Enterprise Systems Management (E3)
Project PI: Larry Leibrock
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The goal of Enterprise Systems Management is to provide information-technology based systems that are highly functional, reliable, of high quality, trustworthy and developed within the enterprise planned resource constraints. The network is heterogeneous and multivendor with more and more applications that are central to the operation of an enterprise being deployed in a multi-tier architecture that separates the business logic, the data, and the presentation onto multiple systems. This project has three primary goals. First, it will provide expertise to other projects in assessing the performance characteristics, capabilities and limitations of their computationally demanding tasks in an Intel/NT environment. Secondly, this project seeks to develop better enterprise security models and policies necessary to protect data in distributed heterogeneous systems architectures, And thirdly, the project seeks to evaluate model development in the context of Microsoft's Internet Security Framework, NT based digital certificate key servers and the recently announced Intel "Secure Card" specification as replacement for current password models.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
Intel/NT systems are increasingly being utilized for mission-critical applications such as SAP, electronic commerce needs and trusted commercial requirements. Research on behalf of Intel can assess present security frameworks and provide for creation of best practices for digital key servers and "Secure Card" specifications in high-performance computational environments. Penetration testing (breaching security) is essential. Neither the industry nor research community have conducted methodologically based penetration testing for inter-operating computer environments (e.g. NT and UNIX) especially in business systems environments The boundaries between differing systems offers considerable risks to high-integrity requirements. In addition, this project will provide expertise and best practices for assessing the performance of computationally demanding applications in order to provide necessary assistance to other projects.
IMPACT
Corporations are increasingly using Intel/NT computational clusters and high availability systems to support mission-critical distributed environments such as BAAN, SAP and Oracle Financials. Typically, these applications are two and three tiered client server applications. The boundaries among the tiers of applications, networks and operating systems provide a considerable level of risk where security can be penetrated and critical data destroyed, stolen or altered.
EQUIPMENT
Server facilities and research labs are available for housing and supporting the equipment and technical support staff is already in place. The Business School, ACITS and TICAM will share use of the servers and desktop systems. This equipment will also support the Computational Finance project and other TICAM projects. The equipment includes 12 Quad servers, two sets of 22 dual graphic workstations, 4 Dual desktop workstations and a print server.
RESOURCES
Several faculty and doctoral students are already working in the area of enterprise systems. Other faculty have interests in applications of new technology and have published research papers and given talks at national conferences as well. Business School, ACITS and TICAM researchers have extensive experience in the development of both measurement tools and high performance requirements. The current research interests lie in migrating projects to a high-performance client-server environment in a distributed environment.
BENEFITS TO INTEL
Development of better algorithms, systems management policies, performance analysis, security testing and best-practices risk models would be of benefit to Intel and its enterprise customers as commercial mission critical applications begin to be deployed that require a scaleable, reliable, economically manageable, and secure multi-vendor distributed environment.
RELATED WEB SITES
Follow this link to the Texas Business School Enterprise Systems and Management Web sites.