Presentation
The Information Systems Area and University Portal provides IT, informative, strategic and basic services for the University of Palermo.
It is organized in three sectors and one U.O.:
-Programming, development sector and management and informative portals of the University;
-University general computer services sector;
-Document management and U-gov support;
-U.O. Secretariat of the Informative Systems Area.
The activities of the Information Systems Area and University Portal are intended to:
-To maintain the efficiency of the University’s IT equipment and network infrastructure, which are used by the University’s researchers, operators and students;
-To support users in the use of automated administrative services management applications.
From a hardware point of view we use hyper-converged systems with virtualization "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization" that consolidate over 150 servers on a storage in auto replication.
The operating systems and development environments used are, in 99% of cases, open source.
From a software point of view, on the servers of the Information Systems Area and University Portal are operating the applications that manage students, teachers, accounting, assets, attendance, salaries and research.
Many applications to support student management and network and identity management is developed in house.
In addition, numerous network equipment (switches, routers, terminal servers, wireless laser and radio technology equipment) dedicated to the maintenance of the city and Sicilian data communication infrastructure are also included, of which the Information Systems Area and University Portal is the star center.
The university network system as a whole consists of more than 100 connections using different technologies (fibre optics, laser bridges, radio bridges, ADSL, HDSL) and connects over 5,000 equipment (200 server computers, 400 network equipment, 4500 personal computers) located in all the facilities of the University of Palermo distributed in the institutional offices of Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento and Caltanissetta.
The University’s Information Systems and Portal Area manages the University’s Wireless Network that covers the entire University thanks to the WIFI4UNIPA project completed in November 2010.
The implementation of the project, in addition to having extended the wireless signal "wifi-unipa-wpa" to all university facilities, has increased the speed of backbones citizens from 1gbps to 10gbps.
Since 2008, the Voip-UNIPA project has been launched at the Information Systems Area and University Portal, which today connects over 3,600 interiors and over 200 faxes.
The implementation of the project has allowed since 2010 a reduction in the total telephone expense of the University (except for the Faculty of Medicine) equal to 40% compared to the expense incurred in 2007 (about 400,000 euro/year).
At the Information Systems Area and University Portal is located the node of the network of the University and Italian scientific research GARR, coordinated and managed by the Consortium GARR.
The University’s Information Systems and Portal Area manages the connection to the Internet network and it maintains the reference servers for the management of internet addresses (Dns: Domain Name Server), for the most popular Internet services including e-mail of unipa.it (over 6,000 active mailboxes) and, for students, it manages the student domain.unipa.it.
Recently a Registration Autority of the unipa.it domain has been established at the Information Systems Area and University Portal, for the request of digital certificates to the GARR Certification Autority.
The Information Systems Area and University Portal manages:
-The reference website of the University of Palermo (www.unipa.it);
-The teaching support portal (teachers.unipa.it);
-The student portal (studenti.unipa.it) through which registration/enrolment services are provided;
-The portal (immaweb.unipa.it/immaweb_backoffice) to support the staff in charge of the management of student careers.
Through the reference website you can access numerous databases including university libraries, the Official Gazette of the State, the Sicilian Regional Assembly.
It is also possible to consult, from any location in the University network, numerous bibliographical repertoires of major scientific interest and the autonomous websites in the University.