ITD leads the way

December 06, 2007

An upgrade of the University of New England's student database has been so successful that other universities are sending IT staff to Armidale to see how it's done.

After months of hard work, UNE recently became the first Australian university to move to an Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) environment. This week a team from Deakin University will visit UNE to find out how, with a team from Monash University to follow later this month.

Oracle RAC spreads the computing load around by allowing users to access a database through multiple, interconnected computing nodes rather than via a single supercomputer. Multiple computing nodes communicate with each other, forming a computer "cluster". For users, this means faster access to the entire database, and at busy times or in case of breakdown, greater reliability.

In order to accomodate the new database environment, ITD has chosen to switch operating systems from Tru64, a proprietary system owned by HP, to Linux, its open-source competitor. The decision will result in considerable savings to the university.

Database administrator Daniel Watkins said, "We realised that for UNE, RAC provided flexibility, protection against faults, and, importantly, room to increase our capacity to keep pace with our needs. With this system we can just keep adding nodes."

In October, UNE upgraded its student database to the latest version of the Callista student information system, involving migrating Callista onto the new RAC database. The success of this upgrade sparked interest from other universities' IT departments, leading to phone calls from Deakin and Monash.

Posted by Kate Nash at December 6, 2007 11:07 AM