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2) What is your SAKAI infrastructure?

• Primary (this is a mix of production and failover gear and does not list HW associated with development)
  • Netscaler 7000 (x2) for load balancing
  • Sun Fire 4100 (x3) for sakai process
  • Sun Fire 4150 (x2) for Oracle database (and manual failover)
  • 2 TB Hitachi SAN for sakai main data store (independent disk arrays for redundancy - currently 1T LUNS each)

• Secondary
  • BlueArc Titan NAS Storage System for backup data storage
  • CAS/Kerberos VMware hosts for authentication
  • Middleware Accounts Database system (PostgreSQL) for provisioning

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3) Which database version did you choose to use for SAKAI Installation?

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• Version upgrades are performed during the summer break.  A few minor patches/upgrades are performed during the short winter break.  We have a weekly maintenance window in which any small patches that are needed and have been tested are applied to the system.  We use this maintenance window about once per month to install small patches.
• We have local subversion repository for patches and local mod.

6) Who provides you SAKAI maintenance and support?

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• No direct integration
• Banner provides a synthesized view of data to Middleware
  • THRCSDB - person registrary info
  • SWVITSI - courses and instructors
  • SWVITRG - students and the courses they are in
• Middleware further processes the data against the person registraryregistry
• Web services API is used to provision Sakai
• Three custom java applications are used for this provisioning
  • sakai_load_users - creates the main sakai account for each user. Does not assign the user to any sites.
  • sakai_load_courses - creates all of the new course sites in Sakai. This is the process that assigns the Sakai site ID for the course.
  • sakai_load_students - adds/removes the students from each of the courses that they are assigned to
  • for more information please see Rice-Sakai-Atlanta.ppt

The Sakai Web Service API routines that we use are:

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• Currently, we do not purge. Sakai's current version does not offer a tool to do this conveniently.  There is hope that in 2 years, Version 3 will correct this problem. 

• Note
  Salah Dami Assistant Director of Technical Services Information Technology Essex County College Tel: 973-877-3502

HARDWARE AND INFRASTUCTURE QUESTONS

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• Sakai Servers:
  • Sunfire 4100
  • 3 - Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 275
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 8 DAS SAS drives (2 OS raid 10, 6 Data disks RAID 5)
  • Redundant port 4 GB HBA to SAN Fabric using RDAC for failover to 1 TB LUN
• Database Server:
  •  Sunfire 4150
  • 2 - Dual core AMD Opteron Processor 2.8 GHz (production system and cold backup)
  • 8 DAS SAS drives (2 OS raid 10, 6 Data disks RAID 10 for performance)
• VMWare - We initially deployed the application servers on VMware, but the need for memory in future versions required more than a VM Guest could use at the time as Tomcat alone is configured to use 3 Gig.  Also at the time, VM had no support for multiprocessor, very limited memory and no 64 bit support.  By the time you allocate enough resources for guest, the host could be tapped out.  The front ends can be more cost effectively scaled by simply adding more lower cost application servers tuned to deliver web content.

17) What type of storage do you use for the servers?

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23) Any issues with client software when accessing the system? (eg. Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, toolbars)

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OTHER ISSUES:

24) We know that some data from Banner tables such as: Roster, Course, Course Section, etc needs to be exported into Sakai in a CSV format. Does that data need to be parsed?

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• We are not using Course Management API.. Course Management API did not exist when we started using Sakai in 2006.

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Sakai Provisioning Code

I've put together a subversion repository with the code we use to provision courses, instructors, and students into Sakai.

The repository can be found via a web browser at

	https://www.it.svn.rice.edu/

You will need to authenticate using your guest account. Look for the repository named Middleware_Public.

The repository can be accessed with a subversion client using the following URL:

	https://it.svn.rice.edu/r/Middleware_Public/