Kevin McDonalds Blog

• SMTP Mailgates are now 100% Load Balanced!    

  Early in January, the System Administration staff finished the production load balancing of the SMTP mailgates. This change is a huge step in providing seamless availability to our email customers, as well as providing the flexibility to scale to future needs without changing any public facing mail destinations. The Mail load is now evenly distributed amongst the multiple mailgate servers, which has resulted in a smoother operation and less disruptions from bursts of activities.

• Sitemason Migration

  The Sitemason services have been migrated to new servers.  The frontend web server is running in a Virtual Machine, and the backend database server is running on physical hardware. The site has been running pretty well, and everything looks to be performing as expected.  The frontend server was built with twice a much memory (4GB) as the original, and the system is using up to 95% of it at times.

• Office of Investments Application Hosting – PerTrac

  ITS is hosting an application called “PerTrac” for the Office of Investments. This month, ITS staff assisted the Pertrac technical consultants with the implementation and production rollout of their product. The following components were installed and configured: SharePoint, SQL Reporting Services, and major troubleshooting issues for them.

• Backup Enhancements – new methodology for Exchange backups.

  This month, ITS System Administrator staff enhanced the methid in which Microsoft Exchange backup processes were performed. They implemented Legato’s Exchange Backup product which dropped the backup window for the exchange servers from over seventeen hours to just over four hours. Additionally, this lowered online disk consumption in the MS Exchange environment that resulted in freeing up 1TB of Tier 3 diskspace to the storage environment.

• Operational and Administrative updates:
  • 179 Magic Tickets were processed in Applications Hosting.
  • 23 IMAP to Exchange Mailbox Migrations
  • Staff attended “Sharepoint end-user” training

Two staff obtained the Redhat Certified System Engineer (RHCE) certification.

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – MLK