The Illusion of One Hundred Percent Uptime

摘要

In demanding academic environments students expect 100% uptime. It is rarely the case when dealing with school technology including Macs, PCs, printers, servers, complex networks and numerous peripherals that everything will be working correctly. Given our customers desired reliability how do we meet their expectations? We make use of a variety of software packages to identify potential problems before they impact students. These software packages focus on security state, application status, network connectivity and usage patterns. Through a combination of hot-swappable hardware, checklists, scheduled inspections and results from our monitoring software our dedicated staff is able to minimize perceived system downtime. Our student support and student experience staff gather regular feedback from the student body. This feedback coupled with our monitoring software and a student satisfaction survey is able to gauge our results. It is not possible to provide 100% uptime but by our constant monitoring and quick response we are able to give that illusion. To achieve this it is important to define your institutional goals and make sure you have the infrastructure in place which meets your unique needs.