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Features
Ensuring the Success of Self-Service Portals
4/4/2002
Portal technology has revolutionized human resource
departments on college campuses. Self-service is now the name of the game,
enabling employees to access electronic forms and services from any Web browser.
Replacing paper forms and labor-intensive processes with automated services
provides institutions with significant cost and time savings. At the same time,
for self-service to succeed, the system must be reliable, accurate, and
available at all times. Users must feel confident that the forms they submit
online will arrive at their destination quickly and
securely.
As Arizona State University began building
a portal to provide students, faculty, and staff with personalized online
service, its Human Resources Technology Group worked to ensure that the services
would be always available. ASU's three campuses serve about 50,000 students and
employ nearly 7,000 faculty and staff. It was critical that there be no delays
or failure in the Web-based system and that the system be able to handle a large
volume of traffic. Another issue was persistence: the department needed a system
that would guarantee that users working on a form would remain connected to the
same server through the entire process of completing the form, no matter how
long that took. That way, users could complete the form without having to start
over in the middle of the process.
ASU decided on a
solution that included two servers, rather than one larger one, and a traffic
management product that would guarantee the safe and consistent delivery of
materials into and out of the servers. The servers, Dell machines running
Windows NT and Microsoft Internet Information Server, would be monitored by
BIG-IP HA+ from F5 Networks. BIG-IP provides automatic and intelligent
management of Internet traffic and content, ensuring reliability, scalability,
speed, and management.
"We decided against purchasing a single high-end
server," explains Scott Hancock, support systems analyst for the Human Resources
Technology Group at ASU, "because we couldn't be guaranteed 100 percent uptime
or be assured it could handle any size load. Instead, we opted to invest in two
lower-end, cost-effective servers and a load-balancing solution to provide the
redundancy and uptime we required."
Traffic management products such as
BIG-IP monitor, intercept, inspect, transform, and direct traffic to (or from)
servers. In addition, BIG-IP helps prevent system failure by quickly detecting
server and application problems while directing traffic to functioning servers
and applications. It also verifies that content is responding properly, thereby
preventing users from seeing error messages. For ASU, this not only ensures that
HR’s Web-based services are always available to users, but that the right
services are available with the right information. The product conducts both
health monitoring (checking to make sure that the server is operating correctly
before sending it traffic) and load balancing. "If a server isn't sending
correct information, BIG-IP automatically switches to the other one," says
Hancock. This keeps traffic moving smoothly and gives the support team time to
correct problems in the troubled server.
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