Dedicated Solr platform for ZHAW

Zurich University of Applied Sciences

“This is exactly how collaboration should work: straightforward, reliable, and with the necessary foresight. Pragmatic solutions—optimally tailored to the task at hand. Here, someone thinks along with you and delivers exactly what is really needed. No more, no less.”

Bruno Prandi, Product Owner, Marketing & Kommunikation ICT, ZHAW

The Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) is one of Switzerland's leading universities. It is active in teaching, research, continuing education and services – with a practical approach and a scientific foundation. As a driver of innovation, the university works with numerous partners from industry and science, relying on modern, scalable IT solutions.

Our to-do list

Development, support, hosting, agile solution, training, consulting, multilingual, system architecture

Challenge

The university's internal search infrastructure required a stable and secure Solr environment that could be flexibly adapted to different scenarios. The aim was to operate multiple environments with multilingual search cores while ensuring a high level of security, availability and maintainability.

The solution had to be designed in such a way that it could be integrated into existing processes and systems – including the planned use of the university's own Nutch containers.

Implementation

We designed and implemented a completely new Solr infrastructure, which we set up, configured and commissioned on the server side. The setup comprises several environments (development, testing and production) with scalable, multilingual Solr cores. Solr itself was integrated into the existing TYPO3 system and connected via the ext:solr extension. After successful implementation, ZHAW took over productive operation based on our setup and has been using it independently ever since.

An essential part of the project was the IT security concept we developed, which was specifically tailored to the university's requirements. It is based on six general IT security aspects that we adapted to the ZHAW's operating environment. The concept documents all security-related measures at server level and shows the implementation of our workflows with regard to data protection, access protection and system hardening. The ICT department at ZHAW reviewed and confirmed that the concept was suitable and compliant with its internal security guidelines.

Authentik was integrated as a central identity and access management component to secure sensitive administrative processes. This enabled two-factor authentication for user interfaces to be implemented, while system communication continues to be carried out efficiently via simple authentication.

The new structure has created a robust and scalable platform that reliably supports the central search function of the TYPO3 website. The system offers stable performance, meets the university's high security requirements, and at the same time enables flexible further development by the internal IT department.