Enterprise System Administration
The Enterprise System Administration unit provides planning, acquisition, implementation, support, tuning, and performance for central server architecture components and operating systems (load balancers, web servers, application servers, database servers, batch servers) to support the development, testing, and production delivery of enterprise-wide, mission-critical applications and services to Indiana University. Services that rely on these infrastructure components include the Student Information System, OneStart, Sirsi Library System, Oncourse CL, EPIC purchasing, Decision Support, IUIE, Financial information System, HRMS, and others. While not directly supporting application or service content, the team provides critical delivery components. Staff also provide assistance and consulting to various internal UITS groups (e.g., Enterprise Software units, Database Administration, Operations, Production Services) in support of development and test activities.
Principles
Because we are a tier three unit, our customers are generally internal to UITS. A guiding principle is that all services and applications have an identified service owner with whom the unit partners. So as to deliver services with high availability, performance, and security, service owners and appropriate infrastructure staff should engage in a defined life cycle for planning, design, development, processes, testing, deployment, and readiness assessments for production support. Infrastructure components should achieve high availability (the percentage of scheduled time a component is accessible for delivering a service). The infrastructure should allow for the service to be delivered with needed relative performance (i.e., results returned to end users within a sufficient relative amount of time to allow the users to be productive; not be an impediment to efficient university business). Infrastructure components should adhere to all applicable laws, regulations, security policies, and best practices with regard to use of electronic resources and institutional data, and not compromise the measures to protect such data.
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Consolidation: Physical servers and components
will be consolidated into fewer physical entities in order to achieve
economies of scale and to allow greater flexibility in shifting
resources from one application area to another.
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Standardization: Physical components as well as
operating systems will be standardized to a select few to promote
stewardship of resources, fungibility of components, and productivity
of staff.
- Virtualization: Virtualization will be pursued and exploited at all levels of the architecture to achieve benefits of hardware efficiencies, reduction in environmental impact, and increased flexibility to respond quickly to changing and unpredictable service needs. The majority of web servers, application servers, and database servers will be virtual systems, hosted on standard hardware components.
Infrastructure and technologies
With some exceptions for special purpose systems, the following are supported operating systems, with mention of standard hardware platforms:
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Red Hat Linux: The standard for web servers,
application servers, and J2EE application development; deployed on
standard HP hardware as virtual systems under VMware
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Windows: For delivering services available
only via Windows and certain vended applications, deployed on standard HP
hardware as virtual systems under VMware
- AIX: For supporting enterprise level Oracle database environments, deployed on IBM p5/p6 hardware as virtual systems using IBM advanced virtualization features
Future research
Future research will include administration of web, application, and database servers, and Microsoft Longhorn analysis and deployment
Contact Enterprise System Administration
| For emergencies with production systems at any time of day, call WCC Operations at 812-855-9910. Provide a description of the problem and request a page. |
| For non-emergency situations, email the Enterprise System Administration team. |
| Contact information for Enterprise System Administration staff |
