UNC General Administration
Information Resources
Shared Services Alliance
Paul Hudy – Asst. CIO IT Infrastructure and Administration: phudy@northcarolina.edu
Derrick Murray – Asst. Director SSA: dtmurray@northcarolina.edu
Terry Mayer – Lead Remote Admin: twmayer@northcarolina.edu
Chris Stefanick – Manager rDBA Services: cstefanic@northcarolina.edu
Systems Administrators
Christy Pons
Obie Deyo
rDBAs
Mark Walters
Lizhong Liu
Haijing Ma
Lee Harrison
Tricia McKellar
Business and Technology Application Specialists
Bernard Haynes
Leon McCormick
UNC Shared Services Alliance (SSA) provides remote
hosted banner-based services and centralized
information technology support services to
participating constituent UNC campuses across the
North Carolina system.
In essence, The Alliance offers a way for constituent
campuses to bolster campus resources by hosting some
or all aspects of their campus Banner environment and
other Technology needs.
The Shared Services Alliance was formed as a result of the 1998/1999 UNC IT study. It
was officially formed in March 2000 with approval by the BOGs. Banner was acquired
July 2002.
The remote DBA services were started by SSA for 7 initial campuses then expanded to
9. Soon following, due to significant resource restraints, UNC School of the Arts called
upon the SSA to provide Banner Hosting services. In 2010 additional campuses were
added to the hosted environment. MCNC was chosen as the datacenter of choice.
From these initial efforts of the SSA, 6 schools are now fully “hosted” operating out of
two data centers. Campus participation in Banner Hosting is completely voluntary. A
team concept is followed and fully utilized between SSA administrators and campus
Banner/IT administrators and analysts.
Expansion of SSA services is expected beginning in 2013 to include further Banner,
non-banner, and DR related hosting services. Discussions of those services are
currently underway.
Utilizing a centralized “Cloud” concept UNC SSA can offer a hosted
campus the following services.
Secure, redundant datacenters.
More efficient, lower cost environmentals.
Augment or add system’s administration staff.
Application and File system backup and restores.
System patching and updates.
Disaster recovery and fail over technologies.
ERP/Finance IT Audit Preparation
Meeting ITS security and control requirements.
Provide support to 3rd party vendor engineers.
Provide “hosted” failover systems for on campus servers. (Web and Active Directory)
Tripwire Enterprise (Security Baseline Monitoring)
Vfoglight (Application Reliability Monitoring)
FMS (Network Services Monitoring)
RHEL Satellite (Operating System Management)
Webmin (DNS, System Tool Management)
FootPrints (Ticketing Request System, CM tracking)
UNC Shared Services Alliance (SSA) provides “automated” IT reporting that can be
used to enhance campus based audit control.
Cutover to DR is preferable to doing the more regular load balance. With LB,
performing maintenance on public-facing servers, NCAT must remove each leg
from the balance as they prepared to down it, rejoin to LB,
move to another leg, etc.
By doing the DNS switching between a WDC recovery site and our main site's
VM, NCAT basically “kill two birds
with one stone” by having it built into their monthly maintenance procedures a
process that they are effectively testing
their Disaster Recovery Plan for the main website every maintenance weekend.
NCAT is currently hosting a public website (www2) failover server to
precipitate
Loss of campus based primary resource.
Eliminate site downtime due to system and application updates.
Ease of monthly maintenance .
System application functionality is managed entirely by campus staff.
Thanks for your time!