Old Servers Never Die …

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Old Servers Never Die …

… they just slowly virtualise away.

‘Research servers slowly fade away’ – Part 2

This post might have to be filed under the category of “Bloomin’ Obvious” but anyway…

In a recent email I commented that “most researchers  don’t tend to decommission a machine until it dies from underneath them” – my respondent’s reply was that this is one of the findings from the KPMG Audit that the Digital Campus initiative was seeking to address.

So as I was performing a more exhaustive audit of the School’s server resources I was mindful to see if there were any servers that could be put out to pasture. The answer was that perhaps 5% of them fell in to this category and they were the Sun Solaris machines that are now well and truly past their prime.

The other servers? Well, the metal has been repurposed in to virtual hosts and the instances have been converted in to virtual clients. The virtual server files are held on a big, networked iSCSI array and the instances, themselves, are split over a number of machines that have either been bought as bespoke virtual hosts or converted from an old, ‘physical’ server.

This means that the instances can now keep going for as long as we have the determination to maintain them. If a host fails then the client can be moved to another machine and the metal either repaired, replaced or scrapped.

There is really no need to retire an old virtual server if we have the capacity to keep it going alongside the newer ones.

This doesn’t mean that old servers should never be decommissioned – but virtualising them makes the process less abrupt – they can be kept running until all their users migrate to a newer instance and then the setup can be mothballed.

There are many reasons a researcher may argue for maintaining access to an old setup (see previous post), virtualisation means that there’s one less reason to remove them within a short timescale.

 

IT Support or Supporting IT?

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I was talking to a colleague the other day and he mentioned how difficult it was to get IT Support in their unit.

He said that their IT Support technician was always busy sorting problems out for the students and fixing other machines so he was rarely able to help staff with their issues.

I was intrigued, as ‘sorting student problems out and fixing machines’ sounds quite a lot like reasonable duties for a technician’s ‘IT Support’ to me, so I asked for an example.

“Well, the other day somebody was showing me their Word Document and it had an Excel Pie chart in it. We discussed changing a couple of parameters in the statistics and so he opened up the Excel sheet, changed the details and the chart in the Word Document updated automatically! That seemed really useful to me so I emailed our chap to ask him to help with setting something like that up. I’ve not heard anything back from him yet and it’s been two weeks!”

Now, whilst this has an element of IT in it and would, indeed, provide support to the story’s main protagonist, I don’t believe that this is what most IT Staff feel is their main remit for ‘IT Support’!

However…

What if this is what a sizable amount of non-IT Staff feel *is* what is meant by ‘IT support’? i.e. if they’re asked the question “How good is your IT Support?” they answer “Not great”. Not because the IT Support is actually lacking but more because they don’t know that their definition of ‘IT Support’ is more to do with their own Digital Literacy and less to do with what their IT Support staff actually have as their main role.

If we’re trying to fix a gap in provision of IT Service we should always identify the true definition of the problem rather than blindly assume that we’re all thinking the same thing for the same terms.

Preserving Murphy’s Legacy

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We had support call the other day from one of our academic researchers. He was working with one of his old postdocs and they were busy putting a project together based on one of their old papers.

The trouble was that the postdoc was having difficulty accessing the setup they’d originally used. It took a few emails to finally get to grips with the problem; he was using a deprecated server trying to access software that had been updated and made obsolete three years ago. We had archived the software but not completely removed it, we know our staff and the chance of something like this happening was reasonably high.

The thing is that this is nothing unusual. We try to ensure that our staff have access to the most up to date machines and software that their research money can buy, however no-one likes to let go of a setup that has served them well in the past – they simply have too much time and experience invested in it.

To be honest, the only times we get to finally let go of old software is when the manufacturer no longer provides a license for it and server hardware only when the cost to repair is prohibitive. Actually, these days, with virtualisation, old ‘hardware setups’ can often keep going on new metal.

Enabling our staff to use the systems that they are used to, that produce the results in a fashion they understand and can easily work with is a service that we provide. Having to re-learn a package every time it gets updated can be remarkably frustrating to power users (and this applies to Microsoft Office as well as some of the more esoteric suites) and sometimes an update can change the result of a simulation for the worse – not what one needs when one is trying to produce research material from that simulation data.

People can look at our servers and may question why we’re still running them and why they run packages that are several years old. The answer is that we’re trying to ensure that our staff have the services they want as well as the services they need.

