Upgrade of the Banner System

The existing Banner system is an IBM Power 8 system running on LPAR technology, a hardware virtualization system. It means that additional number of CPU core can be re-allocated to the production database server to increase the processing power of the Banner system without buying extra hardware.

LPAR

IBM LPAR virtualization technology diagram

 

In view of the needs to provide sufficient capacity to support peak season activities such as allowing more students from the same intake to conduct courses add/drop from Term 1, 2021-22. Additional Oracle RDBMS licenses were procured and the CPU cores of the Banner system were re-allocated.

During the load tests of the upgrade of the CPU cores, the simulation has obtained load test result with a significant improvement of the concurrent sessions.

The upgrade wasc completed in June 2021. After the upgrade, all students in a single cohort are now able to perform courses add/drop at the same time without time-ticket restriction.