News

HE the Rector Opens Upgraded Building 9 Labs ITC Launches New Email Service on “Exchange” KFUPM Virtualization Infrastructure Upgrade at ITC ITC Team Visits Top International Universities

Inside

Exchange vs. Gmail Seminars & Training at ITC ITC Conducts IT Services Satisfaction Survey Technology Trends - Cloud Terminology

HE the Rector Opens UpgradedBuilding 9 Labs

HE the Rector opened the recently upgraded General-Purpose and Training labs in Building 9. The ceremony was attended by the Mr. Mahmoud Turkistani, Vice-President of National Commercial Bank, which sponsored the upgrade of the hardware.

The labs have been upgraded with state-of-the-art desktop hardware including LCD monitors as well as chairs specially designed for the lab.

ITC Launches New Email Service on “Exchange” ITC has announced the full production-mode deployment of the new email platform. The Exchange Platform has been configured to provide adequate redundancy using the VMware based virtual servers and the recently deployed and upgraded EMC high-end storage platform. Previously, the Sun/Oracle iPlanet Messaging suite tightly integrated with the Luminous Portal was in use as the e-mail platform at KFUPM.

A partial production mode for Exchange 2010 was announced in August this year for a group of selected users

who have been participating in the thorough testing of the new platform. The approach of deploying Exchange 2010 in a fully virtualized environment was taken after appropriate study of partially virtualized deployments including a similar deployment at Plymouth University in UK.

This is a unique deployment of the latest version of Microsoft Exchange (version 2010) at KFUPM which virtualizes both the server and storage tiers. It forms a major step in the implementation of the road map towards setting up a private cloud infrastructure at KFUPM. The present deployment is fully configured to run from the main data center site in Building 14 and the disaster recovery site in Building 28. [See also the article “Why Exchange 2010 is better than Gmail for KFUPM Users?”]

KFUPM Virtualization InfrastructureUpgrade at ITCITC Server & Storage Virtualization Services provide infrastructure to host servers and services in a virtual server environment. This service is based on the VMware suite of virtualization products, and is available for university academic and enterprise applications. The infrastructure for these services has been further upgraded with the addition of 8 powerful servers and 100 TB of advanced SAN storage with 40 additional VMware licenses. Presently, there are 12 hosts running Vsphere 5.0 virtualization environment hosting 100 virtual servers utilizing 50 TB of storage serving a wide range of

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Newsletter Volume2

Sep, Dec 2011

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Newsletter Volume2 Sep, Dec 2011

applications including Exchange 2010, Oracle e-Business suite, Blackboard etc.

With the addition of the new server and storage hardware, ITC expects that the Virtualization platform will grow to 160 virtual servers using 100 TB of SAN storage.

With the maturity achieved in the virtualization technology, ITC plans a private cloud initiative in 2012 to offer select IT services through the cloud.

ITC Team Visits Top International Universities

A team from the Information Technology visited Oxford & Cambridge Universities in the UK as well as Harvard & MIT in the US. The team members included Dr. Mansour Aldajani, Director, Information Technology Center, Dr. Hosam Rowaihy, Assistant Director, Information Technology Center and Jaweed Yazdani, Manager, IT Project

Management Office. With primary focus on the IT facilities and organization of these reputed institutions, the visit provided an opportunity to understand their challenges, environment, methods and processes.

In addition, the visit facilitated benchmarking IT facilities at KFUPM against world-class IT Centers. The visits to each university were organized to include meeting with the CIO followed by presentation on IT Services & Facilities A tour of the Data Center, IT Service Desk and other facilities including Computing Labs, Smart Classrooms and Research Labs was also organized. Agenda and discussion items were focused on their future plans, cooperation through joint programs, and benchmarking of IT services at KFUPM.

Saudi Arabian High Performance Computing Symposium

Saudi Aramco hosted the Saudi Arabian High Performance Computing Symposium on Dec. 6-7, 2011 under the theme of “HPC: Past, Present and Future.” Computational scientists, industry representatives, as well as students were among the more than 300 attendees of the two-day symposium.

Participants from KFUPM using the HPC platform presented two papers as follows: “ECC & KFUPM: The High Performance

Collaboration” by Raed Al-Shaikh, Senior Systems Analyst at Saudi Aramco, EXPEC Computer Center and

“Computer Simulation on the HPC by Dr. Abdullah Sunaidi, Assistant Professor, Physics Department at KFUPM

Distinguished presenters also came from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).

Seminars & Training Conducted

ITC hosted the following technology seminars and training:

Service Oriented Architecture by Rizwan Ahmed from Al-Elm Information Security on Wednesday, Oct 12, 2011 at 1:15 pm in Building 14 Room 108.

Workshop on ISO 27001 Project Overview and Asset Capture at 9:00 AM in Building 14 Room 111.

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Newsletter Volume2 Sep, Dec 2011

Leveraging ITIL Best Practices for Service Improvement at ITC by Ali Ramadan, Global Knowledge, on Wednesday, Nov 16, 2011 at 9:00 AM in Building 14 Room 111/108.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Development, from November 19 - 23, 2011, 8:00am to 4:00pm in Building #9, Room # 302 (Training PC Lab).

Tip of the issue

Never share your password with anyone. While this seems like a very basic concept, many people don't consider it a security risk to share or give passwords to helpdesk staff, co-workers, managers, friends, or family members. ITC at KFUPM will never ask users to provide their password information.

