Xi'an University of Science and Technology's Smart New Campus 2.0, layout of "IT unified smart operation and maintenance" (Part 1): IT asset full life cycle management​

Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology is an implementing institution of the “National High-level University Construction Project” and the “Basic Capacity Building Project for Colleges and Universities in Central and Western China”, a co-constructed university by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the Ministry of Education, and the Shaanxi Provincial People’s Government, one of the “Eight Old Architecture Schools”, a high-level university under the jurisdiction of Shaanxi Province, and one of the first batch of doctoral, master’s and master’s degree-granting institutions in the country.

The author of this article is Dou Hao, deputy director of the Network and Informatization Department of Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, and a senior engineer. He is also the chairman of the Higher Education Professional Committee of the Shaanxi Information Network Security Association, a member of the Informatization Branch of the China Higher Education Society, a member of the Network Security Professional Committee of the China Educational Technology Society, an expert in the expert database of the Shaanxi Provincial Department of Finance, and an expert in the expert database of the Shaanxi Provincial Survey and Design Association. He is mainly engaged in the construction and research of educational informatization, network and information security, and smart campus and digital campus.

He led the team of the Cyberspace Administration of China to fully build the Xi'an University of Science and Technology Smart Campus 2.0. He not only upgraded the unified operation and maintenance platform to the "smart brain" of the smart campus, but he was also the first strategic initiator and practitioner of smart campus construction in the country to propose and successfully implement the concept of "big operation and maintenance".

Smart Campus of Xi'an Jiaotong University: Green, Smart, and Future-oriented

Driven by the wave of informatization, the construction of smart campuses in universities has become an important means to improve the quality of education and management efficiency. Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology (abbreviated as Xijian University) is a university with a long history and unique characteristics of science and engineering. It adheres to the new national policy of "building a strong network country" and promotes the implementation of the "11445" new development pattern of "smart +, green +, healthy +, international +", and strives to build the school into a new international architectural technology base with the most complete disciplines, the largest training scale and the highest academic level along the Silk Road.

The Internet Information Office of our school is committed to building Xi'an Jiaotong University into a "green, smart, and future-oriented" smart campus. It has planned the overall construction goals and made careful arrangements to provide a more convenient and efficient service experience for all teachers and students in the school.

Located in the historic city of Xi'an, Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology has two campuses, Yanta and Caotang, and a university science and technology park, covering a total area of ​​more than 3,700 acres. It has more than 36,000 students and more than 1,900 teachers. The school's Internet Information Office manages the campus network, data center network, and IT infrastructure, "managing assets, people, affairs, and processes." The multi-pronged information management makes the Internet Information Office extremely arduous in terms of workload and difficulty.

The solution to the problem of intelligent operation and maintenance of Xi'an Jianda University

The positioning of the information development strategy of NCU is to focus on the school's "11445" overall development goal, serve the school's core work, and promote the school's development. At the same time, it will form our school's unique information construction experience, form a certain demonstration effect, and thus comprehensively enhance the school's status.

Compared with the traditional information construction idea of ​​"small users, big IT", the guiding ideology and concept of our school's unique information construction is "big users, small IT", that is, the smart campus construction concept with teachers and students as the "user-centered".

However, how can colleges and universities differentiate themselves in information construction?

In fact, the design of information space by learning from others (architecture) has become a discipline, namely Information Architecture, and the designers are called Information Architects; Information Architecture is very important, just as architecture has many forms, Information Architecture can also take many attractive forms and is based on precise, planned structures and solid ideas.

We use architecture, our school's expertise, and the idea of ​​integrating and communicating with users to solve the ultimate problem of the school's informatization construction. We were the first to propose the concept of "big operation and maintenance" to solve the problem of "smart campus" construction, and upgraded the operation and maintenance management of the smart campus to the form of "smart brain" to coordinate the management of Xi'an Jianda's informatization.

Implementation of the "Big Operation and Maintenance" strategy of Xi'an University of Science and Technology

The "big operation and maintenance" strategy of Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology is to establish a big operation and maintenance model that integrates "network and information system operation and maintenance, information technology publicity, teacher and student training, and user services" to effectively respond to cross-system, cross-business and multi-cross collaborative user scenarios and improve the overall operation quality of the smart campus.

However, the implementation of the "big operation and maintenance" strategy of Xi'an Jianda University still has four difficulties to overcome:

● Extensive IT resources : The workload of IT resource maintenance is huge, and there is a lack of effective means to uniformly manage the huge campus network, data center network and IT infrastructure throughout the entire life cycle. At the same time, repetitive and tedious operations such as daily basic inspections, risk prevention, security compliance, and data analysis cannot be automated, which takes up a lot of energy of operation and maintenance teachers. How to achieve full life cycle management of IT assets?

● Quantification of organizational effectiveness : The organizational effectiveness and personnel operation and maintenance work of each department of the Cyberspace Administration need to be further refined and quantified. How to build a sustainable and healthy operation ecosystem based on the big operation and maintenance strategy? How to summarize and analyze multi-source operation and maintenance data, and realize value mining and organizational capability building? How to ultimately achieve the precipitation of a quantitative management model for the effectiveness of operational organizations?

