As a result of a migration from its 20-year-old financial accounting application, Melbourne University implemented what it claims is the world’s first “stretched” cluster that runs applications transparently across systems in two separate campuses.

The university’s deputy principal John Julian, said the University Systems Project began in 2002 and by January last year the new Oracle financials system went live.

“Even for a university we are a very distributed organization and needed a financials system that delivered more unified reporting and was available to all departments,” Julian said. “We have around 5000 staff and 40,000 students in more than 100 departments, many of which have their own silo systems. Implementing a Web-based solution would also make it available to our large number of Mac desktops.”

To demonstrate the project’s ROI, the university commissioned an independent IDC study that concluded that, over five years, $11.7 million in benefits will be realized. The phase-one investment was about $14 million which includes all hardware, software, services and training.

Julian said the active-active architecture of the cluster is more economical than an active-passive backup and disaster recovery.

Melbourne University’s IT infrastructure team leader Chris Pivec said the project is unique in that it replicates the core systems, storage and applications across two separate sites which are connected by redundant fibre links.

“The university already had the fibre infrastructure so we could design the system to be fully redundant across two sites,” Pivec said. “The clustering technology is a combination of HP’s TruCluster and Oracle’s 9i RAC. The system is fully redundant in that we can perform upgrades without any downtime.”

Pivec said this design is an example of how grid computing could potentially be used across countries and even internationally. When asked what the university’s strategy is given that HP has announced the end-of-life for the AlphaServer product line, Pivec said it is keeping an eye on emerging technologies.

“The decision to purchase Alpha was made when there was no equivalent technology available with the same price-performance,” he said. “When it’s time to migrate off we will look at Itanium and Linux which should mature over the next couple of years.”

Julian added that HP has been very open with informing the university of its technology roadmap.

Going forward the university plans to implement research management software, a departmental position-based budgeting application and an e-commerce component for services payments.