Exchange vs. Gmail

A common refrain of some users is that they are comfortable with the free Gmail or Yahoo accounts and need to be convinced to fully use their KFUPM email account. This article focuses on comparison between Exchange 2010 and Gmail for KFUPM Enterprise Users. Prior to deploying the Exchange platform, the Information Technology Center (ITC) went through a stringent evaluation process from the following choices:

1. Remain with the current iPlanet suite. 2. Switch to ad-funded and externally hosted (with

security concerns) free services such as Gmail, Microsoft live@edu etc.

3. Deploy Microsoft Exchange 2010 server services at KFUPM with a clear road map towards unified communication services and leveraging the Microsoft Campus Licensing program.

4. Other choices such as Lotus Notes, open platforms using clients such as Thunderbird, Mulberry, Opera M2 etc.

After detailed and exhaustive analysis of the options above, the third option was identified as appropriate at KFUPM. The major differences and advantages in using Exchange are given below:

Present Not Present

Partially Available Equal

Feature/Capability Exchange

Google

Issues and Comments

KFUPM Directory

Global Address List (GAL) is missing phone number, KFUPM name, business unit, work office location, manager, and other key metadata fields to help identify unique users In addition IT must deploy the GALSYNC tool for the limited functionality.

Tasks and Reminders

To-do flags and reminders work and can be set locally in Outlook. However, voting buttons and tasks cannot be sent to other Gmail users.

Permissions and Delegation

The user cannot share mail or contact folders, or calendars, and cannot delegate permissions and access to others, such as administrative assistants.

Encrypted Mail (message vs transport)

Not supported as a feature in Outlook if using Gmail back end; prevents mail from being sent with an ambiguous “unexpecte d error.”

Rich Calendar

Google strips attachments from appointments, so content might be missed when collaborating with anyone on other rich messaging platforms (use case example: Agendas).

Synchronized Group Calendars

Google Apps does not provide as complete a collaboration solution, like SharePoint, for group calendaring that can be synchronized to Outlook for tracking project meetings, timelines, etc.

Meeting Attendees and Responses

Attendees can be required only, not optional. Responses can be accept or decline only, not tentative. The user cannot delete attendees from exceptions to recurring events.

User Created (local) Contact List

Outlook local contacts are complete and can include user-created groups and distribution lists.

Distribution Lists and Groups

No support for synching of groups and distribution lists with Google Gmail. No support for multiple contact lists, etc

More details at http://www.paypercloud.com/exchange_vs_gmail.aspx

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ITC Conducts IT Services Satisfaction Survey

The Information Technology Center (ITC) conducted a survey to measure the level of satisfaction for various services provided by ITC at KFUPM. The survey was designed to measure the satisfaction of the following services:

Email service KFUPM Web site Internet service ITC Web site Customer Support Computer Delivery Banner system Computer Support Black Board system PC Labs ERP Business Intelligence

Survey Instrument

A survey questionnaire with Likert-type scale was used where 10 (ten) implied fully satisfied while 0 (zero) implied not satisfied at all. The survey measured the satisfaction across 12 service components as mentioned in the above section KFUPM Students & Faculty were surveyed.

Survey Results

Figure 1 shows the average satisfaction rating of the services provided by ITC. It can be observed that the KFUPM Webpage has the highest satisfaction rating of 8.35 while the Internet has the lowest satisfaction rating of 6.35. Variance in the satisfaction ratings of Customer support (7.81), Computer delivery (7.57) and Computer support (7.05) contest the validity of the users’ satisfaction rating of the customer support provided by ITC.

Figure 1 – Average satisfaction rating a cross ITC Services

ITC Webpage has a lower satisfaction rating of 7.11 compared to the high satisfaction rating of 8.35 for KFUPM webpage. However, the important point to note is that all the services satisfaction ratings are above the mid-point i.e. 5 and hence it can be inferred again that in general, the users are satisfied with the services provided by ITC.

Technology Trends

Cloud Terminology

Cloud: The Cloud is a computing model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Cloud Operating System: A computer operating system that is specially designed to run in a provider’s datacenter and be delivered to the user over the Internet or another network. Windows Azure is an example of a cloud operating system. Cloud Oriented Architecture : A term to describe an architecture where applications act as services in the cloud and serve other applications in the cloud environment. External Cloud: Public or private cloud services that are provided by a third party outside the organization. Google Apps: Google’s SaaS offering that includes an office productivity suite, email, and document sharing, as well as Gmail, Google Talk for instant messaging, Google Calendar and Google Docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. HaaS : Hardware as a service; see IaaS. Hybrid cloud: A networking environment that includes multiple integrated internal and/or external providers. IaaS : Infrastructure as a service — Cloud infrastructure services, whereby a virtualized environment is delivered as a service over the Internet by the provider. The infrastructure can include servers, network equipment, and software. Internal cloud: A type of private cloud whose services are provided by an IT department to those in its own organization. PaaS: Platform as a service — Cloud platform services, whereby the computing platform (operating system and associated services) is delivered as a service over the Internet by the provider. Private Cloud: Services offered over the Internet or over a private internal network to only select users, not available to the general public. Public Cloud: Services offered over the public Internet and available to anyone who wants to purchase the service. SaaS: Software as a service — Cloud application services, whereby applications are delivered over the Internet by the provider, so that the applications don’t have to be purchased, installed, and run on the customer’s computers.