Macquarie Uni consolidates IT teams

Macquarie University will consolidate staff from 30 technology teams across its Sydney campus into a centralised informatics group in a bid to “unite campus IT into an effective whole”.

It will see staff currently distributed among faculties consolidated into the centralised team, which itself already has 140 staff.

The move follows an review of the operational model last year, which recommended the centralisation of “all non-student-facing technology functions”.

Chief information officer Marc Bailey declined to disclose how many staff currently made up the distributed teams and the target operating model it was striving for.

By consolidating teams, he said the university hoped to get a better handle on its annual IT budget of $40 million, of which $10 million was managed by the 30 distributed teams.

It remains to be seen how the centralisation strategy will affect faculty-based licensing and operating platforms.

Bailey said the university did not have a standard operating environment (SOE) for the 14,500 networked machines and 16,000 devices that connected to its wireless network each day.

Instead, software licensing, maintenance and decisions are handled on a faculty level, so that users from various disciplines – such as economics, arts or science – had systems that best suited their requirements.

Bailey described Macquarie University’s IT strategy as one that aimed to “sell, not tell”, by producing compelling “products” that users chose to use without being forced.

The informatics group planned to develop an “opt-in, standard package” of software in future, but mandatory, campus-wide SOEs were “neither feasible nor desirable”, Bailey said.

“We’re not about trying to manage [users’] computers,” he said, citing the university’s goal of delivering the “number one digital campus experience”.

“People need technology that they want to use ... Any [centralised] control over operating systems is neither feasible nor desirable.”

Application integration and migration

Alongside the centralisation work, the university has a capital expenditure portfolio of 40 IT projects planned for the year.

Several projects target the integration and large-scale migration of applications onto new active-active data centre architecture.

Bailey described 2012 as the “Year of Applications” for the informatics group, following a “Year of Data” last year and “Year of Plumbing” in 2010.

The group will use a new Talend enterprise service bus, Dataswitch, to improve information flow between a Moodle-based student learning management system (LMS), iLearn, and staff-facing LMS, iTeach.

Staff will also work to geocode and digitise the Macquarie University campus in 2D and 3D to improve its Google Maps listing and generate data that may be used by mobile applications.

Other projects could deliver a more seamless experience for students using iLearn and the eStudent student administration portal supplied by TechnologyOne, Bailey said.

“Our timetabling system needs to talk more to our student management and financial systems,” he added.

Read on to page two for more on Macquarie University’s cloud computing barriers and application migration plans.

Macquarie University currently has a primary data centre on-site, and a disaster recovery facility at Sydney University under a reciprocal arrangement.

Bailey revealed plans to establish an active-active configuration across both data centres this year, to allow workloads to be balanced across both sites to support business continuity.

Applications will be moved from a seven-year-old database engine to Datacore, an Oracle RAC 11g platform that was commissioned last October and built under the active-active architecture.

The ability to draw computing power from both sites could be particularly useful during enrolment and the release of examination results, when systems have struggled to cope with peak loads in the past.

It is supported by an EMC storage area network called Datagrid

The university has also rolled out iLab, a web application that provides students with software that they previously accessed from physical computer labs, allowing the university to avoid deploying 110 new physical workstations this year.

Bailey acknowledged that infrastructure-as-a-service offerings could help address demand spikes but said Macquarie University’s line-of-business application vendors were not yet able to support splitting workloads across in-house and cloud-based resources.

He said the university had a “cloud-first, open-source-first” strategy, having deployed cloud-based project management and helpdesk systems as well as SugarCRM for customer relationship management.

But line-of-business applications such as finance, student management and human resources were more difficult to move, he said.

“It’s not a matter of whether the cloud is ready; it’s a matter of whether applications are ready,” Bailey said.

He declined to disclose whether the university would consider new, cloud-ready vendors for its line-of-business applications, noting that selecting vendors for those business-critical applications tended to be a three-year, $15 million affair.