Automation Technology at Boston University
- By Lawrence Ouellette
- 06/29/04
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.
The systems threshold management capabilities allow ACS to monitor for fluctuations
in critical system resource metrics and automatically react and/or notify appropriate
personnel to take action before a serious problem occurs. Suppose, for example,
a non-interruptible power supply generates an event indicating that the ACS
department has lost building power and is operating on batteries. The automation
tool notifies active online users and support staff of the outage, and then
starts the process of executing a managed shutdown of the university’s
administrative business systems, rather than risking database integrity waiting
for an abrupt crash when battery power would be exhausted.
BU’s automation system simplifies remote data center management and increases
staff productivity and system availability, while at the same time minimizing
manual intervention in the data center. Given that AF/REMOTE is the primary
means of automated notification, BU operates both a primary and a hot-standby
version of AF/REMOTE, which are networked and synchronized.
Since deploying systems management automation technology, BU achieved its goal
of an unattended data center, while enhancing quality of services, increasing
system availability, reducing operating expenses, and improving the quality
of life for the support staff.