● Operation and maintenance process control : Alarms are not managed in a closed loop, the operation and maintenance process is difficult to track, the alarm handling situation is not clear enough, key operation and maintenance events are difficult to track and manage, and there is a lack of change records for resource changes. The operation and maintenance process lacks quantitative means. How to monitor and manage the quality, effectiveness, and process of operation and maintenance?

● Improvement of operation and maintenance capabilities : There are ideas for improving operation and maintenance capabilities, but there is a lack of powerful partners. How to quantify the results of information construction and operation and maintenance through technical means such as AI, and how to solve a large number of operation and maintenance problems such as project management collaboration and asset life cycle management? How can the Cyberspace Administration of China implement the concept of "big operation and maintenance" and continuously empower the school's core businesses such as scientific research, teaching, enrollment and employment through the improvement of operation and maintenance capabilities, and help promote the digital transformation of Xi'an Jianda University?

After preliminary research and in-depth internal discussions and judgments, the school introduced a cloud-ground combination model to promote the implementation of the overall operation and maintenance work on campus. With the help of Ruijie LeXiang intelligent operation and maintenance management platform and cloud services, we finally developed an overall implementation plan for our school's "big operation and maintenance" strategy to support the school's informatization construction, help team growth and improve service efficiency. In terms of IT asset life cycle management, the following construction results have been achieved in stages:

The achievements of the "Big Operation and Maintenance" construction of Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology: IT asset full life cycle management

1. Centralized and unified supervision, proactive operation and maintenance, and automated closed loop

Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology has successfully built a unified centralized management and monitoring platform to achieve unified monitoring and early warning of IT infrastructure, realize the automated closed loop of proactive operation and maintenance work, establish an IT infrastructure centralized management and control platform, and realize the closed loop of unified monitoring of the entire IT infrastructure.

The IT equipment of Xi'an Jiaotong University has achieved 7*24 hours full-time monitoring and unified early warning, realizing daily basic inspections, network risk prevention, and automation, providing intelligent and automated guarantees for the continuous operation of the campus network, data center network and IT infrastructure of Xi'an Jiaotong University, and realizing centralized monitoring and management of IT infrastructure.

IT Infrastructure

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Centralized business monitoring

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Centralized management of wired networks

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Wireless centralized monitoring

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Operation and maintenance data analysis

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2. Automated operation and maintenance support efficiency improvement
Basic operation and maintenance are carried out regularly and automatically on time to achieve comprehensive automated management of daily basic operation and maintenance work.

Network configuration backup
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Daily equipment inspection

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Network health check

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Unified IT Operation and Maintenance

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3. Cloud-ground collaborative solution for large-scale operation and maintenance platform to facilitate efficient operation and maintenance

Through the Ruijie LeXiang Cloud Service Manager Group, cloud data refresh, safety notification, alarm tuning and other services are provided to support the efficient operation and maintenance of Jianda Network Information Office, close the loop to handle alarms, and assist in completing system maintenance and alarm coordination.

● Operation and maintenance data refresh : ensure the consistency of monitoring system data and operation and maintenance environment.

● Safety notice : inspection of key IT equipment and fault warning.

● Alarm tuning : Ensure the accuracy of monitoring system alarms and reduce false alarms and interference alarms.

● Alarm coordination : Experts intervene in complex faults to locate the root cause of the fault.

4. Realize the full life cycle management of assets

(1) Establishment of asset management processes and rules and regulations
● Asset life cycle process planning (30+)

● Currently, the following 5 processes have been sorted out: asset entry, asset exit, asset scrapping, network equipment replacement, and computer room entry and exit

(2) IT asset modeling and asset information collection

Establishment of asset management model

● Completed network/security/wireless/IoT/host/storage/business software/suppliers/projects/contracts and other categories

Asset model building

● Asset model completes system initialization

● Identify campus network and data center IT equipment. Currently, we have sorted out more than 3,000 physical IT assets and are currently cleaning and importing data.

5. Support the construction of green data center of Xi'an University of Science and Technology

(1) Computer room power environment management

● Realize electrical equipment (line cabinet - voltage and power and other indicators monitoring)

● Environmental sensors (temperature, humidity, water immersion, etc.)

● Air conditioning (air conditioning/fresh air temperature and status)

● Firefighting facilities (fire alarms)

(2) Computer room visualization

● Realize 3D modeling and visualization of the overall layout of the computer room

● Realize the integration of power environment and computer room, and display the computer room and power environment in a unified manner to realize the visualization of cabinet layout and cabinet equipment, and display the integrated display from computer room - cabinet - IT equipment - equipment visualization (status and indicators can be observed)

After the implementation of "Big Operation and Maintenance" in our school, through efficient collaboration between the team and Ruijie LeXiang intelligent operation and maintenance management platform, we realized the full life cycle management of the school's IT assets, successfully built a green data center, transformed passive operation and maintenance into active operation and maintenance, safe operation and maintenance, and automatic operation and maintenance, and the IT infrastructure received 7x24 hours of full-time unified monitoring and management.