Powerful SUN Enterprise 10000 Server for Upgrading the HKUSUA and HKUSUB Systems

The HKUSUA and HKUSUB systems have been used as the general-purpose computing servers and email servers for over 14,000 students and staff accounts of the University for many years.  The HKUSUA is a SUN SPARC Centre 2000E and the HKUSUB is a SUN SPARC E6000.  The two systems currently support multiple services, such as:

We are now working on the upgrade-replacement of these two systems.  The HKUSUA and HKUSUB cluster will be replaced by  a powerful Sun Enterprise 10000 (Sun E-10000) system. This new machine is built with advanced architecture and equipped with the HA (High Availability) feature such that the system will work to support multiple server functions with a very high service availability.  For example, when the email server is down in case of certain failure of the system which affects the email server function, the failure will be automatically detected by the other healthy part of the Sun E-10000 system and the email server function will then be restarted and run on the healty part of the system within a few minutes.

Besides the high availability feature, the new machine is much faster with higher CPU and file access speeds.  All file systems used by our users are supported by a disk mirroring set-up.  This means that whenever a user writes some data to the disk storage of the Sun E-10000 system, two copies of the same data are written on separate disks.  With the disk mirroring set-up, any failure of a disk will not lead to a system failure or any loss of user data. Moreover, the user file systems are supported by faster disk array engines for better file access performance in comparison with the old HKUSUA and HKUSUB systems..

The upgrade of the HKUSUA and HKUSUB systems is already underway.  The final migration schedule is yet to be confirmed.  Please check the Computer Centre’s homepage for more up-to-date details.  We can assure you that there will be no change in the user-interface environment and there will be no loss of user data (including email) due to the migration.  When the upgrade is complete, users will enjoy faster and more reliable services from the two servers.

The existing HKUSUB computer (SUN SPARC E6000) will be re-deployed to replace our existing HKUSUC (SUN SC2000E) computer as the former is much faster than the latter.  In brief, the information server cluster will consist of two SUN E6000 servers (HKUSUC and HKUSUD) after the replacement.

When the new HKUSUC/HKUSUD cluster is set up, the new HKUSUC server will see much improved performances of the existing services such as WWW, FTP, RealAudio.  Additional disk space will also be available for hosting web contents, images and other multimedia files for users of the HKUWWW server.
 

Charles Cheung
Tel: 2859 2488
Email: cheungyw@hkucc.hku.hk


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