and availability. Sun Management Center soft-
ware also provides support for advanced Solaris 10 features, including Solaris
Containers and the Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) facility.
• Sun Connection—Sun Connection simplifies the process of tracking, provisioning,
SM

updating and managing Solaris and Linux operating system configurations. OS
updates can be delivered and automatically provisioned to registered servers at the
customer location and administrators can elect to update entire groups of servers
based on user-defined rules.

Best-of-breed monitoring and management
Sun and Blackboard have partnered with Quest Software, an industry leader in moni-
toring and management software. Quest Software provides sophisticated tools for
application and database management that can help institutions maintain maximum
performance and availability of the Blackboard and Sun environment. Using Quest
solutions such as Foglight and Spotlight, IT teams can accelerate the detection,
diagnosis and resolution of database and application issues. Quest’s Toad database
development tool also makes database and application development faster and
easier while simplifying day-to-day database administration tasks.

Quest’s solutions are also integrated with the Solaris OS 10 and its DTrace facility,
enabling complete visibility across application layers as well as the OS and server
layer. This integrated management environment provides a unique holistic view into
performance issues and their impact as well as unprecedented control of application
and database development.


Validated configurations
Sun and Blackboard have invested in performance testing and characterization of
Blackboard software on Sun servers and storage systems to help institutions properly
configure and size their systems and to reduce the risk of unforeseen problems. The
results of these tests were used to define specific configurations that have been vali-
dated to offer peak performance throughput that matches the expected throughput
needs for small, medium and large campus scenarios.
Additional information about the performance characteristics of the validated configu-
rations described in the table and figures below can be found in the Blackboard on Sun
Sizing Guide (available from Sun and Blackboard sales representatives).

Table 1. Configuration information for small, medium and large campus configurations

Description Small Campus Medium Campus Large Campus
Configuration Configuration Configuration

User 1,000 to 10,000 10,000 to 25,000 25,000 to 50,000
Community
Size
Sizing • 500 to 1,000 • 1,000 to 5,000 • 5,000 to 25,000
Assumptions active courses active courses active courses
• Up to 1,200 con- • Up to 2,400 con- • Up to 3,600 concur-
current users with current users with rent users with six
two application four application application servers
servers servers
Application 1 to 2 Sun Fire 2 to 4 Sun Fire 4 to 6 Sun Fire T1000
Tier T1000 servers T1000 servers servers
• 6 core UltraSPARC • 6 core UltraSPARC • 6 core UltraSPARC T1
T1 processor T1 processor processor
• 8 GB memory • 8 GB memory • 8 GB memory
Database Sun Fire T2000 server Sun Fire T2000 server Sun SPARC Enterprise
Tier • 8 core UltraSPARC • 8 core UltraSPARC M5000 server
T1 processor T1 processor • 8 dual-core SPARC64
• 16 GB memory • 16 GB memory VI processors
• Optional 2nd serv- • 32 GB memory
er for cluster con- • Optional 2nd server for
figuration cluster configuration
Storage Tier • Sun StorageTek • Sun StorageTek • Sun StorageTek 6140
6140 array with 1 6140 array with 2 array with 3 trays
tray trays • Sun StorageTek
• Sun StorageTek • Sun StorageTek 5320G NAS gateway
5320G NAS gate- 5320G NAS gate- • SAN infrastructure
way way
• 26 X 500 GB SATA
• SAN infrastructure • SAN infrastructure drives, providing 10
• 7 X 500 GB SATA • 13 X 500 GB SATA TB of usable storage
drives, providing drives, providing 5 for the application
2.2 TB of usable TB of usable stor- tier
storage for the age for the appli- • 16 X 146 GB fibre
application tier cation tier channel drives at
• 5 X 146 GB fibre • 9 X 146 GB fibre 15,000 RPM, provid-
channel drives at channel drives at ing 1 TB of usable
15,000 RPM, pro- 15,000 RPM, pro- storage for the DB
viding 250 GB of viding 500 GB of tier
usable storage for usable storage for
the DB tier the DB tier


Small campus configuration
Figure 3 shows a logical representation of the small campus configuration that
is designed to support a user community of 1,000 to 10,000 active users.

Figure 3. Small Campus Configuration


Medium campus configuration
Figure 4 shows a logical representation of the medium campus configuration that is
designed to support a user community of 10,000 to 25,000 active users.

Figure 4. Medium Campus Configuration

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Large campus configuration
Figure 5 shows a logical representation of the large campus configuration that is
designed to support a user community of 25,000 to 50,000 active users.

* Customers who prefer a deskside server can substitute the Sun Fire V890 server for the Sun SPARC
Enterprise M5000 server.

Figure 5. Large Campus Configuration

20 Summary Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 4
Summary

The Sun advantage
With tight budgets and limited IT staff resources, educational institutions are always
looking for ways to improve their IT services without additional capital or resource
investments. The Blackboard on Sun Reference Architecture enables institutions to
leverage the work of Sun and Blackboard in optimizing and validating Blackboard
software on Sun systems. The reference architecture is also designed to take advan-
tage of specific Sun technologies that can help institutions do more with less.

