lcf
man. nature. technology.
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It's old, but with eStudent and journals crashing all the time, I thought this article was quite ironic
If only they had the bandwidth to cope with us *shakes heads*“Sun has maximised the return on our investment with the Sun ONE architecture. By leveraging legacy applications, the new datacentre environment not only protects past investments but also reduces Web Services development time so we can benefit from results sooner.”
Brian Kissell
Director of IT Services
Macquarie University
The University business is changing worldwide. On a visit to Australia, the award-winning academic and researcher, Carl Berger, talked about a fundamental shift in the educational paradigm. According to United States based Berger - who is well known for his work on how people learn using technology - the expectations of students in higher education has changed to a model he calls WINWINI - an acronym for "What I Need When I Need It."
At the same time, academic institutions are required to do more with less, reducing the total cost of ownership while aligning Information Technology (IT) with business goals. According to research conducted by Sun Microsystems, the seven key business priorities and change drivers for education executives and Chief Information Officers are as follows:
Become easy to do business with - prospects, students, faculty and alumni
Increase Return on Investment (ROI) by leveraging existing IT investments
Integrate discrete sites into self-service portals
Single sign-on and creating a secure network identity
E-learning and digital asset management
Mobile and wireless services
24x7 infrastructure - high quality of service
Source: White Paper, "Sun ONE in Education".
One of Australia's most innovative universities, Macquarie University, is no stranger to the new WINWINI paradigm and has set out to achieve all seven of the listed priorities over time.
"We have a growing number of overseas students, and students within our domestic community, who are trying to juggle jobs, social life and university. They want to be able to study when they can find the time - often externally," said Brian Kissell, Director of IT services, Macquarie University.
Founded in 1964, the university's rapid expansion meant its IT infrastructure had grown in an ad-hoc, decentralised manner. By 2002, it had a disparate and ageing array of technologies from numerous vendors, in a dispersed layout throughout the campus. Its computer centre, based around a mainframe, was inadequate to support a rapidly growing network - a network with increasingly blurred internal and external boundaries.
While technically advanced in terms of online learning and a range of education initiatives, some of Macquarie's large-scale functions including student enrolments lacked Web enablement.
"In today's academic environment administrative overheads must be kept to a minimum and the student enrolment process streamlined. We wanted to use technologies such as Web services to give the University a strategic advantage and also expand our reach internationally. Our goal was to put in place an IT infrastructure that would not only achieve immediate business goals, but also be flexible enough to grow and adapt to new ones not yet apparent," said Kissell.
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Architecture of the Future: Web Services and Beyond
In response to these demands, Macquarie University has implemented a new Sun Microsystems hardware and software datacentre environment to deliver Web services to students, staff and other organisations that deal with the University.
The solution - which includes the establishment of a Greenfield datacentre and an enterprise-wide portal to serve more than 25,500 users - represents a major Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) installation.
It positions Macquarie at the forefront of datacentre technology utilisation worldwide with a "24x7" operational capability that is resilient, secure and scalable in terms of processing capacity, memory and storage.
"Sun has maximised the return on our investment with the Sun ONE architecture. By leveraging legacy applications, the new datacentre environment not only protects past investments but also reduces Web services development time so we can benefit from results sooner."
"The solution meets the University's key requirements for both horizontal and vertical expansion, open standards, reduced cost of ownership and a proven Internet software architecture," he said.
Designed from scratch by Sun Professional Services as part of a two-week on-site engagement, the solution comprises a three-tier architecture: Web services; application; and database layers. A combination of high performance load balancing switches and an industry best practice firewall design, provides a secure and resilient networking fabric for the interconnect of the Sun servers.
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Portal Power: Safe, Secure, Affordable Identity Management
The Sun ONE environment will enable the University to deploy an enterprise-wide portal where students, staff and others can use a Web browser to access a full range of University services from anywhere at anytime.
Web services to be delivered via the portal include enrolments, training courses, exam results, library services, human resources (HR) functions, finance systems and access to research data, as well as a personal calendar and email account.
"Managing and securing user identity is critical in a higher education setting. Unlike corporations, the user population turns over by around 20-25 per cent a year," said Andrew Boulus, Sun Microsystems National Manager, Education and Research.
"You need a system that makes it easy to manage identities and offer varying levels of security," he said.
The Macquarie solution uses LDAP technology to authenticate and authorise user access via a single sign-on log-in. This removes the need to re-key user information when performing different functions.
A user can tailor the portal to their day-to-day needs. Customisable buttons create links to frequently used resources, course material and so on. A new library system currently being developed will make all of the library sites and services available at the click of a button, again with customisation so that the portal becomes a personal gateway to the user's particular areas of interest.
"Portals are the first logical step in an evolutionary migration path towards a Services on Demand architecture. Rather than rip out and replace, portals are a cheap, quick and easy way to move legacy applications to a Web services environment," said Jim Hassell, Managing Director, Sun Microsystems Australia.
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Services on Demand - Even During Peak Hour
Services on Demand describes the ability to provide information, data and applications to anyone, anytime, anywhere on any device. In Macquarie University's case, this means being able to handle high volumes of Internet traffic from around the world, and delivering a range of services that draw on its internal network resources.
"24x7 service is no longer just a nicety, it is crucial in today's service environment. When the University makes a discovery of relevance to the global research community, our systems need to be available and capable of handling the load. Similarly, when examination results are released, students will access these the instant they are published, which could be at 2:00 am in the morning," Kissell said.
