| Achieving High Availability
Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) is a multi-campus
urban institution with campuses situated in the historic
Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts and
another campus located in nearby Chelsea. BHCC enrolls
more than 8,900 students in day, evening, weekend, web-based
and distance learning courses and programs. The College
offers more than 65 associate degree and certificate
programs. Internationally recognized for development
of individualized and alternative methods of instruction,
BHCC is a leader in distance learning technologies that
strengthen the learning environment.
Like many state colleges, BHCC is facing a tight economic
situation with enrollment increasing every year while
its budget is increasing at a lower rate. Expanding
enrollment and programs increase the demand for IT services.
However, securing funding for new equipment is challenging,
therefore processors, random access memory, disk storage,
network switches and other resources are often running
near full capacity. “The monitoring software that
we used in the past told us if a server was up or down
but we were not alerted if an Exchange Store was not
operating, we were nearly out of disk space, or if CPU
usage was near the limit,” said Bret Moeller,
Chief Information Officer for BHCC. “The result
was that we didn’t know about problems until our
critical systems failed. At this time, our availability
levels were much lower than our present level of availability.”
“Several years ago we came to the conclusion
that the limitations in our monitoring system were hindering
our performance,” Moeller said. “We looked
at a number of leading monitoring systems. We selected
Heroix Longitude for several reasons. Longitude is more
granular than the other systems that we assessed. It
provides information on CPU utilization, memory, disk
storage, networking capacity, Exchange Stores, etc.
Longitude also has the flexibility to handle our complete
mixed environment which includes mostly Microsoft, Solaris,
Cisco networking equipment, network appliances, and
a wide range of other miscellaneous devices. There are
a few other systems that provide similar capabilities
but they are all very expensive. Longitude, on the other
hand, is priced at a level that fits our tight budget.”
From day one, Heroix Longitude demonstrated the ability
to provide greater visibility into the BHCC environment
and bring problems to the attention of IT staff before
rather than after the fact. The monitoring system looks
at all applications, services, and hardware. Whenever
it finds a problem, it sends an email or a text message.
The IT staff have pagers or cell phones to receive alerts.
The system is configured to send an alert to Moeller
and also to the person who is on call to handle problems.
“For example if a server fails, I get a text message
informing me that the device is down,” Moeller
said. “I then call the Director who works for
me and is responsible for that system and also call
the on-call person to fix the problem.”
As an example, BHCC used to use iPlanet, an email solution
from Sun Microsystems. Before BHCC installed Longitude,
the College experienced more frequent downtime, especially
when servers ran out of disk space. IT staff set up
Longitude to monitor the disk space on the server. When
the disk was near capacity, Longitude issued a warning
and then the IT staff would clean up the disk. This
made it possible to ensure the server did not fail due
to a lack of disk space while minimizing the amount
of time that was spent on administration.
BHCC‘s Chelsea campus was closed on a recent
St. Patrick’s Day when a domain controller that
provides DNS services failed. This failure in turn caused
problems with numerous other applications. “Heroix
Longitude saved the day by alerting us immediately that
the server was down,” Moeller said. “We
found a person who was able to go immediately to the
site and fix the problem. We also have a Windows server
running the SQL Server database for our helpdesk system.
We keep it running by using Longitude to monitor the
processor and memory utilization.”
BHCC runs its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system
on a Sun Solaris Sunfire V880. The College recently
upgraded to a version of the ERP system that required
20% to 30% more resources. “We upgraded the hardware
but were nervous that even the new box might not be
able to handle the application,” Moeller said.
“Longitude provided us with peace of mind by continuously
monitoring the CPU utilization on the box. For the most
part the application ran normally but Longitude identified
several glitches that we were able to correct.”
“One of the things that I like most about Longitude
is its stability,” Moeller added. “The systems
that we used in the past were not nearly as reliable.
On a number of occasions the monitoring system itself
would fail without anyone knowing and leave us unprotected.
On the other hand, we have not had a single failure
in three years using Heroix. The only glitch of any
kind was once when I changed my cell phone number without
updating the monitoring tool.”
Besides providing alerts of problems, Heroix Longitude
also maintains a database that is very useful for lifecycle
planning and providing objective performance markers.
“We provide a network performance report to the
executives of the College that is visible to the President.”
Moeller said. “It’s a very broad summary
that shows any downtime that has occurred over the previous
week.”
“Despite the challenges in maintaining the latest
equipment, with the help of Heroix Longitude we have
been able to maintain a very high level of availability,”
Moeller concluded. “Nearly every week, the network
availability report shows 100% uptime. Occasionally
we have a problem such as a few weeks ago when a server
was down for a short period before we could fix it.
The bottom line is that over time our availability is
running very close to 100 percent, a dramatic improvement
over the levels that we saw before we started using
Heroix Longitude.”
Learn more about Heroix
Longitude and the SQL
server and network
monitoring solutions that helped BHCC.
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