Systems stability is crucial to keep any organization running. A university is no exception.<\/p>\n
Three to four years ago, Lee\u2019s systems were unstable and didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So IT Systems decided to get the systems in working order. After Lee\u2019s lease on its physical servers was up, IT decided to move everything to a virtual environment, Chad Matthews, database administrator for IT Systems said.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Since then] we\u2019ve not had an outage during registration. We haven\u2019t had many outages in any of our Colleague services \u2026 the systems themselves were bringing us down before,\u201d Matthews said.<\/p>\n
This move created multiple virtual servers rather than physical units, and gave servers exclusive purposes so as not to slow the system down.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
If something does go wrong, they\u2019ll know but it won\u2019t interfere with the main working system.<\/p>\n
IT refreshes these test environments every month, making sure they\u2019re as close as possible to the system the university currently has in production.<\/p>\n
This provides the most up-to-date information on how the production servers will respond to any given updates that might come in.<\/p>\n
IT Systems now works with Ellucian as well, the group that provides Colleague, on performance health checks before registration.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe basically stress our systems out to see what the peak performance is,\u201d Matthews said. This helps show IT where they can tweak things to maximize performance.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Systems stability is crucial to keep any organization running. A university is no exception. Three to four years ago, Lee\u2019s systems were unstable and didn\u2019t 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":206,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[97],"tags":[13,14,15,43,44,45],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-news","tag-lee-university","tag-it-systems","tag-it-operations","tag-systems-stability","tag-colleague","tag-ellucian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7oftp-bN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webpages.leeu.edu\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}