|
|
|
| Information Systems |
 |
|
|
The European
Patent Office (EPO) is split into 5 General Directorates
and the IT department is part of Directorate General
2 (Operational Support).
The IT department of the EPO is called Information
Systems (IS). It has a permanent staff of approx. 300
as well as a number of contractors. The department
has 10 units, including:
- Systems
Infrastructure (SI) - responsible for open system
servers (Unix and Windows)
- Operational Services (OS) - responsible for
the network and running of the mainframe
- Development And MAintenance of Administrative systems
(DAMA-A) - responsible for software on all administrative
systems e.g. personnel files, salaries, etc.
- Development And MAintenance of Patent-granting systems
(DAMA-P) - responsible for software on all patent-granting
systems
- Development
And MAintenance of Electronic commerce systems
(DAMA-E) - responsible for software
development of new e-commerce systems
- User Services (US ) - handle contacts with the user
community e.g. helpdesk, supply of PCs,
etc.
- Technical
support to the National Offices (TechNO) - support
to the National Offices for
the implementation and the use of systems provided by the EPO (EPOQUE,
J-PHOENIX, PATNET, …)
Historically, IS grew up in the branch at The Hague
and thus the mainframe is in The Hague as well as
the majority of IS staff.
|
| Computer Systems
Infrastructure |
|
|
Hardware
- Servers
- Backend: Central mainframes
computers (2 IBM z-Series),
- Mid Range Servers running Windows
and Unix (300 IBM p-Series and
xSeries Intel based)
- Storage
- Circa 260 Terabyte
of disk space made available for central mainframes and distributed
servers.
- Network Infrastructure
(LAN, WAN)
- Workstations
About 9500 workstations running under
Windows 2000.
Software
The
main software running on these servers are :
| Mainframe |
zOS,CICS, MQ Series, DB/2, IDMS, ACF/2, TSO,
Tivoli Workload Scheduler, AF/Operator, BETA92/93,
SCLM, DF/DSS, SMS, HSM, Faver, etc |
| |
|
| UNIX |
AIX, LINUX, HACMP, Lotus DOMINO, WebSphere, WebSphere
Portal, Apache, Tomcat, DB2, LDAP, CTG, JBOS,CVS. |
| |
|
| Windows |
Office XP, Project Server, .NET,
FileNet,SQLServer, etc |
| |
|
| Multi
Platform |
Java,
SAP, SAS/Data Warehouse, Tivoli products (System
management, Service management, Application
measurement, etc …) |
|
| Network
Infrastructure |
|
|
The EPO network is
characterized by:
- Two major sites, in Rijswijk
and in Munich, each with multiple buildings, and
several thousand
workstations per site
- Two minor sites, in Berlin and
Vienna, with several hundred workstations
- The Ethernet Local Area Network
has Gigabit per second backbones and server farms,
and 100 Mbps workstation connections
- Duplicated network rooms and
network core equipment in each building for resilience
and disaster fallback
- Three separately routed multi-megabit
circuits from different providers between Rijswijk
and Munich, and similar arrangements with less
capacity
between Rijswijk and the other two sites
- A secure Wide Area Network with
strong encryption between the EPO in Rijswijk and
on the order of 30 partner organizations throughout
Europe, the USA, and Japan
- Multi-megabit Internet connectivity
for the provision of EPO's Internet services, and
for use by its staff
|
|
|
|
