April 2008 Archives

Matthew Stevenson, IT Architect in University IT Services, presented last week on Seton Hall University's server and storage virtualization initiative at Sungard Higher Education Summit 2008, held April 14-17 in Anaheim, CA.

Server and storage virtualization refers to a set of technologies that separate IT software from the hardware it would normally run on. Most IT applications are designed to run on a dedicated server, including dedicated disk space. Virtualization allows IT to run many "virtual machines" on a cluster of computers with shared disk space, dramatically reducing the cost of running each individual application. It enables better overall performance, since servers for individual software applications are usually scaled to accommodate processing peaks which occur infrequently. Virtualization also enables redundancy, since the "virtual machines" can move around the physical computers in the cluster, so the applications continue to run even if one of the physical computers in the cluster fails.

Seton Hall's IT department has a very robust virtualization program. Matt and his team were the first to successfully run Sungard's Banner system in a virtualized environment. This is of great interest to the higher education community, since virtualizing Banner promises to allow Banner to run on much less expensive hardware and enables server redundancy for business continuity. Over fifty people attended Matt's presentation at Sungard Summit 2008 to learn how Matt and his team were able to virtualize Banner.

For an overview of Seton Hall University's server and storage virtualization program, see, for example:
http://tltc.shu.edu/blogs/projects/DoIT/2008/03/shu_presents_at_nercomp_2008.html

University IT Services today released the preliminary findings from the Microsoft Exchange pilot group. Almost all users in the pilot group found MS Exchange email as easy or easier to use than Lotus Notes email. Most did not want to go back to Lotus Notes! This project helped University IT Services a great deal in refining our plans for moving the campus to MS Exchange email.

As a reminder to the campus community, MS Exchange email will be available to faculty, staff, and administrators on the South Orange campus beginning in July. Schedules for the one to two hour training and migration sessions will be published next month. During the session, users will receive an overview of the MS Outlook exchange client, their Lotus Notes calendar entries and address book will be transferred to their MS Exchange email account, MS Outlook will be installed on their computers, and the MS Outlook client will be configured to be able to view their old email from the Lotus Notes server. The deadline for converting to MS Exchange is the end of December. South Orange campus students will be converted in November 2008, and Law School students will be converted in early January 2009.

PC Support Services began Sophomore Refresh 2008. All sophomore students in good academic standing and who are registered as full time students for Fall 2008 are eligible to replace their current Lenovo ThinkPad T60 Laptop PC (or their ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC) with the latest model.

See this previous blog entry for details about the new laptops.

As of today, over 600 sophomores have already upgraded their computers.

Seton Hall University's Lotus Notes email servers now have IMAP enabled. You can now access your campus email using any IMAP client, including MS Outlook and Thunderbird.

IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) is a common way for users to access email over the Internet. Until recently, users at Seton Hall University were limited to accessing their campus email using the Lotus Notes client or the Lotus Notes Webmail interface. Now that the Lotus Notes servers have been converted to IMAP, you have additional choices for access your campus email.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using IMAP to access your campus email. One advantage is the wide choice of IMAP clients available. Popular IMAP clients include Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird. Another advantage is that many IMAP clients, including MS Outlook, enable you to aggregate email from multiple sources. In other words, you can configure your IMAP client to show you your gmail along with your campus email, so you don't have to switch between Web sites or email clients to view all your new email.

IMAP only transfers email, however, so you're not able to view your calendar entries using an IMAP client. In addition, IMAP clients need an email "relay" service to send mail, and to prevent the spread of spam, the Seton Hall University email relay is currently not accessible off campus. While we are planning to upgrade the campus email relay this summer to make it accessible from off campus, unless you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that provides a public email relay service, at the present time IMAP can only be used to send email from on campus (most, but not all, ISP's do support IMAP by providing email relays to their customers).

IMAP is a key component in the campus' move to Microsoft Exchange email. With IMAP, you can configure MS Outlook so that you can continue to access your old Lotus Notes email after your email account is switched over to the MS Exchange server.

To learn how to use IMAP to access your campus email, call the Technology Help Desk at 973-275-2222, or follow the instructions provided in the following document:
SHU Outlook IMAP Configuration Instructions MARCH2008.doc

This afternoon Steve Landry (CIO) and Paul Fisher (Dir., TLT Center) gave a report to the department of the College of Arts and Science at the monthly A&S Department Chairs meeting.

The presentation included a review of the University's plan to replace the campus email system with Microsoft Exchange beginning this July.

The entire presentation (in MS PowerPoint) can be obtained here.

The University has been informed that there have been problems with the national Internet backbone the past several days. This causes intermittent problems accessing some Web sites. This problem should be fixed in the next twenty four hours.

From the Teaching, Learning & Technology Roundtable

The Department of Information Technology and the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable (TLTR) announce the availability of a high-performance Research Computing Cluster System to support the needs of faculty conducting computationally intensive research. The system consists of an IBM Blade Center with seven blade computers, a total of 28 64bit processors, 56 GB of combined RAM, and 6 TB of high-speed storage, running Redhat Linux Enterprise Edition. Software such as Maple (including a distributed version), the statistical package SAS, the three-dimensional rendering software Blender, and support for a variety of programming languages is available; additional software may be available on request. The cluster can be accessed through your laptop or desktop computer from on- and off-campus. The system supports distributed computing using different scheduling protocols and is connected to Internet2, a high performance higher education network that provides research-capable network connections between the 200+ participating research universities.

The research computing cluster is designed to support Seton Hall faculty members who need to conduct computationally intensive research, who need access to a high-performance Linux-system, who need to manage large data sets, or who need a computing platform other than their laptop computer to conduct their research. Experience with the Linux or Unix operating system is preferred but not required. To establish an account on this system or for further information, contact Mike Soupios (soupiomi@shu.edu) or Bert Wachsmuth (wachsmut@shu.edu) who will work with you to assess your needs and determine how to best accommodate them.

The TLTR Research Computing Committee