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Managing education programs dependably with Stratus^® ftServer^® System

On subjects from aerobics, to history, to art, NHK Culture Center produces and offers course after course - some 15,000 annually. Tokyo-based NHK Culture Center is by far the largest organization of its kind in Japan, with 54 classrooms across the country and 300,000 members.

Optimizing management across all of its locations was becoming a concern for this rapidly expanding provider of educational and cultural programs. All locations have similar management and administration needs, however, including course registration, receiving tuition, course planning, arranging lecturers, and accounting for expenses.

"It was difficult to obtain up-to-date information from all the classrooms," says Mr. Kei Matsuoka of NHK Culture Center's Development Department.

Because data wasn't shared, creating documents and financial reports was costly. Information from each classroom was faxed to the headquarters and manually entered into the computer. At times there were tens of employees working on data entry. Data obtained in this way was rarely current. Consequently, it was difficult to use such information to develop new programs.

"Another problem was the computer system. The issues were operating costs and future development," Mr. Matsuoka explains. Each classroom was making its own changes, updating software, and receiving vendor support on its own.

With an eye toward more efficient management and administration, NHK Culture Center took on a project to overhaul these operations. An ultra-reliable Stratus ftServer system would be chosen as the core database server to maximize the project's results.

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New structure needs new server

MediaSeek Co. Ltd. of Tokyo, a consulting firm and system integrator, was charged with reengineering the computer system as well as the management structure.

"First, we proposed centralization of data processing on the Web," explains Mr. Hajime Otoshi, technology integration manager at MediaSeek. All managerial data and data transactions were centralized in NHK's data center, and each classroom was connected to the data center through PC Web browsers.

Headquarters could now obtain real-time information from all classrooms and manage the entire system from a central server. A framework had been established for centralizing management, reducing operating costs, and promoting business development.

Each classroom had its own rules and procedures for accounting and daily operations, which still had to be reorganized. After evaluating all the classrooms, Mr. Otoshi restructured these management and administrative functions from the ground up. Hundreds of management terminals were linked to the Web to improve coordination with each classroom.

While the transition would take time to implement across all of the culture center's locations, one fundamental issue remained: The database server platform had to be selected.

"We needed performance and reliability to ensure smooth centralization," Mr. Otoshi observes.

The database server needed enough power to handle huge volumes of educational material and financial information throughout the year. At least 4-way multiprocessing performance was considered necessary to handle requests for data from all over the country. No less important was reliability, because a server crash could cost the company enormously.

UNIX^® clusters were considered early on but dismissed quickly. The problem was recovery time. Servers clustered for high availability would take several minutes to resume operation after a server failure. This was a critical issue considering the scale and scope of the system.

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Reliable, timely, affordable

One product promised the answer: a 4-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) Stratus ftServer system. The ftServer series is the only complete line of fault-tolerant, 1- to 4-way SMP Intel^® processor-based servers for Microsoft^® Windows^® server environments.

A convincing demonstration of the ftServer system was the deciding event. One of the server's boards was pulled out of the system suddenly while the application continued to run completely unaffected.

When the ftServer system detects an error, it automatically isolates the faulty unit from the completely redundant CPU, memory, and disks. Failsafe software features prevent many software errors from escalating into outages. No rebooting is needed and processing continues without downtime, unlike cluster systems.

The operating system and applications immediately benefit from the uptime protection of the fault-tolerant design, because the ftServer system's redundant hardware architecture is treated as a single server. In comparison, clusters of multiple servers must be tested to ensure that switchover will occur properly when one server encounters a problem. Built-in Continuous Processing^® capabilities make failover testing unnecessary for ftServer systems, reducing development time - a huge merit when a company needs to deploy applications quickly.

Mr. Otoshi felt that this resilience was ideal for the culture center's new management system. With the Stratus support center constantly monitoring the server platform, the system could run without fail.

"There were cost advantages, too," adds Mr. Otoshi. Unlike clusters that require purchasing duplicate servers and licensing a copy of software for every server, the fault-tolerant ftServer system is a single server that requires only one license of any necessary software.

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Dependable advantages

Within three months of selecting the ftServer system as its database server, NHK Culture Center transferred management and administrative functions to the new system. Twenty classrooms to date, mostly in Japan's Kanto region, have been moved to the system with the rest to follow. The server has operated without incident since going into operation.

"With a Windows base and no downtime, ftServer systems seem to be the most ideal machine for management operations," comments Mr. Otoshi.

According to Mr. Matsuoka of NHK Culture Center, "Once this system is implemented in all classrooms, all the data will be captured accurately and reliably. Only with the ftServer system can we optimize our management so dramatically."

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