With this three-year outsourcing contract, Bull reaffirms its ability to host large-scale critical applications, responding to highly demanding requirements
The French State Modernization Agency, the DGME (Direction Générale de la Modernisation de l’État), has chosen Bull to host and operate the Mon.service-public.fr portal, which went live on 15 December 2008 and is now fully operational.
Digital government supporting citizens
As part of its mission to modernize the way that government operates and is managed, the DGME has launched a vast program aimed at simplifying administrative processes, for all users of public services. At the heart of this program, Mon.service-public.fr enables citizens to carry out numerous tasks on line, monitor the progress of their interactions and save documents published by the government and its partners in a secure area of the site. This means that Mon.service-public.fr is an essential tool when it comes to simplifying people’s relationships with public services and one of the key points of interaction between government, citizens and other organizations partnering the State.
Hosting a secure, critical application responding to highly demanding requirements
This huge application – which is destined to receive several tens of millions of hits a year – has to respond to highly exacting requirements in terms of availability, security of exchanges, confidentiality of personal data and robustness.
Within extremely tight timescales of less than five months, Bull implemented a very complex infrastructure including all software systems, networks, security and storage. To meet the extremely high security standards required, Bull divided each platform into VLANs (virtual local area networks) and implemented security mechanisms at each level, based on the use of encryption keys.
The environment has been designed to handle a sharp rise in the number of annual hits and data storage space required: by 2011 these are predicted to reach 64 million a year and 383TB respectively. Bull has joined forces with NetApp to offer an innovative storage solution, with two different levels of architecture depending on how critical the data is, and responding to the demands required for this public Internet application in terms of the amount of data to be stored and how far it evolves. In total, almost 130 servers including over 100 Bull NovaScale have been deployed to run the integration, pre-production and production environments.
The application is being hosted and operated at a Bull Data Center in two independent cold sites, running 24×7 with 99.8% availability. Bull has also defined the disaster recovery plan for the system. Finally, the company is providing 24 Mbps Internet bandwidth, utilizing the facilities offered by the numerous operators serving the hosting site, including Agarik, Bull’s subsidiary which specializes in hosting critical Web applications.
Jean-Pierre Barbéris, General Manager of Bull France added: “At the very heart of State modernization in France, the infrastructure being deployed and hosted for the Mon.service-public.fr portal confirms Bull’s expertise in large-scale, secure public sector IT infrastructures, as well as its skills as an outsourcing partner.”
