Central Servers

Computer Room

Different central servers are installed in the CityU to provide diverse services for teaching, research, administrative, and management uses.

A consolidated approach has been adopted for setting up these servers. Basically, the Sun Solaris and the Intel Windows platforms are chosen as the main operating systems. For those critical services that need to be run on the Unix environment, the Sun Solaris Enterprise servers are used. These can be configured into different system domains (virtual machines). For those that need to be run on the Windows environment, the high performance Intel servers with multiple CPUs are used. Consolidation will reduce the footprints and system management effort, provide better support, and allow dynamic resource allocation.

High availability and redundancy features have been used extensively. Features such as Server Clustering, Server Load Balancing, and Server Farm Integration are adopted in setting up all of these critical services.

Critical services such as the Email servers, the e-Learning servers, the Web servers, the Administrative servers, and the Library server, are mostly configured using the Sun mainframe class system domains and high performance Intel servers. All of the afore-mentioned high availability and redundancy features have been used.

Other models and configurations have been used for providing services such as the Video-on-Demand service and the Digital Imaging service.

IT.ServiceDesk@cityu.edu.hk