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Network and Infrastructure

It's Time to Upgrade Central Servers

by John Chan

To prepare for the new academic year, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has added resources to some of the critical central servers as enhancement to some of the existing services or as additions of new services.

A lot of resources have been added, particularly to the existing Sun Starfire machines. These include additions of system boards, memory and storage space. Some of the upgrades include the following:

  • A new Starfire domain has been set up for academic research work that requires large computing resources. This system has forty 400MHz UltraSparc CPUs, and 14 GB memory that are most suitable for large research projects requiring huge amount of processing time.

  • The WebCT server has been upgraded to 8 CPUs and 4 GB memory. The increase will be beneficial to the increasing number of Web-based courses that are provided on-line.

  • The student Mail server has been upgraded with an additional 4 CPUs and 1 GB memory to cater for the increasing number of services that will be put forth.

  • The Intranet Database and Web servers have been equipped with an additional 4 CPUs and 2GB memory to cater for the increasing number of new services.

  • The Banner (Student Information System) Database server has been replaced by a Sun Starfire system domain with 16 CPUs and 8 GB memory to take care of the increasing number of Banner services.

  • LDAP servers have been set up to allow the lookup of information through a central database, which in turn serves as a single point for service access validation.

  • A central SQLserver database has been installed for those departments that require this type of database access.

  • Load balancing feature has been added to some of the critical services. These include the University Web servers, the LDAP servers, and the Banner Web servers.