A2LL is the abbreviation of the German social services and unemployment software system, “Arbeitslosengeld II – Leistungen zum Lebensunterhalt“ (Unemployment money II – subsistence payments). It may be a strange name for a computer system but what really freaked me out is the architecture used for this huge German e-goverment project:
The system is based on 16 servers with 4 processors each, all running Linux. A Tomcat servlet container defines the graphical user interface. A web services framework from the company Systinet uses a server farm of approx. 200 Windows 2003 servers which run the application server developed by ProSoz. The application server was developed using Microsoft’s (D)COM technology and uses an Informix 9.4x database running on a Solaris machine containing 80 CPUs and a 300 GB Cache-RAM.
More about this explosive technology mix here. I don’t think we ever envisioned anything like this when we started Systinet…
Roman Stanek's Push-Button Thinking 
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