How to manage the data crunch: IHEs of every size are finding solutions to their server and storage needs that require less manpower to maintain and that create fewer headaches.

The justification behind the uses of servers on college and university campuses is as simple as "more is never enough."

Servers--the software and hardware that store data and handle its processing--are often known by their end users mainly as the sources of blame for various computing failures. "The server's gone down" may be the single best-known phrase in information technology (IT). But schools are relying on their servers to do more than in the past, especially in the area of storage, which they look to as a path to the paperless office they've been promised for more then a decade by the apostles of high technology (see sidebar).

The result is that information technology departments are using servers that are easier to maintain than earlier generations, cheaper to manage, provide more capacity for today's tasks, and will grow with the organization's needs. Hardware and software vendors have provided technology that replaces expensive servers with ones that are more flexible and cheaper to buy and maintain.

Make It Powerful

Few organizations understand the need for huge amounts of server capacity like research universities. They rely on the ability to create, analyze, and store images, computations, and data on a vast scale.

At the University of Houston's Advanced Computing Research Laboratory in Texas, a variety of academic units at the university are able to get resources for computer and computational science research. It uses 60 HP zx6000 workstations with dual 900 MHz Itanium 2 processors and an HP rx5670 Itanium 2 four-way server with 1 GHz processors, all running the Linux operating system. With this setup, the center achieved new heights of performance speed, all in a setup that allows it to be flexible to serve its diverse and changing user needs.

Princeton University (N.J.) took a different route to outfit ting one of its own research centers. The Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior (CSBMB) uses a 64-node G5 Xserve duster from Apple to handle its image analysis and simulation modeling. Though it is housed in the psychology department of the university, it is an interdisciplinary facility that touches on many academic areas, including chemistry, computer science, applied math, and more. "We are really an imaging facility," says Randee Tengi, CSBMB system administrator. "People collect huge amounts of data, then they go back to the lab and analyze it."

To store the vast quantities of images needed for work in simulation and analysis of neuroimaging data, CSBMB uses an 11-terabyte Silicon-Server from BlueArc Corporation. (A terabyte measures the storage volume; one terabyte is 2 to the 40th power, or about 1,000 gigabytes.)

When the center opened six years ago, every user (there are now about 100) used the same machine that ran the imaging software. "We still wanted a central processor for parallel jobs, so we needed a cluster machine," says Tengi. "We wanted all of the data on one file server so users could also access it from their desktops."

As a result, the centers technology lets them use their own desktop computers (whether they run Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux operating systems) to access the image data from the central file sewer.

Though server power is the name of the game at CSBMB, manageability is near the top of Tengi's list of benefits she's derived from the new system. The center has limited resources for administering its technology, so she appreciates having a system that is easy for her to maintain and easy for the end users to operate.

Austin Community College (Texas) worked with IBM in an effort to better serve its growing student enrollment, up more than 19 percent since 1993, which has increased the amount of data that the IT department must manage and support. The school specifically wanted to increase the speed of its web-based and campus-based services around the clock.

The school implemented an enterprise sewer consolidation project that combined several applications from four independent computer servers to only one IBM server, the eServer pSeries 670 running AIX 5L. The switch is expected to save the school approximately $50,000 a year, especially in the area of student grading. In addition, faster online processing has allowed faculty to submit end-of-semester grades via the web, rather than on optical scan sheets.

Make It Simple

For some users, the pain point is keeping the darn thing running. The students at the Yale Daily News needed a system that not only is easy to use--especially in the late-night hours when the paper is assembled--but is easy to maintain. The paper has no dedicated IT staff; instead, it reties upon a part-time consultant and its own part-time photo editor, Nathan Francis, a computer science major at Yale University (Conn.).

In January 2004, the paper updated its Apple servers and operating systems to take advantage of new features in publishing technology. "We'd had some problems," says Francis. The Quark publishing system it was using "had some issues" with the server, and stability problems sometimes led to the toss of articles. So along with the adoption of Adobe's InDesign publishing software, the paper upgraded to two dual 1.33 GHz Xserve servers and the Mac OS X operating system for the servers and the client computers.

