The
Computer Room in the Computing Services Centre (CSC) is the
core location where most of the critical IT equipments are
resided. The room, built and designed over 20 years ago together
with the whole campus, its space was believed to be more than
enough when it was first enacted. However, with the importance
and emphasis on the use of IT (as stated clearly in the University
strategic plans) throughout these years, the needs for more
space to accommodate the ever-increasing number of building
devices, cables, cooling devices, storage devices and servers
arisen from demands from both existing and new IT services
gradually became evident. Thus, optimized designs of space
utilization and housing of equipment in the room with no space
for expansion becomes a critical problem to tackle.
Back in the late 90’s, the CSC had identified several areas
that needed to be standardized in order to tackle the problem
which otherwise would affect the implementation and improvement
of IT services. At that stage, the CSC had decided that a
unified Operating System and hardware platform should be chosen
for providing most of the critical services so as to reduce
the manpower and the expertise required on system management
support, to reduce the complication of space management, and
to minimize the applications compatibility problem. The Solaris
on Sparc platform by Sun Microsystems Inc. was chosen to be
the best choice at that time.
It was about the same time when the IT consolidation had
evolved to become a trend with the help of the emerging technology
on the virtualizations of server and storage. The CSC had
quickly adopted this to become a major factor in formalizing
the policy of consolidation of servers. In Sep 1997, the first
Sun Enterprise E10k top of the line server was bought. The
beauty of this machine was that in a single footprint, a maximum
of 16 virtual domains or servers can be configured sharing
the same high speed backplane and providing high throughput
and performance. With the introduction of the new dynamic
reconfiguration technology, which was the first to be offered
in the market at the time, allows the re-shuffling of the
virtual domains in terms of the number of processors and memory
according to different and volatile needs.
The introduction of the UltraSparc III series processors
in 2002 was a major leap in terms of processing power over
those used in the E10k servers. Thus in Jun 2002, a new Sun
Fire E15k server was acquired. Two years later, a similar
E25k server was installed replacing the entire suite of E10k
servers. Almost all of the critical services, including the
email servers, the Banner servers, and the e-Learning servers,
were configured on various virtual domains on these two machines.
Each service was then set up using one virtual domain from
each machine and either clustered together to form a reliable
and redundant clustered service or join together to form a
load-balancing set with maximized availability.
Five years later, an even more powerful UltraSparc chipset
was introduced with the release of the UltraSparc VI processors
that support more cores per processor. To be in line with
the technology refresh strategy, the Sun Enterprise M9000
(M9k) server, with even better design and advanced features,
much faster backplane, a nearly three-folded performance gain
over the E15k machine, was bought in the late 2007 in order
to replace the old and to be retired E15k machine. Migration
to this new machine from the E15k is quite straightforward.
The E25k machine is retained so that clustering can still
be set up for providing high availability to each critical
service. Apart from the performance gain of the M9k over the
E15k, user adoption to the usage of this new machine is totally
transparent. No user application modifications are required.
Furthermore, this hardware upgrade will not incur additional
management effort in terms of system and application support.
It is anticipated that a completely new enterprise class of
machine will be introduced in the next two to three years,
which would be a natural replacement for the E25k server.
In view of all these advantages, this replacement strategy
will likely continue in the future by making use of the new
technology, with reduced total cost of ownership and minimum
management effort while greatly boosting the performance and
improving the user experience for each critical service.