| Customer: Lingnan University |
Situated in the idyllic outskirts of Tuen Mun, Hong Kong , Lingnan University is renowned for its unique "whole-person" approach to education. Best known for its liberal arts program that blends East and West, the University enables its students to think independently and responsibly by combining professional knowledge and liberal arts education with Hong Kong characteristics.
Founded as Lingnan College in 1967, the university attained its current academic status in 1999. Today, over 3,000 students populate Lingnan University and is manned by over 500 staff.
One of the key strengths of Lingnan University is its focus on IT to improve efficiency and reduce the manual processes needed for administration.
The University has deployed SunGuard SCT Banner to tie the different University systems into one unified campus infrastructure. It automates the critical administration processes in the University, like enrolment and registration, and integrates them for easy information access and content management across the campus systems.
However, with student numbers rising and IT usage doubling, it was not long before the University started experiencing performance bottlenecks.
Routine functions like enrolment and registration were hampered by delays in the system. This affected staff efficiency with IT staff burdened with problems and help desk queries. With the University expecting an increase in enrolment figures, year on year, the bottlenecks needed to be eradicated.
At the same time, the IT department was also looking to add new modules to the deployed SCT Banner system. This created performance worries that creased the foreheads of IT staff.
Compounding the dilemma, the rising use of email and other facilities needed an efficient storage system that maximised the use of resources. The IT department was stretched in trying to rein in the bottlenecks while adding more storage resources to meet demands, at the same time. This affected productivity, and wasted precious man hours that could have been used on more value-added tasks.
With the move to award a 'life time' email to each past student using the Lingnan University 's Alumni network, storage management became a key issue that stood at the foreground.
Rosiah Ho, Associate Director, Information Technology Services Centre, Lingnan University , knew that he could not rest on his laurels. It was vital for him to streamline efficiency and keep mission-critical processes, such as enrolment and email systems running. At the same time, he needed to rein in his storage resources and efficiently manage them.
"So we decided it was time to improve our infrastructure with better servers to reduce the bottlenecks and improve our storage management by building a Storage Area Network (SAN)," said Rosiah Ho, Associate Director of Information Technology Services Centre ( ITSC ), at Lingnan University.
And they chose IBM to build it. |
The decision to choose IBM products was no trivial matter for Mr Ho.
Lingnan University will be the first university in Hong Kong to run SCT Banner on IBM's AIX. "Obviously, changing platform was going to be a major concern as it involved a change in mindset and demanded a steep learning curve," he said.
The advantage of running a more reliable and stable system outweighed the risks of being a pioneer in Hong Kong . With AIX a common mainstay in banking and other industrial sectors, Mr Ho wanted those advantages to power his own infrastructure.
In addition, after scouring reference cases around the world, Mr Ho and his team found that their university was not unique in their choice. "After searching around, we found that there are many universities, especially in the U.S. , who have successfully deployed SCT Banner on AIX. Over time, I would think universities in Hong Kong will also follow us and deploy SCT Banner on AIX," said Mr Ho.
Then there was the allure of price versus performance. "IBM was also aggressive in their bidding, and in terms of price/performance they were a lot better than the competition," said Mr Ho.
Implementing a SAN infrastructure for the first time was worrying Mr Ho.
"This is the first time we were looking to build a SAN infrastructure, and naturally we were apprehensive. You need to get it right at first, else it can become expensive to maintain and rebuild," he added.
After studying the implementation of SCT Banner on AIX in U.S. universities, Mr Ho and his team raised the envelope in Campus infrastructure by being a pioneer in Hong Kong for implementing SCT Banner on IBM.
"It was a major shift for us, to go from Solaris to AIX, but at the end of the day we could not justify staying with Sun Solaris. IBM's stability and reliability, and the price/performance gains that we could have, convinced us to choose IBM," said Mr Ho. |
Lingnan University 's new SAN infrastructure was simple in design.
SCT Banner and the Oracle database, which ran all the critical administration functions, were served by a single server. All data was collated on an Oracle applications server, housed on a separate server. Lastly, the SCT Banner development server was kept separate on an additional server. Together with two other mail servers, all five servers were linked to a SAN switch that relayed the bits and bytes into a storage server.
At every point of the infrastructure, there was redundancy built in, to provide a safety net in times of hardware failure.
The production platform of SCT Banner system, which ran the day-to-day activities of the university administration, was deployed on an AIX-based IBM eServer p630. The powerful yet cost-effective up to 4-way rack-mounted SMP server featured leading-edge Capacity on Demand (CoD) capabilities that allowed the University to enhance the flexibility, scalability and mission-critical functionality of its SCT Banner system.
Serving as a repository for its records, the Oracle applications server was deployed on an IBM eServer p650, which provided a 2 to 8-way, PO WER4+ mid range enterprise server with the reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features familiar to mainframe users.
The SCT Banner development server was deployed on an IBM eServer p615, which is a one to two-way server with PO WER4+ microprocessors. It provided enterprise availability for mission critical requirements.
Along with the Alumni email servers, the new servers were tied through SAN switches to an IBM TotalStorage DS4400 (formerly FAStT700), which provided a reliable and scalable backbone for the campus' entire storage needs. It provided the University with scalable and reliable performance to ease growing storage pains. It also features advanced replication services that enable business continuance solutions.
For backup, the University deployed an IBM 3582 Ultrium Scalable Tape Library. It served as an ideal solution for cost-effectively handling the University's wide range of backup, archive and disaster recovery data storage needs.
Safeguarding against unwanted mishaps, the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager protected the University's data from hardware failures and other errors by storing backup and archive copies of data on tapes.
The entire system was deployed within three months and with expert advice from IBM consultants, went smoothly. "From the fact that we had very little hiccups, it was good. It was a fairly standard rollout in a production envi ron ment," said Mr Ho.
He was also impressed with the IBM consultants who helped the University in the deployment process. "IBM helped us a great deal when it came to performance tuning. In addition, the training and knowledge transfer was especially useful to our team as this project involved a change in platforms," said Mr Ho. |
It was not long before Lingnan University began reaping the benefits of the new IBM infrastructure.
Performance worries were also laid to rest. "The previous system ran into performance bottlenecks, but with the new system we had none. We just went through the entire enrolment cycle without any performance bottleneck," said Mr Ho.
The University also enjoyed immediate scalability. "We did not have any capacity problems when we launched the Alumni system," said Mr Ho.
Finally, the new implementation could not have come at a better time for Mr Ho.
"Our enrolment increased this year, and it is good to note that the system was able to handle the increase in workload quite easily," said Mr Ho. |
Overall, the decision to use IBM was a bold but necessary one for Mr Ho.
By boosting scalability and reliability of the University's current architecture, the new system allowed for a smoother rollout of new systems and eased the University's management headaches.
It also improved the overall reliability of the university infrastructure and gave less sleepless nights for Mr Ho and his team.
"From my perspective, I have not heard of anything major going w ron g in the system, and that is a good litmus test," said Mr Ho.
"When we changed platform, we were very apprehensive. But we are now very happy with the performance and the outcome. Looking back, I am certainly glad we chose IBM," he added. |
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