Manukau Institute of Technology(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 33

Senior IS executive: Anthony Margetts, IT director
Reports to: Dr Stuart Middleton, executive director
Size of IS shop: 30

PCs: 3512
Mobile PCs: 318
Terminals: 563
Hand-held devices: 160
Total screens: 4553

Industry: Educational services
PC environment: Apple Mac; Asus; Lenovo; Windows XP, Vista
Server environment: Sun; Cyclone; AMD; Intel; Windows 2003, 2008; VMWare; Mac OSX
DBMS: Oracle, SQL, MySQL
Address: Gate 1 Newbury, Street Otara, South Auckland
Website: www.manukau.ac.nz
Key IS projects this year: Application virtualisation; replacement HR system; consolidation of domains.

Manukau Institute of Technology (MIT) continues to enhance the quality of IT service provision. Major projects include the upgrade and replacement of legacy systems in the administration departments. MIT is also developing and deploying email and file system archiving to address issues of compliance. These changes have required increased storage capacities both on the SAN and tape backup systems.

Business continuity is being addressed by duplication of systems through the addition of a DR site capable of supporting the entire organisation.

MIT continues to support Mac OS X, Windows XP and Vista client operating systems on fat clients, but is increasing the deployment of virtualised desktops delivered to SunRay devices. Thin client devices help address power consumption as well as security of data concerns. Difficulties with fat client device image maintenance will be addressed this year, with an increased use of virtualisation technologies.

IT services continue to be delivered to more than a dozen
facilities spread from Pukehohe to Queen Street in central Auckland. Progress continues towards full migration of legacy PABX environments to VoIP, which has enabled converged communications and lowered fixed wiring costs.

Structured data continues to be held in Oracle database servers and the use of ZFS file systems is increasing in use across its Solaris servers. MIT remains committed to Sun’s mail, calendar and directory services and will start to tackle the issues of identity management, provisioning and auditing later in 2009.