A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
The Institute of Technical Education (ITE), a statutory board under the Ministry
of Education, is a post-secondary institution that provides pre-employment
training to secondary school leavers and continuing education and training to
working adults.
Since its establishment in Singapore on 1 April 1992, ITE has developed into
an institution well-known for its provision of a broad-based, multi-disciplinary
curriculum that ranges from engineering to technical, business and service
skills areas. ITE produces confident, highly-skilled and “world-ready” graduates
capable of meeting the needs of the global economy.
ITE operates a comprehensive IT infrastructure to support the needs of its
staff and 40,000 full and part-time students. The IT systems team is tasked
to maintain over 100 servers, hosting Single-Sign-On Web portals, emails,
e-learning, student administration, finance and human resource systems, and
other functional-specific systems.
Company
Institute of Technical Education
Industry
Education
Web site
www.ite.edu.sg
“The superior security features from Avocent solutions
have proven to be the right IT manageability system for ITE.
We now have secure access and control of all our local and
remote servers directly from headquarters.”
– Seah Hock Chee, IT Systems Manager, ITE
Applications
DSR KVM over IP switch
Setting the stage for expansion
The IT system administrators were faced with the daily task of balancing their
time between maintaining servers, managing the requests from users and
handling multiple projects to enhance services offered to the various users – the
public, staff and students.
The multi-platform servers at ITE include UNIX and Wintel systems. Before
installing Avocent solutions at the ITE headquarters, the system administrators
had to manage servers via terminal services if they required remote access.
ITE developed its first “regional campus” – ITE College East – to cater for the
expansion of student enrollment. Operational since January 2005, ITE College
East also houses the second data centre and this provides a unique 25KM
distance advantage as a mutual backup site with its main data centre at ITE
headquarters.
A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Getting equipped
“It is much more conducive to work outside the noise level of
the data centre enclosure,” said Mr. Tan Choon Chiat, head of
data centres at ITE. “Additionally, travel time is saved when the
administrators do not need to physically access the data centre
to carry out tasks such as loading CDs or collecting log files for
troubleshooting. We can then focus on diagnosing, solving remote
site problems and keeping our servers up and running.”
Mr. Seah Hock Chee, ITE’s manager for IT systems, was faced with
a critical decision to manage the dual data centres with effective
resource deployment. He could establish a duplicate team of
system administrators to manage the second site or have the ITE
headquarters team to manage both data centres. After careful
consideration, he decided to acquire Avocent manageability
solutions to allow the existing team of IT administrators to manage
servers at both locations.
With an additional remote data centre to manage, the need for
secure and convenient file transfers are even more pressing. This
was solved by leveraging on the encryption options available with
the Virtual Media sessions. The encryption levels include DES, 3DES,
128bit or no encryption. Data files are encrypted before transmission
to ensure all file transfers are secure. This benefit can be achieved
without having to load additional security software onto the target
servers.
ITE deployed the Avocent DSViewTM 3 software management
solution, combined with multiple DSRTM 4030, DSR 800 and DSR
1021 KVM switching systems.
Security benefits
Addressing data centre security is a priority for Mr. Seah. “External
IT vendors and programmers sometimes need to access our
servers to install new application systems, conduct testing and
troubleshooting. With the Avocent IP-based solution in place, they
can do the same work from outside the data centre. This greatly
reduces our exposure to risks of tampering or damage to our
servers,” he explained.
Savings
In addition to physical security, ITE gains from having logical security.
With DSView 3 software, logical grouping of servers and assignment
of access rights are possible. Hance, the system administrators will
be given access only to the systems under their charge.
Complete remote access and control with Virtual Media
DSView 3 software Virtual Media is available on the DSR 4030
KVM switch. It provides ITE the capability to map CD-ROMs and
other storage media to a remote server to perform file transfers,
application and OS patches, and CD-ROM diagnostics. Conducting
these daily management tasks is now possible without constant trips
to the physical servers.
In addition to saving time and reducing physical travel, ITE also usses
the Avocent IP-based solutions to save on server rack space. Having
a console to locally manage multiple servers on each rack is no
longer required. With DSView 3 centralised management software,
ITE administrators have a single interface that gives them complete
remote control of the attached multi-platform servers. The multiple
sets of peripherals (keyboard, monitor and mouse) that were used to
manage the servers at the racks are a thing of the past.
“With Avocent solutions we are able to manage both data centres by
effectively leveraging on the existing skilled technical personnel at
headquarters. The superior security features from Avocent solutions
have proven to be the right IT manageability system for ITE. We now
have secure access and control of all our local and remote servers
directly from headquarters,” Mr. Seah explained.
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