Hardware, software, and facilities

The Enterprise GIS is hosted on state-of-the-art server infrastructure.

• All machines reside in the AISB data center, which offers physical security, climate control, and redundant power.
• Mirrored Production and Testing instances exist for all critical GIS Services
• ArcSDE and ArcGIS Server are hosted on Dell 2950 dedicated application servers
• The Virginia Tech Database Administration and Applications team manages two Oracle instances for the Enterprise GIS.
• Google Earth Enterprise is hosted in a Virtual machine on an IBM BladeCenter. This application is among the first to be virtualized at Virginia Tech in this new environment, but reflects a commitment on the part of IT to migrate much of the data center to virtualization in the future.
• Storage resides on our centrally managed SAN and NAS infrastructures
  

SECURITY

ArcSDE

All Oracle security features supported
Data owners retain control at the feature class level
Data resides in departmental schemas controlled by the GIS liaison; users login as themselves and see only the data they have been granted
Roles are used to grant privileges to multiple users
Versioning enables multiuser editing

ArcGIS Server

Authentication and authorization are managed locally

Google Earth Enterprise

GEE Streaming server is a modified version of Apache
Mod-auth-LDAP enables use of “real” VT PIDs/pws