It is possible to remove a live system after deprecating it – warn the users and watch the usage level, when it drops to zero for a month or so then take the system off-line. Then leave it there for a year (or some other length of time that has been communicated to its user base). Then mothball it. Then pull it out of storage and recommission it when an academic researcher and his postdoc try to develop a project based on an old paper. Or it could just be left ready to power-up because history has taught us that removing something that still works will require its reinstatement at some point. That point is usually when it takes quite a lot of effort and knowledge-trawling to get it back to its former state – the Law of Murphy is pretty consistent in this respect…

Where do we draw the line between working with Murphy and ruthless efficiency?

From JISC – Retaining Students

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According to a National Audit Office report, 20% of students in higher and 15% in further education do not complete their studies. Universities and colleges with high student drop-out rates lose government funding.

In a nutshell

Institutions that provide a first class learning experience achieve good retention rates. Our research has shown that the appropriate use of technology in learning and teaching can enhance learning, motivate students and improve retention.

Our thinking

We’ve examined how digital technologies can support retention at various stages in the student lifecycle from search and enrolment, to teaching and learning, through to assessment and feedback.

  • Learners are more likely to prosper if they are suitably matched to their course and institution. You can help students make informed decisions by sharing sample learning materials and lectures freely online through Open educational resources
  • Online technologies can also help learners develop realistic expectations of study and acclimatise to their new institution. Listen to our radio show to find out how several universities and colleges are using digital technologies to better meet students’ requirements and improve retention.
  • Many learners enter further and higher education enthusiastic about the use of digital technologies, yet lacking the skills needed to apply them to education. Unchecked, this could result in dissatisfaction, drop-out or failure. We’ve developed new guidance (PDF) to help institutions support students in developing these new learning and digital literacies
  • Students are more likely to prosper if they have a stake in designing their own learning experiences. Our new guidance, Emerging practice in a digital age, discusses how to work in partnership with students and includes several written and video case studies and podcast interviews.
  • Effective management information can also help institutions retain students. For example, ‘at risk’ students can be identified by tracking those who fail to log in to key services, such as library systems and virtual learning environments. See our new toolkit to find out how activity data, which records a user’s use of a resource, can help.
  • Some institutions are supporting student retention through enhancing the first year experience. Our getting started guideStudent engagement and retention: easing the transition to HE, puts the experiences of three universities into a wider context. Another guide shows how some institutions are using mobile technologies to enhance the student experience and thus increase retention rates.

What does the future hold?

We are exploring customer relationship management tools which could be used to encourage ongoing study.

Research servers slowly fade away

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When a Research Group buys a server as part of a grant then it will get extensively used for that grant by the team working on that grant.

When the grant expires, so does the server. It gets decommissioned and sent to server heaven.

Actually, no. When the grant expires the server lives on and will most likely be used by the original team and others in the Group.

They get used to its setup, the software is probably quite stable.

At this point the system is probably 3 or 4 years old, it will have software of a similar age. If it still works then there is a reluctance to change it, especially if change means learning a new system or having to transfer a project from one version of software to another. “What happens if we need to revisit our old project?” “But I *know* this works on this setup!” they cry.

So we leave the machine be, we keep it patched as long as possible and running as long as possible. Only when it is no longer viable (either from a security or a parts-replacement cost point of view) do we let it fade away. And you know what? At that time very rarely do the users find that they actually needed that setup as much as they thought they did.

There must be a cut off point where an old machine has outlived its required usefulness and is just a drain on support and electricity. Should we push our users to find that point? ‘Proactive change’ can be a dirty phrase if one is resistant to change.

We try to virtualise where we can, but  whilst virtualisation is a reasonable route for replacing the *processing* power of old machines it can be a bit of drain to try and move large amounts of storage around.

So what do we do? I think again this touches on Digital Literacy. We must impress on the users that when they purchase a machine they must give it a reasonable lifespan and include provision for the long term archive, storage and, if necessary, format/application-shifting of its data.

The new Vista?

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So, Windows 8.

Hmmm.

We’ve just got Windows 7 established as the steady, reliable workhorse for Windows desktops. XP is in its death throes. Vista was almost stillborn on the corporate desktop, it needed extensive rewriting and repackaging before it was accepted (i.e. Windows 7 was released and taken up).

Windows 8 with its extensively modified user interface has already generated a reactionary response from the corporate world, unsure of how to integrate this new system in to its setup or its training.

It may take a year or so before people get used to it. People may never get used to it. Microsoft may abandon the Metro interface and step back to the ‘standard desktop’. Whatever happens it’s unlikely that Windows 8 will replace Windows 7 on the corporate desktop. Windows 9, however, may learn from the Windows 8 experience and deliver something with which people feel more comfortable. We may have got used to seeing Windows 8 on personal machines, so the jump in to 9 may not seem as bad as the switch to 8 may have been.

