Moving Datacentre – next two weeks

There have been a couple of postings about moving our servers into a new datacentre (Green ICT, How to Move 160 Servers). Well, now the time has come! As a reminder, we plan to move all of our servers out of the Faculty of Health and Social Care Server room into a refurbished datacentre shared with the University of Aberdeen and Aberdeen College. Over the past few months IT Services staff have been preparing the ground, making sure that the network connections are all working and that the services being moved are ready. Some of this work is highly specialised – one of the essential components to link the network had not been properly configured and had to be returned to Japan for further work, a round trip of 3 weeks. IT Services did also find that the configuration of some services had to be changed to allow them to operate in the new datacentre, and you will have seen a few small outages to allow these services to be updated.

The moves are going to happen over the next 2 weeks. ITS are not moving everything in one go, but will carry out the move in 2 or 3 stages. Some of the services ITS will be able to move without any downtime at all, some will require some downtime which is unavoidable.

The first batch are going to move this week, but the main move is planned to be the weekend of 27^th July. That weekend in particular will be a substantial move and there is likely to be some downtime over the weekend, so do keep an eye on the information notices which will be issued and plan your work and studies around this.

Once this is complete, we will have removed a significant risk from our IT infrastructure by being able to decommission the old server room (see When Things Get Hot). We will also greatly improve our environmental credentials. One key measure for datacentres is “Power Usage Effectiveness”, or PUE. This is a measure of the total amount of power used by the datacentre, divided by the raw power used just by the servers – and the reason this figure is important is that older datacentres use a lot of extra power just to keep the servers cool. So, for example, if you have servers consuming 100kW of power, and if you need another 100kW of air conditioning to keep them cool, then the datacentre is using 200kW of power in total. The PUE is 200/100 = 2. We want a figure which is as close to 1 as possible – the lower the better.

In the shared datacentre we’re aiming for an average PUE of 1.2 or less, and have already reached figures as low as 1.08 at times which means we are using much less additional power to cool the servers. That sort of figure is close to Facebook’s big new datacentre in Sweden  and we anticipate we will reduce our carbon output by around 230,000 Kg per annum.

RGU Web – Inside and Outside

Go back 12 years or so, and RGU’s web presence was pretty much a static web site, with some core information on there but many parts of the University largely unrepresented. Around 2002, a major web redesign project created a simple content editor, a relatively straight forward overall design and the ability of a wide cross section of the University community to create and populate web pages within the overall web site. I remember clearly that our biggest concern at the time was how to galvanise the effort across the University to create the level of web presence that we were looking for. I needn’t have worried – we had made the process of putting information on the web so easy that everybody jumped on very quickly and we actually ended up with the opposite problem. We had too much information, it was not all co-ordinated across departments, there was some duplication and much content was not being kept up to date following the initial enthusiasm. If I remember correctly we had over 12,000 pages on our web site, of which probably 11,500 were rarely accessed.

Anyway, we set about a major redesign of our web site back in 2007/8, put a web content team in place and control of content and over a continuous process since then created the web site that you see today for RGU. That web site is deliberately focussed on the external world – prospective students, parents, business partners, the community and so on. Whilst creating it, we moved across / redesigned content on the old web site. However, a great deal of the content on the old web site had been created with our internal University community in mind and this remained on the old web site which was now affectionately called “www4” as it had been renamed to distinguish it from the main web site.

The next stage in our journey was to create a staff and student portal which would, amongst other things, be the new home for the internal content marooned on www4. I wrote about that portal previously.

We’ve made good progress in moving that content across – if you are a member of staff or a student, go and have a look {web link to RGyoU}. Now we are undertaking the final push to get all the remaining content areas removed from www4 and replaced with something on the Portal. After that, www4 will be turned off in the next 2 to 3 months – and that will be the end of an era.

Once www4 has been turned off, we will have externally facing web content on our main web site, and internally facing web content accessed through the Portal via your RGU username and password. We also have web based content on Moodle, but that is information that is primarily associated with our teaching and learning programmes. It’s important to avoid confusion that the right information is in the right environment (web site, Portal, Moodle), and I will be working with colleagues to make sure we have effective arrangements to oversee this.

If you want a nostalgic look at one of our www4 pages – here (ironically) is the old web page for the web redevelopment project.  But be quick – it will disappear soon!

