Jon's Blog
Blog for thoughts and ideas, when a Tweet isn't enough.
Attempted Clouds
by jon
All about our Hybrid Cloud Attempt
Overview
My institution attempted an ERP migration to the cloud. It went, in a direction. Lessons learned, ignored and something happened.
Current State
Because of reasons We expanded our current private cloud environment to accommodate the current batch of Database servers, and all the associated services that connect to the Banner ERP.
What is Banner
Banner is a academic ERP. It manages Finance, Student Services (admission, registration, classes & curriculum), Human Resources. In the current EOL version it runs on Oracle WebSphere (Tomcat stuff) for its front ends (for user self service), Oracle Forms for administration and an Orcale DB backend. There are lots of connected systems. My institution has run Banner in various forms for over 20 years. It’s been on Linux hosts for the last 8, and before that it lived on Sun Solaris hardware.
Why Now
Ellucian, the provider of Banner is upgrading to a newish architecture, where they allow you to drop the Oracle WebSphere & Forms services and replace them with multiple servers running Tomcat. It feels like general improvement, it makes it much more browser agnostic (Banner 8 was only really viable inside of IE) and modern (you can now resize the window).