McElhaney to replace Falls as computer lab manager

25th March | No Comments | posted by vegger | in About IT Staff and Student Workers

 

Starting April 1^st, faculty members who have questions about technology in their classrooms will be interacting with a different person than they would have before. Justin McElhaney, currently computer support analyst II for IT, will replace Steven Falls as IT Operations computer lab manager.

The computer lab manager is the person responsible for taking care of all the computers, virtual desktops and projectors in technology-enhanced classrooms and computer labs.

According to Chris Golden, Director of IT Operations, the computer lab manager also makes sure that

“students are using what the teachers are teaching”

when it comes to technology.

That means that students and teachers are using the same programs with the same updates on their computers, so there isn’t a disconnect that inhibits the learning process.

Golden said that that fact makes the staff move something faculty would want to know about.

As for students, they will now simply owe the efficiency they experience when they sit down at one of Lee’s computers to a new man.

All systems go: IT stabilizes operating systems

20th March | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

Systems stability is crucial to keep any organization running. A university is no exception.

Three to four years ago, Lee’s systems were unstable and didn’t have the memory to run even regular, everyday processes. During high-traffic periods like registration, the system would lock up, leaving users frustrated and slowing down the entire process.

In fact, IT Systems and Operations team members would have to sacrifice sleep to keep things running, getting up at 3 a.m. every morning to reboot the system to insure that it had enough memory to get through the day.

So IT Systems decided to get the systems in working order. After Lee’s lease on its physical servers was up, IT decided to move everything to a virtual environment, Chad Matthews, database administrator for IT Systems said.

“[Since then] we’ve not had an outage during registration. We haven’t had many outages in any of our Colleague services … the systems themselves were bringing us down before,” Matthews said.

This move created multiple virtual servers rather than physical units, and gave servers exclusive purposes so as not to slow the system down.

There is a database server that IT created off of which users can pull information for reports. Since reports can involve massive amounts of data, using the production server to create these reports would slow it down.

The database server is specifically for reporting, so nothing gets bogged down. It’s also updated every 30 minutes, which means reports won’t suffer from a lack of current information.

IT also rebuilt the apps server from the ground up, which is the main production server. It runs Colleague, the system everyone at the university uses at one point or another.

Several test servers were also created. These servers are just replicas of the main production server; however, when new patches or updates come in, IT will run the updates on the test servers to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

If something does go wrong, they’ll know but it won’t interfere with the main working system.

IT refreshes these test environments every month, making sure they’re as close as possible to the system the university currently has in production.

This provides the most up-to-date information on how the production servers will respond to any given updates that might come in.

IT Systems now works with Ellucian as well, the group that provides Colleague, on performance health checks before registration.

“We basically stress our systems out to see what the peak performance is,” Matthews said. This helps show IT where they can tweak things to maximize performance.”