An efficient approach to the deployment of complex open source information systems

Abstract

Complex open source information systems are usually implemented as component-based software to inherit the available functionality of existing software packages developed by third parties. Consequently, the deployment of these systems not only requires the installation of operating system, application framework and the configuration of services but also needs to resolve the dependencies among components. The problem becomes more challenging when the application must be installed and used on different platforms such as Linux and Windows. To address this, an efficient approach using the virtualization technology is suggested and discussed in this paper. The approach has been applied in our project to deploy a web-based integrated information system in molecular genetics labs. It is a low-cost solution to benefit both software developers and end-users.

Figure 1

Benchmark results on five systems running MolabIS. The mean response time of ten runs are presented in seconds (vertical axis). Five test cases from left to right (horizontal axis) are: inserting 50 samples into the database (insert), searching 500 samples in the database (search), exporting 7000 microsatellites to a CSV file (export), reporting the details of 500 samples to a PDF file (report) and uploading a 3 MB electrophoresis file to the database (upload), respectively.