 

Seven IT Related “Themes” for RGU

RGU has just finished the main stages of its annual University planning process. The major activity in this process is that all Schools and Departments lay out their forward action areas in the context of the overall University strategic aims and priorities. This year’s context includes a revision to the University strategy and an incremental update to the IT Strategy which I’ll share soon.

I then reviewed all the School and Departmental plans for anything that related to the use of IT and after discussion with IT Managers and colleagues on SPARG  we’ve all agreed to approach these IT requirements under seven overall major themes. These are key to delivering the IT Strategy, support the individual school and departmental plans, but do so in the context of a longer term approach which will bring greater consolidation and integration across key parts of the University’s IT estate.

At this stage we have not finalised how these will be led across the University but we have agreed that most of them should be led as key institutional change projects, with significant technology enablement support from IT, but not as “IT” projects per se. As we start to firm up on how these themes will be taken forward, I’ll provide ongoing updates and also  go into more detail in relation to each theme.

Here are the 7 themes:

Engagement Life Cycle – Student, Staff and other stakeholders.

• Optimising key administrative processes across the University to create the best stakeholder experience
• Ensuring that collated information about all interaction with each stakeholder can be brought together and effectively used to enhance the stakeholder experience

Technology in Teaching and Learning

• Ensuring that the deployment and use of technology across the Campus effectively supports enhancement to teaching learning and assessment

Information and Knowledge

• A coherent approach to where information is located and presented across web based information environments
• Research data management
• Document management
• Provision of management information

Communication

• How the range of technology supported communication can support the overall communication strategy of the University, both internally and externally

Identity Management

• As the University activities and user community becomes increasingly diverse, an identity management solution is key to ensuring that we are able to effectively provide each person with access to the resources to which they are entitled and can manage their relationship with the University as it changes and evolves.

Use of University Services

• This theme will expand the use of technology to make it easier for users to access to a whole range of University services using, for example, smart cards online and mobile solutions as appropriate.

Infrastructure

• Underpinning all the above themes, there is a substantial programme of work taking place to upgrade many aspects of the underlying IT intrastructure. This will include ongoing server upgrades, network fitout of the new buildings, new wireless network, and moving into new datacentres.

 

First Move

First Move

Well, it’s the 30th May 2013, and the Library staff and books have moved into the new Library Tower in Riverside East, and this is the first day that they’ve opened to staff and students.

In a recent post I explained what was involved in preparing the IT infrastructure behind the scenes, so this post is by way of an update and also a huge thanks. Many IT staff from IT Services and from the Faculty IT&AV team, have worked immensely hard over the last 2-3 weeks on fitting out all the IT facilities and I am grateful to their commitment in getting everything to this stage. Thanks also to staff from the Library, Estates and various contractors for their assistance.

With some final construction work still ongoing in the building, and furniture and book moves happening at the same time, it’s been a challenge to schedule everything and work around issues and snags that have been arising on a daily basis. But over the past few weeks the IT teams have commissioned the network infrastructure required to service the Library and front desk and deployed around 400 workstations into the Library ready for use. There are some last minute issues with power connections at the moment which are preventing the workstations from being powered on today but hopefully that will be resolved quickly and everything is then ready to go.

Now that the IT in the Library is finished, the IT teams will turn their attention to the rest of the building. There is a schedule over the summer for staff moving from the three Schools into the building and the IT teams will be working ahead of these moves to prepare the network and install workstations. Priority will be given to this, and the installation of IT equipment into the various teaching spaces in the building will fit around preparation for these staff moves. The IT network will also be required to support other functions in the building, such as the building management system which is used to manage a range of building services and that will be scheduled too.

Finally, the WiFi system also has to be installed in the building. The system has already been procured and delivered and IT Services will start to deploy this once all the significant remaining building work is complete and the priority areas of the main IT Network are ready.

It’s hard to convey the scale of all this work to a non specialist. When talking to colleagues in the Library, I was interested to hear them refer to “kilometres” as a measure of how many books they were moving. That’s a great measure and something that you can visualise. I wonder what the IT equivalent is – kilometres of networking cabling? Or alternatively who can suggest how many kilometres there are in a terabyte?

UCAS – Paperless Admissions

For those who may not be familiar with the post-school education system in the UK, UCAS is a national body which is responsible for managing applications to higher education courses in the UK. Anyone wishing to study at a UK University will submit their application online via the UCAS web site which also provides information to assist applicants in their choice of University and course.