The stability issues disappeared, as did the problems with the publishing system. But the ease of use has been one of the biggest benefits. "These Xserves have not crashed," says Francis. The paper is now looking at purchasing another Xserve to host its website.

The University of South Carolina Spartanburg also touts the ease of managing its e-mail system for staff and students after adopting Microsoft Exchange 2004, running on 52 Dell PowerEdge servers. The system replaced a web-based e-malt system that proved to be stow and difficult to manage. Not only did the school get the collaborative features of the Exchange system, but it has weathered a computer virus attack that the school's network staff believes would have knocked out its previous system.

Solutions to Stretch Storage Capability

"The biggest challenge in terms of storage is there's never enough," says Laura Hunter, senior IT specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, where she works in the student registration and financial services office. The popular drive to achieve a "paperless office" means the university scans documents for stage on a document-imaging server, "and our financial aid counselors can pull up data by our student's name or financial aid number, and our counselors can make notes."

The backend server currently is proprietary software, but UPenn will be moving to a Microsoft SQL Server in the near future. To back up its server data, UPenn outsources the task of backing up its server data to IPR's Dataguardian service. Hunter's office has about 200 gigabytes of data at IPR, and offloading the responsibility of safeguarding and making available the data has allowed Hunter to automate the backup process and eliminate the need for tapes. "Basically, my tapes went away and I'm very happy for it!" she says.

Instead of tapes, she manages the entire process through a web interface. She can also delegate restoration of simple files to anyone on her staff. "On a support question, it's great because you don't have to wait for the storage person to return from lunch," Hunter says.

Though storage costs have fallen in recent years, the management of storage is still a challenge, and the high volume of e-mail among an institution's students and faculty users is one important reason why. Both legitimate and spam e-mail traffic has grown in volume; estimates of the amount of e-mail traffic that is unsolicited commercial e-mail (spare) range from 40 to 85 percent. And schools make particularly juicy targets to senders of spam, who have a decent chance of guessing recipients' addresses when 10,000 to 45,000 users share the same domain address.

"Knowing that a large university has 25,000 students means that randomly generated e-mail addresses are more likely to find their target," says Stefano Bensi, managing director of Outblaze, which is the provider of outsourced e-mail services. He adds that the management problem is compounded by the need every semester or every year to delete and create thousands of email addresses at schools.

Given those challenges, it is a little surprising that someone might want to add e-mail handling to their list of chores, especially if they have no dedicated IT staff to begin with. But that's what the Yale Daily News did, bringing e-mail and web hosting in-house for reasons based on its mission: It is an independent student newspaper for Yale University (Conn.) students, and it is designed to let the students run the operation themselves. The paper uses the e-mail client that is included on Apple Computer's Xserve servers, and it is looking at adding another Xserve to handle the website, says Nathan Francis, a computer science major who also serves as the paper's photography editor.

On the development front, Apple Computer beefed up its support for heterogeneous storage environments this past fall with an updated Xserve RAID storage system. The system delivers 5.6 terabytes of storage capacity at a price the company puts at slightly more than $2 per GB. Xserve RAID has been certified by Cisco and SUSE Linux.

IBM and Cisco Systems, Inc., are also improving their storage management. The two companies recently announced improvements to their joint solution, the IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller for the Cisco MDS 9000, that will help organizations manage storage systems that are spread among many different types of hardware and software. The first customer to deploy the system, Germany's University of Cologne, praised the system's features that allow it to be more independent of individual vendors--not an inconsequential consideration in large organizations, where different departments and different schools may have systems purchased at different times and from different vendors.

Resources

Apple Computer www.apple.com

BlueArc www.bluearc.com

Cisco Systems www.cisco.com

Dell Computer www.dell.com

Extreme Networks, Inc. www.extremenetworks.com

HP www.hp.com

IPR International www.iprintl.com

IBM www.ibm.com

Microsoft www.microsoft.com