Specific Sun advantages that can benefit Blackboard customers include:
• Proven reliability and scalability
Sun systems and the Solaris OS are proven in the datacenters of many of
Blackboard's largest customers and the configurations described in this white paper
have been validated to meet the performance requirements of specific campus sce-
narios. Sun systems and the Solaris 10 OS are also known for their high reliability.
The enterprise-class RAS features in Sun CoolThreads servers and their cooler operat-
ing temperatures help these systems deliver mission-critical reliability that far sur-
passes that of similarly priced PC-based servers. This reliability is further enhanced
by the predictive self-healing capabilities in the Solaris 10 OS, providing maximum
protection for Blackboard customers.
• High performance throughput
Characterization and performance tests in the Blackboard lab have also shown the
Sun Fire T1000 application server to deliver the highest scalability of any volume
server tested. Test showed that a single Sun Fire T1000 server could sustain an aver-
age throughput of 3 MB/second and deliver good user response time for up to 600
hits/second.

The UltraSPARC T1 processor in the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers is specifically
designed for highly threaded or horizontally scaled workloads such as Blackboard
Academic Suite. Furthermore, the Solaris 10 OS has been optimized for high
throughput on multithreaded architectures and contains the award-winning DTrace
technology for optimizing system performance and throughput. The integration of
the Solaris 10 DTrace facility with monitoring and management solutions from Quest
Software also creates a breakthrough in visibility within the IT stack, making it easier
for developers and administrators to quickly tune their application or database envi-
ronment for maximum performance.


• Low TCO and eco-responsibility
Sun servers with CoolThreads technology deliver breakthrough performance with
dramatic space and power efficiency. These servers, which are the industry's fastest
and most space and energy efficient systems, can help institutions save on power
and cooling costs while offering a consolidated infrastructure for Blackboard soft-
ware. Customers can avoid the cost of virtualization software licenses while consoli-
dating onto these powerful servers by using virtualization technologies from Sun
(Solaris Containers and LDoms) that are already included in the Sun solution.
Additional costs can be saved with reduced need for Oracle database licenses
because the Sun Fire T2000 server can require up to 7X fewer database licenses
versus competing servers3.
• Increased flexibility
Sun systems support multiple CPU architectures (SPARC, AMD and Intel) and three
OS environments (Solaris OS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows), giving customers the
opportunity to easily deploy Sun systems within their existing IT infrastructure. Sun's
broad line of binary compatible servers offer a cost-effective and flexible growth path.
Whether scaling up with high capacity Sun servers or scaling out in a horizontally
distributed architecture, Sun's flexible solutions make it easy to add capacity when
user demand grows.

3. In the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark, the Sun Fire T2000 server required 7x fewer database licenses and 8x lower
database licensing costs than the HP rx8620 Itanium 2 configuration, while consuming 8.5x less data center space and
consuming 13x less power, resulting in nearly 18x higher performance per watt. Based on software licensing costs, the
Sun Fire T2000 delivered 11x better price / performance.


For more information
For additional information on how Sun and Blackboard can help organizations opti-
mize their eLearning environment, visit the Web sites below or contact a local Sun or
Blackboard representative.

Table 2. Web Links for Additional Information

Web Site URL Description
sun.com/edu Sun solutions for education and research
blackboard.com/ Blackboard home page
blackboard.com/products/academic_suite/ Blackboard Academic Suite software
sun.com/solaris Solaris Operating System
sun.com/coolthreads Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers
sun.com/storagetek/ Sun StorageTek storage solutions
sun.com/software/products/system_manager/ Sun N1 System Manager software
sun.com/software/products/service_provisioning/ Sun N1 Service Provisioning software
sun.com/sunmanagementcenter/ Sun Management Center software
sun.com/ldoms Logical Domains (LDoms)
sun.com/solaris/containers Solaris Containers
sun.com/sunconnection/ Sun Connection
quest.com Management solutions from Quest Software

23 Summary On the Web sun.com/edu

© 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc., 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, California 95054, U.S.A.

All rights reserved.

This product or document is protected by copyright and distributed under licenses restricting its use, copying,
distribution, and decompilation. No part of this product or document may be reproduced in any form by any
means without prior written authorization of Sun and its licensors, if any. Third-party software, including font
technology, is copyrighted and licensed from Sun suppliers.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, N1 Sun Fire, CoolThreads, and StorageTek are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.

All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC
International, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon
architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

AMD Opteron is a trademark of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All other trademarks and registered marks are the
property of their respective owners. Information subject to change without notice.

RESTRICTED RIGHTS: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S. Government is subject to restrictions of FAR
52.227-14(g)(2)(6/87) and FAR 52.227-19(6/87), or DFAR 252.227-7015(b)(6/95) and DFAR 227.7202-3(a).
DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED AS IS AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED CONDITIONS, REPRESENTATIONS AND
WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
OR NON-INFRINGEMENT, ARE DISCLAIMED, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT THAT SUCH DIS-CLAIMERS HELD TO BE
LEGALLY INVALID.

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