Macquarie Uni consolidates IT teams

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

Credit: Macquarie University

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.