Server struggles to keep up with registration
“Hey, have you registered for classes yet?”
“No, I can’t even log on.”
Since the beginning of course registration, this has been a typical conversation between KU students. According to Lynold McGhee, the assistant provost for Institutional Research and Planning, Online Student Services (OSS) has been experiencing problems recently on a far greater scale than in previous semesters. McGhee says last semester, students simply experienced a slowdown.
According to McGhee, the current system is a “homegrown system,” a Triton system that has been modified to fit KUs needs. McGhee says the problem is that the system is running out of processing ability. He said he is not sure what has caused the problem, saying, “Is the setting off? Is processing capacity expended? We don’t know.”
To solve the problem, McGhee says the university is working with Unisys, an information technology consulting company. They have installed monitoring devices on KUs Unisys mainframe and are sending data back to the company to identify where the issues are. McGhee predicts that a solution will be implemented shortly after the registration period ends, and says the solution should prevent the same circumstances from happening again.
Currently, “analysts are literally babysitting the system,” and manually monitoring the number of students logging on to OSS, McGhee said. “They reduce the number of students that can access the system as they see the processing power dwindle toward zero.” For this reason, he was unable to give the number of students that are able to access the system at once because it is constantly changing.
When asked whether adding a server would help, McGhee explained that students interact with the web server. The web server then interacts with the mainframe, which is where the problem lies. “You can’t simply add another,” he said.
Robert Zera, the vice president for Informational Technologies, said that a “new system is on the horizon for PASSHE.” According to Zera, the state system is contracting with outside companies to create a series of package deals that could meet the individual needs of the 14 schools in the system. Zera estimates that in two years PASSHE should have a new system in place.
President F. Javier Cevallos added that “the current mainframe is quite old,” and that the university was in the process of purchasing another, although he did not offer details. He also said that there would be a possibility of extending the registration period. Zera’s main concern was that course registration not be interrupted.
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