The process is fully online – I was on the parent side of this a couple of years ago when my son applied to University, and it’s always interesting to see things from a different perspective! What would not be obvious to most parents, however, is that once all these applications are submitted online and the data is transferred electronically, until now UCAS has also printed them out and distributed something like 2.7 million paper copies of the applications to Universities across the UK every year. It is therefore the paper application that forms the basis of the admissions process.

All that is about to change. Following a review of the application processes, UCAS announced that they plan to move to a completely paperless process so that student applications will only be passed to Universities electronically instead of by hard copy. This will take effect for students commencing in Academic Year 2014-15, which actually means that we will no longer receive paper forms from the start of the next admissions cycle in Oct/Nov 2013.

Sheila Kay, Head of Admissions and Enquiries at RGU, is leading the project at RGU to prepare for this and this is her most recent update on progress and plans:

“Over the last year we have done a lot of work including working with a selection of school-based admissions tutors and staff to identify what we require to put in place to continue best practice but to also look at ways to improve our efficiency and effectiveness throughout the admissions cycle.
By the end of this month, the supplier will be on site to install a web-based component of our student record system which gives us the functionality we are looking for.

The first phase of testing will be done by admissions staff to ensure the basic business processes are working as they should before expanding testing out to others. As all the Schools/Faculties have different ways of working and different requirements, it is important to ensure that what is put in place works for each area. Volunteers will be sought to assist with testing at various times over the coming months.

For courses that have no interview/selection process to manage, it is likely that input won’t be required until October.

For courses that do interview or have selection visits the plan is to get a short working group together to look at these requirements in more detail to ensure we can accommodate all procedures within the scope of the project. Contact will be made with these Schools shortly to get this started.

The current timeline is to get all the testing done by the end of October 2013 with a view to the system being put into the live environment at the beginning of November. There will be members of staff that have been involved with testing who will also require training in the full system. There will also be staff who’ve not been involved in testing and will be using the system and will require training in how to use it. This will take place early November and several sessions will be set up at Garthdee to ensure all staff have the opportunity to attend.”

Moving to Riverside East

It’s just a few weeks before the first part of Riverside East, our new building down at the Garthdee Campus, will be open for staff and students.  The Library is moving first and they plan to have moved out of the Aberdeen Business School and into the new building around the end of May. Sounds like they are having fun with red and green dots getting ready to move thousands of books – have a look at their blog.

We’re having fun too in IT Services, although we’re not quite seeing dots in front of our eyes yet. Before anyone can move into the new building we need to get all the IT equipment set up ready for staff and students to move in.

First priority is to build the IT network. All the cabling work has been done as part of the construction project, but what we have to do now is install all the network routers and switches which will drive the whole network across the building, and connect it up to the rest of the Campus. The network kit has been bought and the IT Engineers are on site to start the installation. It’s a complex process. The network equipment needs to be physically installed into the communications rooms and communications risers in the building, and thousands of cables need to be connected up to the correct network equipment. It’s essential that this is done systematically and neatly from the beginning to make access for future maintenance easy. Then it’s all got to be systematically configured and tested. The priority is to get everything ready for the Library first, but in order to do that much of the whole building network core needs to be done anyway. So in terms of sequencing, we’ll get the Library done first and then move on to the remainder of the building according to the move schedule for the Schools and Departments moving in. Because some of the construction work is still ongoing, health and safety is an important priority and all the IT engineers who will be working on site are going through formal safety training first.

Next come the IT workstations – approximately 400 are going into the Library space in time for it to open for students. There is a team of IT staff, ably assisted by some students from the School of Engineering, who are currently taking lots of workstations out of their boxes and cabling them up ready for installation in the new building. That’s fine, but of course you can’t put the workstations into the Library until there are desks to sit them on. So, all this IT work is actually now part of a very intensive programme of work to co-ordinate all the activities for the move into the building. The University has contracted with a company called Space Solutions and they are managing the overall programme of work – actually right down to scheduling the use of the lifts in the building. There’s no point in a bunch of IT guys arriving with hundreds of workstations and furniture guys with loads of desks and then fighting over who gets to use the lift. Just goes to show what level of detail has to be planned at this stage.

At the tail end of all of this there will be a fairly intensive period when the desks are going into the library, the workstations are going on the desks, are being connected up and tested, and somewhere round about this time thousands of books will be getting moved across and into their proper places on the shelves. Then of course there will be printers to install, and the self service issuing terminals for borrowers to use.

I’m sure it will look like an oasis of calm when the doors open and students go into the new building. Inevitably there will be some snagging at that stage, but spare a thought for a month of very hard work which will have preceded the opening!

