Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
Automation Technology at Boston University
6/29/2004
Higher education leaders are directing their institutions to incorporate the
strategies of business school academics to increase operation efficiency and
maintain a high level of service to administration, faculty and student “customers.”
Ensuring the reliability of an institution’s Information Technology (IT)
systems, which today underpin nearly all facets of campus life, is critical
to achieving these objectives. Increasingly, advanced automation technology
is enabling universities such as Boston University (BU) to achieve tight control
over the performance of their technology infrastructures, with greater consistency
and fewer resources.
BU’s Administrative Computing Services (ACS) team has taken an active
role to assure a high level of systems uptime and automation in support of the
university’s administrative computing requirements. ACS plays a key role
in supporting the university’s population of more than 30,000 students,
who come from all 50 states and 135 countries. Additional international student
federal registration and reporting mandates enacted after September 11, 2001,
make performance and availability critically important to serving BU’s
foreign student population, nearly 5,000 students, each semester.
In the late 1980s, ACS’s mission was to establish an unattended data center that would improve the overall availability and reliability of its computing environment and better serve its user community. Automation of BU’s performance monitoring and service management operation in the early 1990s was a fundamental requirement for achieving this objective. To support its unattended data center initiative, automation systems were required to:
- Ensure a high level of systems availability;
- Reduce the potential for human error by enabling automation routines for specialized and complex system requirements;
- Notify university staff immediately in the event that a system issue could not be corrected automatically.
After reviewing its options, the ACS team selected the AF/OPERATOR automation system from Candle Corporation to build a set of automation rules and routines for its mainframe and distributed environments. AF/OPERATOR is a performance and console automation system that addresses a critical data-center need to reduce human error and respond as quickly as possible to system events displayed on the console.
The Administrative Computing Services’ automation capabilities manage all system alert activity for zSeries mainframe, Unix, and Windows servers hosted by ACS. Automation is the backbone of the ACS operational environment and so new technologies deployed in the data center are integrated with the automation system.
Without automation capabilities, BU would be required to add staff to deliver these same quality services. A critical use of automation technology at BU is monitoring the 2,500 batch jobs—relating to student accounting, registration, housing and federal reporting requirements, along with all the usual business functions—that the university’s ACS runs daily. BU is thus able to build automatic responses to conditions that occur during processing, which leads to a more consistent level of systems performance and management.
Recommended Reading
- IBM Unveils New Software Designed To Streamline eDiscovery
IBM has announced the release of new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software specifically designed to meet the needs of clients dealing with complex legal discovery requirements. The eDiscovery solutions expand on IBM's ECM platform and are intended to give organizations greater control of digitally stored documents in an effort to reduce costs and streamline the discovery process involved in litigation.
- Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008 to Manufacturing
Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 to manufacturing (RTM) and, as an evaluation edition, to subscribers of its Microsoft Development Network and TechNet services, the company announced Wednesday.
- Security Woes Up, as PHP and OSS Make the List
Software vulnerabilities are up this year, especially Web browser-based ones, according to a new report from IBM Internet Security Systems. The X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics Report, released in late July, defined the problem broadly. A vulnerability is anything that results "in a weakening or breakdown of the confidentiality, integrity, or accessibility of the computing system."
- Textbook Publishing in a Flat World
According to the National Association of College Stores in a 2007 survey, the average cost of a new college textbook was $53. The founders of Flat World Knowledge, which launches with its first run of college textbooks this fall, consider that too high--so high, in fact, that they'll be offering textbooks for free, at least in versions that can be read online.
- CourseCast 2.0 Adds Podcasting, Streaming Media Features to Free Lecture Capture System
Panopto has released CourseCast 2.0, an update to the company's classroom capture system that's available free to academic users. CourseCast 2.0 had previously been available as part of Panopto's beta program for educators since June.
- It IS about Technology: Integrating Higher Ed into Knowledge Culture
For more than twenty years, we educational technologists have talked about "integrating information technology into higher education." The implication was that education would stay the same and information technology would benignly slip in and cause no ruckus at all. This rhetoric no longer applies, if it ever did, and does a disservice to us as we work through the intricacies of this age.
