Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Xerox Global Services's Jean-Baptiste Gauthier.

Date : April 2009

Could you tell us a bit more about XGS in France ?

Xerox is the global leader in document management, offering the widest array of products, services and solutions in the industry. Xerox Global Services, one of three main business units within Xerox, offers a broad portfolio of services including outsourcing and consulting.

We work with our clients to improve and manage their document intensive business processes - everyday processes like customer communications, billing, training or records management. Xerox Global Services are worldwide leaders in document outsourcing and are able to re-engineer all areas of document activity, delivering improved document processes and significant savings in document costs. You can find more details here.

Can you tell us about the application, site, or service in which you have adopted GlassFish?

Today there are real opportunities to use strategic document services to generate revenue, eliminate inefficiencies, and create a better experience. Xerox Global Services provides added-value for document management services. J2EE is used for differents kind of services we offer:
• Document management systems (external use applications)
• Production tracking systems (internal use applications)
• Customers Interfaces (webservices, upload/download front-end, ...)
GlassFish is used in both production and qualification process.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

After a first comparating step in the beginning of 2008, we decided to deploy GlassFish as our main J2EE application server in the middle of that year.

Did you go through an evaluation process before selecting GlassFish?

Yes, based on literature and a easy/successful deployement first and then by testing applications we've got in production.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

We are using v2ur2 b04 and hardly waiting for v3.

On what operating system do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same OS for both development and production deployment?

Solaris 10 on both SPARC CMT and x86 for production.
Solaris 10 on x86 for qualification.

On what hardware platform do you run GlassFish?

SUN T2000 (production)
SUN 4150 (production and qualification)

Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription?

This is in the works.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

WAR and EAR based deployment, EJB, JDBC Ressources.

Are you using OpenMQ?

Not today but thinking about it for tracking databases.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

Management orientation and facilities via DAS GUI utilisation.
It's the most integrated administration environnement we found.

What do you like to see improved for GlassFish?

• Web based GUI monitoring interface (threshold alerts on jvm parameters)
• Web based GUI Capacity management interface (graph, history)
• Upgrade process (V3)

Are you using any open source or commercial frameworks or tools in your application?

• Struts
• Hibernate
• Spring
• JBoss Tools

Does your application use a database? If so, which one?

• Postgresql (8.2, 8.3)
• Oracle (9i)

Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share?

All of our modules run on solaris 10 containers.
• 3 nodes with 2 instances each in a public DMZ network.
• 4 nodes with 3 instances each in production network.
• 1 load-balancer in a public DMZ network which forward trafic to those 3 previous nodes in same subnet.
• 2 load-balancers in a private DMZ network which forward trafic to production subnet.
We have 32 WAR-based applications and 1 EAR-based application deployed on 5 clusters.

How has GlassFish performed since your application went live? Have you run into any production issues which you would attribute to GlassFish?

Some problems dealing with Xmx that crashed glassfish instances.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

User only.