 

How to move 160 servers without moving 160 servers

What are some of the challenges faced by IT Services staff? Here is a guest contribution from “Bobby G” – one of our senior IT technical staff:

“It may not be the type of question we ask ourselves everyday but we have recently been in a position where we have been required to move 160 of the university’s key servers onto new computer hardware often in diverse locations, and we wondered how to carry this work out as quickly as possible and with as little impact to our customers as possible.

The servers are all real working servers providing many important roles for the University including Library, Teaching, Financial, Research, and Support services. The amount of data involved is also quite large with around 5TB of data being involved (For those of us familiar with 1.4MB Floppy Disks that’s around 3.5 Million Floppy disks worth of information).

There is a trick as I suppose there usually is with these types of questions, and the answer is to move most of the servers in a “virtual” manner. This still involves moving where the server really is in terms of all of its intelligence (CPU/Memory), but actually leaves the data with all of the information and disks exactly appearing to be where they always were. There are now a number of systems which allow us to carry out this type of work and the University has used a tool from VMware in this instance. This has allowed us to reduce the total number of real physical servers used by half from 20 to 10 servers while almost doubling the amount of computing power available.

This makes the system much greener as there are significant savings in electricity and room cooling costs, and makes it much easier to add additional servers at a very low cost.

With a little careful planning we were able to move all 160 servers in around 9 hours one weekend with most services being unaffected by the move and most of those that were affected only being shut down for around 10 minutes.

The new setup of the system has been automated in such a manner that as servers get busy or if a physical server fails the “virtual” server will now move around to find a comparatively quiet working server and no one will even know it has moved (unless they have access to the log files). So we currently know the room that your server runs in but not exactly where it is as it may have moved itself in the last 10 mins. One of the next challenges we are giving ourselves is to setup the system so that we don’t even know which room the server is running in to allow the systems to move between buildings for themselves when a service is busy or there is some form of problem (e.g. power outage) in a building.

So in answer to the question “how do you move 160 servers without moving 160 servers” – you only move the little bit of intelligence that runs the servers and leave the rest set up as it is. (i.e. move where the server thinks it is).”

Technology in Teaching Spaces in RGU Riverside East

RGU’s new Campus Masterplan Building – “Riverside East” – is due for handing over to the University in April, and the Library will be the first official occupants – moving in during May. After several years of planning, preparation, procurement and building – we’re almost there! You can get up to date information on preparation for the move by referring to our “Campus Moves” web page:

One aspect of the new building that has been continually in our minds has been how to fit out teaching spaces with new technology to support anticipated future approaches to teaching and learning.

Work to scope the design of the new facilities started back in 2009, with a working group that included representatives from all faculties. This group was provided with basic room layouts and asked to discuss key questions about the way in which staff would want to use the spaces.  These questions included: “What will staff want to be able to do?”  “What will they want their students to be able to do?” Outcomes from these discussions helped to feed in to the specification of the room designs in the new building.

IT Services, DELTA (The Department for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching and Assessment) and Estates and continued to refine and develop the technical specification of learning spaces as the Masterplan project proceeded. We learned from developments in other Universities and activity in corporate environments – both in the UK and internationally. I wrote in a previous blog entry the key design principles that we wanted to see in the new building and since I wrote that blog the demonstration facility has been created in DELTA’s offices in St Andrew Street.

You can get a preview of all the features in an online video tour.  This includes links to specific video guides to each of the key features.  Staff at the University are also welcome to visit the demonstration area in DELTA’s offices and try it for themselves (contact Nicol Ferguson).

DELTA will  be coordinating a programme of staff development to help staff learn about the potential, and  encourage  best use of the features.  This will range from basic “how tos” of using specific pieces of kit, through to considering blended learning designs to make best use of the combination of the virtual learning environment and the new physical environments.

 

 

OOPS! – Working from Home

There is a cracking article in a recent edition of “The Economist”, which is available online and in which Yahoo’s new Chief Executive, Marissa Mayer, appears to be driving Yahoo employees to come in to the office unless they have a very good reason to work from home. The memo from the Human Resources Manager is addressed to “Yahoos”. If you are cringing already, read the article!

