Early today, the PM IT Team deployed a major upgrade to our Sapphire server. The new server hardware and software should prove to be significantly more robust than our current platform. Thanks to our Senior Engineer, Shawn Beard, the transition was smooth and nearly flawless. Often, a considerable amount of behind the scenes planning and work is required to bring these types of services online. Today’s successful deployment is the result of weeks of engineering and planning.
Shawn took a few minutes to summarize several “under-the-hood” enhancements behind our new Sapphire “engine”:
Through the utilization of load balancing technology are able to provide redundancy in the event of server failure and a faster user interface. The load balancing technology will also permits us to perform server hardware and software maintenance without the need to take Sapphire offline. The new server provides multiple webservers on a single piece of server hardware and each webserver will utilize it’s own bank of resources. This means that when a user is running a report or performing a resource intensive function, we can maintain a higher level of usability and stability for all staff and faculty.
A big thank you to Shawn for his time and energy on this project!