'Big box' to serve university

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland University is consolidating its administration and library applications on a Sun F15000 server, the most powerful computer yet seen in this country.

SolNet director John Hanna said the university had bought two of the Sunfire servers, one with 60 processors and 60 gigabytes of memory for its production environment and a 32 processor-box for disaster recovery. Each processor has four of Sun's latest 900 MHz UltraSparc3 chips.

The F15000 Sunfire was launched in November, and list price for the university's configuration is over $10 million.

"This is a big box," said Mr Hanna. "Everything is dual pathed. Sun went to Boeing and said, 'What is the biggest container which can fit in your planes?', and built to that."

Auckland University chief information officer Steve Saunders said the larger machine could run up to 18 domains.

Each domain could run a separate version of the operating system, separate database and applications.

"We will run all of our enhanced corporate applications, which have previously been running on disparate systems, as well as the Voyager library systems," Mr Saunders said.

"Because of the domains, this new architecture allows us to run all these applications in a much more reliable and disaster-recoverable way."

He said Sun was chosen because of its strength in partitioning - "the other vendors are still not there" - as well as its record with Voyager and the applications the university used for finances, human resources and student administration and enrolment.

Voyager had been running on an Oracle database on a midrange Sun server. Other applications had been running on a range of servers from Sequent, Compaq and other vendors.

Mr Saunders said those servers would be reallocated to other tasks, such as running the PeopleSoft Portal that the university intended rolling out over the next year as true web-enabled modules became available.

The back-up box, which would be housed away from the main Albert St campus, would be used for developing and testing new applications as well as for disaster recovery.

Auckland University has about 28,000 equivalent full-time students, but the system must also carry records of the hundreds of thousands of other students who have been through the institution.