This is contrary to the direction that most enlightened organisations are travelling in – the ability to work from home or anywhere else off Campus for that matter is increasingly one aspect of a more flexible approach to working life. Of course, there are occasions where face to face contact and participation cannot be easily replaced, but equally there are many activities which can be easily carried out anywhere.  An important aspect of our IT Strategy is to ensure that access to our core IT services can be provided easily to any location, on any device, whilst maintaining security of information and access. A key part of that is the MyApps service, which I have mentioned before and which gives  you access to your University IT resources from anywhere – at work, at home, on the move, on a Pc, on an iPad – even on your phone if you can cope with the small screen size.

The great thing about MyApps is that information and data never leaves the University servers. This is important if you are working from home and relieves you of many responsibilities. Did you know that if you use your personal e-mail account for work then these e-mails are covered by the Freedom of Information Act? Likewise, if you store University documents on your home computer, or take paper documents home, you could be personally liable for any breaches under the data protection act? There are a few things to think about if you are working from home – have a look at the page on the Staff Portal if you want a very comprehensive guide:

We’ve also published an interactive guide to data security for mobile devices under the banner of “OOPS” – “Out Of Protected Spaces” and if you are a member of staff you will already have received that guide in hard copy as well as interactively. We’ve had really good feedback from that – with many people making positive suggestions and asking very relevant questions about particular situations and also requests for additional copies. We did have one person who returned the printed cards with an anonymous note saying “waste of money”. That’s a real disappointment and completely out of step with all the other feedback we have received. Given the amount of press coverage of authorities being fined 6 figure sums of money for data protection breaches, and given the fact that this whole issue is important enough to grab the attention of the University’s Audit Committee, I hope that person has a change of heart on further reflection.

Here is the “OOPS” guide:

OOPS

Wireless Coverage at RGU

We’ve had a few issues with our wireless network over the past few weeks – apologies for that to our staff and students. Without going into the details, there were a number of unexpected issues with the central controllers and we’ve been in regular contact with the supplier and manufacturer to get these sorted. We still have some background work to do in order to get to the root cause of the issues, but we have an interim solution in place now and the service itself is much more stable for our users. We are, as it happens, shortly going to install a new Wireless Network Infrastructure anyway to meet the requirements of the new Riverside East building down at Garthdee, and to meet the growth in demand for coverage across the whole of the Garthdee Campus.

Use of wireless networks, as we all know, has exploded over the last few years to the point where we increasingly take it for granted that we will have wireless access in many public spaces and places of work. In designing our “Riverside East” new building down at the Garthdee Campus, we were clear from the outset that we wished to see wireless coverage available within the entire building. Our current wireless infrastructure varies across the Campus. When it was first implemented, the intention was to make sure that the key “public” areas were wireless enabled, including the core committee rooms, library and teaching areas. But, it was not designed to be a complete solution – especially in our older buildings it did not at the time make sense to attempt to put wireless coverage into every single room.

Requirements change, however, and with the range of mobile devices in use today complete wireless coverage is now a growing expectation, and we are receiving requests for the wireless service to be extended to areas that currently have poor coverage. As mentioned above, we are starting the process of refreshing our wireless network with the new Riverside East building in the first instance. We need to get that building commissioned as our first priority, but whatever solution we procure for that will be sized so that it can be expanded across to the rest of the Campus.

Installing a wireless network in a large building with thousands of users is a complex task. Wireless signals are broadcast by what we call “wireless access points” – you’ve probably seen them on the wall around the campus. Each access point can only handle a limited number of connections without losing performance, and it must not be too close to another access point using the same radio frequency, and there is a limited number of radio frequencies that by law we are allowed to use. So, we have to position the access points across the building (vertically as well as horizontally) to match what we think the demand will be in each area and configure them so that they don’t interfere with each other. To achieve that, we need to calculate how far each signal will broadcast and that depends on the construction materials used in the building. Early on in the design of the building, we put the CAD drawings through a software programme which calculates how the wireless signal will behave theoretically and we use that to estimate where the access points should go. That is only an approximate guide, however, and once the building is complete engineers have to physically walk through the building to measure the actual signal loss in each area before they can finalise where all the access points should go.

Even having done all of that, there are still some limitations on wireless technology. If you are doing heavy downloads of large files, and particularly if there are a number of people doing that in the same physical location, you may find that the wireless network will slow down – that’s just the laws of physics and how much traffic can be carried across one radio signal in one location. That said, we are looking at newer wireless technologies that will improve performance even in areas of dense use. So, while there might still be some occasions where it is better to “plug in”, for most everyday tasks – email, web browsing, Facebook usage etc the new wireless network will be fine.