"We get between 7,000 and 10,000 users in the first hour when exam results are released. Add to this a research discovery, or news worthy article and you can have a huge number of traffic patterns. Not only do our systems need to be up at all times, they need to handle unpredictable, peak loads and highly variable identity and authentication requirements," Brian Kissell said.
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Fire Up - 15K Powers the Datacentre
Macquarie set a precedent in the education sector by becoming the first Australian University to install a Sun Fire 15K server to drive its datacentre. Importantly for the University, the Sun Fire 15K has the flexibility to support multiple configurations as the Services on Demand model continues to grow.
"With the Sun Fire 15K, we have the capability to nominally allocate CPUs at different times, so we can plan for the peak loads and pre-determine which domains will be used to handle surges," said Kissell.
With high availability and hot-swappable components, the server delivers a compelling total cost of ownership benefit to the University. It is the only high-end datacentre server with Sun's fifth-generation Dynamic System Domains, running the robust Solaris 8 Operating Environment and capable of supporting thousands of mission-critical applications.
"We were impressed when the recent lab tests showed it has the fastest transaction rate when running Oracle 9i," he said.
Macquarie University's old architecture comprised a large number of Web servers and numerous email systems. Its previous computer centre grew in an ad-hoc manner having supported Cray, FACOM and DEC mainframes and the existing FACOM system environment was not supported by the new Student Information System - AMIS.
Multiple server systems scattered throughout the University will eventually be consolidated within the datacentre reducing administration, maintenance and associated costs.
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Meteoric Storage Needs - Literally
Macquarie University's data storage needs are large by anyone's standards. And they are growing. For example, it currently needs to store around 2 Terabytes of research data and this is expected to expand to around 20 Terabytes within the next few years.
With Australia's best-known cosmologist and popular science author, Professor Paul Davies among the University's staff, the volumes of data generated every day are huge.
For example, Professor Andy Pitman's research interests include climate modelling and climate change. This requires the mathematical modelling of the flow of heat and water through the soil and vegetation. It also requires the generation and use of global data sets and surface characteristics. He collaborates with the Bureau of Meteorology and some of the major research groups in Europe and the USA.
All of this adds up to huge data archive that must still be accessible by researchers everyday.
"Sun was particularly creative in meeting our need for cost-effective scalability," Kissell said.
"By linking one of the active domains on the 15K server with Sun SAM-FS hierarchical storage solution and a Sun StorEdge L700 tape library, Sun was able to significantly cut the cost per megabyte of storage. Academic staff can still retrieve data via the network as if it were stored on the hard disk but at a fraction of the price and with huge scalability options," he said.
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Get it Right Day One - Sun ONE
"You only get once chance to get this right. We needed to make sure that when we launched a Web service that it worked perfectly the first time. If it isn't user friendly it will not be well utilised and users will be less likely to take advantage of the additional services it provides," Kissell said.
With this in mind, the University sought a solution capable of demonstrable performance from day one - which meant previously tried and tested case studies.
"We chose Sun ONE because it was a commercial product offering an easy migration path. Sun had large international reference sites demonstrating that the Sun ONE solution can handle peak loads of Internet traffic."
"Sun ONE was particularly attractive given that we could draw on solutions already developed elsewhere in the world. You can install the Sun ONE products and they will run with limited customisation," Kissell said.
The University expects to have the new datacentre operational by the end of September 2002, just three months from project commencement. Existing University applications and Web services will be migrated to the new datacentre on a project-by-project basis according to business priority.
"It is dangerous to blindly employ Web services without properly understanding the infrastructure ramifications. Such an approach can be costly and time consuming. That is why Sun proposes a measured and phased strategy,"
Andrew Boulus
Sun Microsystems National Manager
Education and Research
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Reinvent the wheel? No - build a new transport system
The Macquarie University architecture sets a global precedent for delivering Services on Demand. Lessons learned in its creation will be made available for use by other organisations keen to speed time-to-market.
The solution is so advanced that the architecture (datacentre, network security and software) will be developed into a Reference Architecture for Australian and New Zealand Universities, and later made available to other academic institutions around the world.
Reference Architectures - in combination with Sun's global network of iForce Ready Centres - help speed development times and cut costs when designing new solutions by leveraging best-practice work already done by other organisations.
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Financing future growth
To guard against technology obsolescence moving forward, and spread capital costs over time, Macquarie University is using Sun Rentals to help finance its infrastructure and facilitate a continual process of technology refresh during the next five years.
"We wanted to design a commercial grade solution from the ground up that would meet all of the University's business needs not only now, but in the future," said Kissell.
"It's all about delivering better service to all of the communities that interact with the University in the most efficient and cost effective way possible. The new IT infrastructure is not technology for technologies sake, it will give Macquarie a strategic advantage in an increasingly competitive global market," he said.
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Standards benefit all
Macquarie University is a founding member of the Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services (COLIS) project - whose aim is to develop a scalable standards based model for institutional interoperability, enabling the seamless sharing of online learning and scholarly information resources.
Macquarie plans to utilise the lessons learned through the COLIS project and integrate many of these within the Sun ONE environment.
Macquarie University and Sun are also working on a number of strategic partnership opportunities, including possibility of Macquarie joining the Liberty Alliance, an organisation formed to create an open, federated, single sign-on identity specification.
The University's commitment to collaborate and communicate with other institutions reiterates the importance of developing open standards. "In the datacentre this means open systems - we must be able to run any technology seamlessly. It also means best practices standards. Sun has delivered just that," said Kissell.
