New and More Powerful Central Servers

Horizontal Rule [Sept 97]

John Chan

At the start of the new school year, you would notice that significant improvements have been made to our Central Services computing equipments. These enhancements were made possible as part of the total campus network upgrade project. The University's Central Services can be broadly divided into 5 main categories, namely the Academic Computing, Administrative Systems, Communication Systems, Network Management, and Internet & Intranet Services Facilities. Improvements can be seen in most of these services.

Our backend Email servers for Staff have been upgraded to a new DEC Alpha Cluster. This cluster consists of AlphaServer 4100 5/400 machines, which are the most powerful in its range. Our Polylink Email servers for Student have also been upgraded to a similar Alpha Cluster, again consisting of AlphaServer 4100 5/400 machines. Both of these clusters are provided with RAID disks and ample disk storage. The implementation of RAID disks will minimize disk failure significantly. Since the machines are clustered, the failure of one node will be automatically offset by the others. Thus, reliable and quality services of our Communication Systems can be maintained with the provision of these redundancy and failover capabilities.

Our Academic Unix environment have been completely replaced by an extremely powerful SUN Starfire UltraSparc Enterprise 10000, which falls in the range of the supercomputer capacity. One of the spectacular features of the Starfire is the ability to be subdivided into different domains, with each being viewed as a separate entity or "machine". The Starfire domain for Academic use has been configured to consist of 1GB of main memory and 8 UltraSparc processors. Sufficient disk storage are provided for all teaching and research needs, as well as for developing personal Web pages for individual users. With this, together with the set-up of the new Email servers for Staff leading to a reduction of system loading in the existing Academic OpenVMS cluster, users should experience considerable performance gain in both the OpenVMS and Solaris Academic Computing environment.

Another Starfire domain has been set up for the Intranet services, a new campus information infrastructure based on the Internet technology in which the CSC had started to develop applications more than half a year ago. Under this environment, all our existing information services will be converted to Web-based systems, and new applications such as multimedia teaching support, Help Desk systems, etc. will be incorporated later. This Starfire domain was configured to consist of 512MB of main memory and 4 UltraSparc processors, which should be of reasonable capacity to support the Intranet services.

Besides the above, newer and powerful machines have been added to some of the University Administration Systems. Amongst these are the Oracle Financial System replacing 3 of the financial modules of the BFO. These services will be provided by a SUN UltraSparc Enterprise 4000 configured with 768MB RAM and 2 UltraSparc processors. Other systems include a new DEC AlphaServer 4100 5/400 for the Library system, and new SUN UltraSparc Enterprise 4000 servers for the Student Information System. Both of these are still under development and will be available in the near future.


[Issue No. 12]


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City University of Hong Kong
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