Programme

Opening session: “Does your institution really need 24x7x52”? 
David Teed, Teed Business Continuity

Presentation (.5Mb)

Following a detailed business impact analysis carried out by Teed, LSE developed a “statement of recovery” document which sets out the criticality of its systems and services. Many of the systems that had originally been considered “mission critical” were not actually that critical after all. Resources were able to focus upon those services that really did need to be resilient. David will outline practical examples of how to determine the real requirements, as well as exploring the implications of systems failures and outages.

Is working from home the answer if you have a disaster?
Adrian Ellison, LSE

Pressentation (2Mb)

Has your institution assumed that working from home/off-site is their de facto business continuity plan, should a major incident render the campus inaccessible? This session discusses some of the technical, operational and legal/security aspects of supporting large numbers of remote users.

How Oracle can meet the availability needs of 21st Century universities
David Storey, Oracle and Catherine McMillan, University of Strathclyde 

Presentation (11Mb)

Universities face many challenges, not least the demands of modern students requiring access to applications 24x7. David will describe Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture, which is a best practice approach to delivering highly available critical applications such as online learning and admissions. Customer examples of where this architecture has been deployed, including a case study at the University of Strathclyde will be showcased.

How to improve the availability of Windows systems using clustering and virtualisation technologies.
Richard Smith, Sheffield Hallam University

Presentation (10Mb)

This session will explain how Sheffield Hallam University have used Microsoft Windows Cluster Services and network load balancing to improve Windows service availability. It will also cover how virtualisation can help with availability for applications that do not support clustering technologies. Applications covered will include Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange and Terminal Services.

Accessing data from anywhere - virtual storage to complement virtual servers? A case study of using FalconStor.
Adrian Jane, University of Plymouth

Presentation (.3Mb)

The University of Plymouth has implemented an appliance based Storage Virtualisation system to provide a highly fault tolerant, scalable and flexible storage environment to support the provision of IT services at the University.  This presentation will describe the implementation of the system, and highlight some of the key benefits that have been realised as a result, including data storage tier migration, hardware vendor independence, storage re-configuration on the fly and enhanced management and monitoring.