About Programma Modernisering GBA - ICTU
ICTU, established in 2001 by the Netherlands Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, is a government agency responsible for promoting and developing the Dutch state's use of information and communication technology. The organisation plays a key role in developing e-government services to Dutch citizens and in improving the efficiency of government departments.
Challenge
The Dutch government has tasked ICTU with building a modernised citizen registration system called Gemeentelijke Basisadministratie (GBA). The system, composed of a hierarchy of servers nationwide, will act as a national repository of information on each citizen–including name, address, social security details–and will feed this information into a wide variety of e-government applications. Already in the pipeline are taxation and social security payment systems; central and regional government bodies will add dozens more applications in the coming years, aiming to simplify and streamline government services' use of citizen information.
As the new e-government applications will be developed by a variety of different groups, the GBA team needs to make the GBA system as open and interoperable as possible. When choosing its strategic platform for the new system, the team therefore focused on finding a solution based on open source technology and open standards. Security was also an important aspect, as the government required the system to store confidential information about citizens and keep it safe from unauthorised users.
Novell Solution
The GBA program within ICTU chose SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server as the development and test platform for the GBA system, selecting it as the first enterprise-class distribution with built-in support for Xen virtualisation.
"Linux is based on open technologies, so we avoid being locked into a relationship with any particular vendor and we preserve maximum flexibility for the future," said Jeroen van Disseldorp, Senior Architect at ICTU. "People who develop software that links to GBA are permitted to use other tools than we do, but only if they adhere to open standards."
The GBA system will eventually be rolled out across the various municipalities, creating a decentralised hierarchy of servers that will be required to communicate with each other, and with a variety of e-government applications. Naturally, this important system requires extensive testing, and in particular the team needed to make test environments available to various third-parties involved in the development of the new e-government applications that will draw citizen data from the GBA.
Creating multiple test and development environments on separate physical servers would have been very costly, both in terms of the initial hardware acquisition and in terms of ongoing management and maintenance. Instead, the GBA team opted to virtualise its test and development environments, using the Xen virtualisation software included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
The GBA team builds virtual servers and uses cloning tools to copy and reconfigure them as new servers, making it fast and easy to run multiple development, test and integration environments on each of its existing physical servers. The organisation also takes advantage of the Linux Heartbeat component included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to test failover and load-balancing capabilities.
Results
The Xen technology included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server uses paravirtualisation to allow virtual servers to communicate directly with the underlying hardware. The leading proprietary virtualisation solutions require a software layer to emulate the hardware, which incurs a considerable performance overhead–typically around 40 percent. The low overhead of Xen paravirtualisation delivers excellent performance, enabling the GBA team within ICTU to actively use up to 95 percent of its available computing power.
The move to virtualised servers for testing and development has enabled the team to significantly increase its flexibility and speed of provisioning, while allowing existing hardware investments to be used fully.
"When we need a new server for testing or development, we can simply clone an existing virtual server–with no need to buy and configure new hardware or software," said van Disseldorp. "Xen virtualisation on Linux gives us improved flexibility and ease of maintenance, and allows us to test large and complex multi-server architectures more easily than would be possible in a non-virtualised environment."
When the GBA system and the applications it supports are deployed across local and regional government agencies, the use of open source technologies will enable the Dutch government to eliminate more costly and less flexible proprietary technologies.
"Novell provided easily accessible and knowledgable support during the pilot phase of our SUSE Linux Enterprise and Xen deployment," said van Disseldorp. "As we complete our deployment, we are already seeing clear benefits in terms of price-performance and flexibility."