So, I think it may be a while until we roll out Windows 8. Maybe when it’s been extensively rewritten & repackaged…

“But I Don’t Really ‘Do’ Email… “

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Neither of my children use email as their primary method of electronic communication. Certainly not in the way that I do. They both have accounts but they are mainly used to ensure they can register for the preferred Social Network site du jour. One ‘child’ is 20, the other is 13. They don’t really ‘do’ email.

They’re not abnormal in this respect. Whilst I and, I’m sure, others in the University tend to think of email as the de facto standard for communicating the written word, the current crop of teens will more often be checking their phone for an SMS, a tweet/DM or an IM. In my experience they don’t check their email unless reminded.

This leads to a bit of a problem with respect to how we contact our students if we need to ensure they have received and read an important and/or urgent message

Email is useful for us because, correctly configured, it maintains an audit trail of messages sent and received. The problem is that if the messages are not read when we think they should be (or at all) then the purpose of sending the message is somewhat diminished.

If possible we should develop/commission a communication promulgation system (or hub). Messages sent would be routed through this hub on the way to the final email (or whatever) destination. The hub would then check the recipients of the message and look up their proffered method of notification, be it SMS, DM, IM, etc, and then let them know that they should check their email (or whatever) for the contents of the message (always assuming that the notification cannot contain the full message itself – it should always contain the subject).

It may be worthwhile for the users to actually log in to the hub to retrieve the message this would allow confirmation that the message had at least been accessed by the intended recipient(s).

They may not ‘do’ email as automatically as I do, but at least this system gives them a nudge to make sure that they’re getting the information we believe they need…

Invisible IT

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For regular users it would be ideal if IT would, to coin a phrase, ‘just work.’ Most of the time it does and everyone uses the system quite happily with no real knowledge of the effort it takes to provide them with a PC and network that does what they require. However, there are still many instances where manual intervention is required and people have to start ‘noticing’ their IT support provision (e.g. why should users, who are already authenticated to their login session have to re-authenticate to post to an on-Campus blog site – SSO please!)

In an ‘ideal world’ they should only have to contact their IT support if they need access to something that is not a regular part of their setup. If they are fully trained and can work to a well constructed set of procedures then the need to contact the help desk should be minimal and they would be able to install applications at the click of a mouse.

In a ‘pie-in-the-sky world’ they shouldn’t need to contact the service desk when something goes wrong, hopefully (a) because nothing would go wrong with their software and operating system, or (b) because the infrastructure will already have identified that there is a problem with their system.

Pie in the sky is still a way off for regular environments, but the ideal world isn’t quite so far away. In our office, Ian came up with the idea of a web page detailing what Applications were available to the user with a point and click front-end and, perhaps, a Powershell back-end that would apply them – a Campus type of ‘App Store’. As for the setup, training and procedures, then why not? The Digital Campus initiative will hopefully provide us with a decent starting block on the way to an ideal world supported by (mostly) invisible IT.

Digital Literacy 1

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As I understand it, the drive for Digital Literacy within the Digital Campus Initiative is so that everyone in the University is able to use their IT resources with the minimum of fuss and effort but, at the same time, in such a way that security and resiliency standards are maintained at the highest levels.

In order to accomplish this the things that they are expected to do and the procedures they are expected to follow should make their job easier to do and not be a chore or a faff.

It will fall to the University’s IT setup to ensure that this is the case. IT staff will be the most likely candidates to guide users in best practice as they may be the ones who develop the tools and procedures in the first place.

For example, a regular user would probably balk at having to complete five different stages of preparation if they simply want to (securely) send a document within an email, if there were a simple process that allowed this, at the press of a button, then they will be much more likely to adhere to the procedures. It is up to NU-IT staff to ensure that such a button exists and that it works first time and that it works every time.

Another example is global us of single-sign on. SSO should be employed Campus-wide – saving users an authentication stage is another rung on the ladder to making the job easier.

Training will be a necessity, however this doesn’t have to be formal SDU sessions, it can be quick clinics or workshops showing people how simple the processes can be.

Above all, if a policy is mandatory then it should be applied with as much help and guidance as possible, otherwise it is likely to be ignored or only partially followed (either that, or the ‘mandatory’ part will need enforcing with a big stick – and if a big stick is necessary then perhaps the Education drive has failed).

Some regular things that should be simple (and should be made to be so):

  • Digital Signing of emails.
  • Encrypting/decrypting files to a consistent, universal standard
  • Promulgation of documents in open formats.
  • Arranging meetings and booking rooms for them at the same time.
  • Backing up and recovery.
  • Requesting help and guidance.
This list is not exhaustive but touches on the things that we’ll need to consider.