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.”

IT continues to innovate university website

26th February | No Comments | posted by vegger | in About IT Staff and Student Workers, For Students, Faculty and Staff

If you thought that innovation was over for the university website when IT launched the revamped version in August 2012, think again.

Changes are in the works that will simplify the user’s online experience and make the website a more effective tool.

The biggest change, according to Nate Tucker, Director of IT Systems, is the approach to web development.

Instead of having two separate webpages – one old, and one with all of the new changes – the development transition will be more fluid.

“We’re creating more of an evolving website instead of taking a stop-and-go approach,” Tucker said.

Click here to see the current developing website.

One important difference users should expect to see that will help them connect and interact with the website is the incorporation of RSS feeds from the university calendar and news updates page.

“You’ll be able to get the RSS feeds on your personal calendar or on your mobile phone if you want,” Tucker said.

Another user-friendly update is the conversion of the calendar from a list form into a visual of an actual calendar.

The most recent change, however, involves elements Tucker refers to as banners and real estate, both of which have different meanings in the web design world than they do in other areas of life.

Online banners don’t wave in the wind like their cloth counterparts do, and Lee’s online banners are no different.

The banners on Lee’s website are text and graphic combos that highlight, and may provide links to, other areas of the site that users are likely to find interesting or to want more information about, such as the Frontline program or Lee Day.

Lee’s banners are currently located in a stationary line towards the bottom of the homepage above the “quicklinks” section.  The banners do not appear when users click on links to other pages of the website.

But with this next development, the banners will rotate one by one in the bottom right-hand corner of every webpage on the site, replacing the flame from the university logo.

“The banners will help utilize the real estate on the web page,” Tucker said.

The real estate Tucker is talking about isn’t concerned with selling a house for a better price or surveying land to get an accurate measurement; it just means the available space on a webpage.

In addition to helping the website use available space in the best possible way, Tucker said that the banner rotation “provides more visibility for current events.”

And there you have it. IT is committed to promoting innovation, one step at a time.

Facebook page gets 15,000 “thumbs-up”

19th February | No Comments | posted by vegger | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

Last week the Lee University Facebook page surpassed 15,000 likes: a milestone for the page.

That means that over 15,000 people (15,079, as of right now) have clicked the button on the page indicating that they are fans of, or are interested in, Lee University.

The amount is over triple the number of Lee’s undergraduate enrollment.

Bryan College, another private Christian university in the area, has an enrollment of about 1,400, and its Facebook page has around 4,000 likes.

Compared to a nearby public university, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has an enrollment of about 10,000 students, with more than 12,000 likes on its Facebook page.

But, according to director of IT Systems Nate Tucker, who manages the Facebook page, “there are a lot of current students who still haven’t “liked” Lee.'”

That’s something that the administration sees not as a discouragement, but as a challenge.

Vice president for enrollment Phil Cook posted on the Facebook page, “15,000 likes…nicely done! Here’s to 15,000 more.”

 

Check-ups prevent system crashes during registration

18th February | No Comments | posted by vegger | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

Registering for classes can be a stressful time for Lee students.

While still bearing the weight that one semester entails, students must begin thinking about the next one: the classes they need to take, the times that they need to take them, and how to work everything else in their schedule around them.

If the system students use to register for classes crashes in the middle of the process, the stress is likely to increase.

This is a problem Lee used to have, but thanks to Performance Health Checks done by IT Systems, they don’t have it anymore.

“[A few years ago], we were having outages in the middle of registration. That’s where we were,” IT Systems database administrator Chad Matthews said.

Matthews said that technological systems, just like people, need periodic check-ups.

Whereas people need a doctor, technology needs Performance Health Checks. While seeing a doctor can keep you from getting sick, the Performance Health Check keeps Lee’s systems from having the technological equivalent: a system outage.

According to Matthews, the goal of the check is essentially to “stress the system out” by simulating what it would be like if all students were doing class searches at the same time. (Class searches are the most time-consuming part of registration).

“It’s similar to a stress test you’d have in a physical examination [at a doctor’s office],” Matthews said.

By pummeling the system with information to compute and tasks to accomplish, IT is able to examine which parts of the system are slowing the process down.

This way, they can fix the individual components without having to buy completely new hardware (unless new hardware is the only thing that will solve the problem).

“The ideal thing is to have someone go in as if they are the only one in the system,” Matthews said. “We don’t want anyone to have to wait. We want them to get exactly what they want.”

These advances in the registration process don’t just help students; they also help the university itself by providing a good first impression for freshmen.

Matthews claimed that a freshman who experiences too many problems when they first come to a university may become too frustrated and want to leave.

“They’ll go somewhere else,” Matthews said.

Performance Health Checks help keep the system in shape so that Lee can attract new students and satisfy the ones it already has.

As Matthews put it, “We are making sure we can handle as much as possible.”