Sinclair Community College’s Information Technology department has made an effort within the last year to fix issues from the past, according to Scott McCollum, the Director of Information Technology Services (ITS).
Information Techology is split between ITS and Research, Analytics and System Development (RASD).
According to McCollum, ITS is the infrastructure part, including networks, my.sinclair, ANGEL and the Help Desk, among others, while RASD oversees applications that would run on top of that infrastructure.
McCollum said that ANGEL is just a part of what ITS oversees, because they are responsible for more than just ANGEL.
“We run 240 servers, of which ANGEL is about 40. We have 75 terabytes of disk storage, of which ANGEL is about 10. ANGEL is significant, but we run lots and lots of systems,” McCollum said.
He said he understands that problems with ANGEL occur, but over the last year things have changed to help prevent further issues.
But sometimes diagnosing the problems can be very difficult, according to McCollum.
“Problem is, the problems change,” McCollum said. “The systems don’t stay the same. What might be the problems at one point in time or another point in time are different.”
ANGEL is a purchased product, McCollum said. ITS can make minor changes so that it has, according to McCollum, ‘our look and feel to it.’ Last winter, ITS updated ANGEL, a move that changed the way it worked on multiple levels, according to McCollum.
“Completely different. Imagine going from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Everything changed underneath in the way that it worked.”
An issue that originated shortly after the upgrade last winter, pertaining to the way ANGEL recognized file names took months to diagnose and fix. Because of ANGEL’s load-balancing—designed to ease the burden caused by heavy demand by giving ANGEL several servers to work with—one server could be bogged down, while others worked fine, according to McCollum.
“If one student loaded one of these bad files onto a server, all of the students on that server experienced the problem,” McCollum said. “But all the other students on other servers could be going okay.
McCollum said that at the start of winter quarter last year, Sinclair had 12 ‘front-end’ servers. Within two months, they added 25 more.
“When only 10 percent of the people are reporting the problem and 90 percent are not reporting that’s what makes it hard. When everybody’s having the problem, when you can recreate the problem, that’s when it is easier to figure out.”
McCollum said that students having problems with ANGEL should always call the Help Desk (512-HELP) because without input from students, ITS cannot fix things.