University of Surrey

Success at a Glance

The University of Surrey has garnered numerous kudos, among them receiving several “excellent” ratings for teaching quality, being selected as a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and having its undergraduate programs ranked in the top 20 of UK universities. Surrey sought to shine equally as brightly in IT services, which support the computer systems that keep the university humming day to day.

Though the University has had Sun servers for more than a decade, it was only recently that the university saw a need to expand its relationship with Sun. When Surrey began upgrading its business systems three years ago, it realized the opportunity to move several applications from an aging IBM mainframe to Sun rack-mounted servers, as well as introduce new business systems on Sun servers. . At the same time, user demand for services was going beyond the traditional nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, workday. As the university evolved into a round-the-clock operation, its UNIX staff could not provide the coverage needed.

After learning of Sun Managed Operations services, Surrey opted for a contract to manage four Sun servers that supported the school’s virtual learning environment and associated Web portals, as well as several facilities services. As the IT Services staff established more and more business systems and services, it purchased additional Sun Fire servers to run those programs and placed them under Sun Managed Operations. Surrey now has now 30 Sun Fire servers running the Solaris 7, 8 and 9 Operating Systems. They support a wide spectrum of applications, including Oracle databases, human resources, financial management and student administration systems, and a virtual learning environment.

Sun Managed Operations provides reactive monitoring and management of the Sun servers and third-party storage systems, handling everything from monitoring the servers and operating systems to break-fix services for tape drives, disks and servers. Through the Sun Managed Operations delivery team, Sun also provides assistance for projects such as providing patches, provisioning new servers and consolidating infrastructure services. All servers are covered by SunSpectrum Support.

The IT Services staff of 70 can now focus on its core strengths and ongoing projects, rather than concerning itself with managing UNIX systems. Meanwhile, Sun Managed Operations has increased system coverage from 40 to 65 hours a week, providing uptime and service support from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday to Friday. As Surrey’s virtual learning environment (VLE) continues to grow--it now has the ability to accommodate 2,000 concurrent users--Sun Managed Operations is proving critical to making sure the VLE Web portals and supporting applications are highly available. The availability of the Solaris OS is 99.99 percent on most of the servers. Using Sun Managed Operations services, Surrey's IT Services department has reduced its overall operating costs by 100,000 GBP annually.

Seeing the value of Sun Managed Operations, IT Services has offered the service to academic departments. The Postgraduate Medical School recently brought its Oracle database, which runs on a Sun Fire V890 server, under the Sun Managed Operations contract. Others may well follow.