Youngnam University

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Youngnam University Builds Robust New Online Registration System

Established in 1947, Youngnam University is one of the premier private universities in South Korea. Today, with a student body of 35,000, Youngnam is actively promoting the use of information technology by students and administration.

The Online Registration Dilemma

For Youngnam, online course registration presented a challenge. Because Youngnam limits class sizes and students are accepted in the order they apply, when a class fills, latecomers are turned away. As a result, on the first day of registration, many students are poised at computers or workstations to register at the first opportunity, so that they can get into the classes they need.

“Typically, the university registration system has to process highly concentrated transactions in the first five minutes after the opening of registration,” said Lee Byeong-wan, Youngnam Information Systems, who is in charge of registration at the university. This large transaction load taxed the school’s registration system, impacting performance and response times. Students, upset by the delays, complained, and Information Systems staff, doing their best to cope with the problems, bore the brunt of the criticism.

Originally, registration was handled by a client-server system, which meant that students had to come to campus during the semester break to register using a university workstation. To provide remote access, so that students could register from home, the IT staff added a Web system to handle some of the load. Success was, however, limited. Mr. Lee described the problem: “We had run both client-server and Web systems for registration until the first semester of 2003. However, with heavy usage, screen displays were slow, and sometimes the Web server crashed. After rebooting,” he added, “we tried to limit the number of simultaneous users, but even with those limitations, the response time was 40 seconds—too long for our students.”

Off-the-Chart Performance Gains

To solve the problem, the university turned to Fujitsu Korea. Together they began a project to convert the integrated information system of the school, Education & Administration System for Youngnam (EASY), from client-server to Web-based.

Fujitsu suggested an upgraded EASY system that used the stability and high-performance capabilities of the Interstage Application Server, running on Fujitsu PrimePower servers. The new Interstage-based registration system was launched in June 2003, with outstanding results. Performance in the first five minutes of registration, when the load is highest, was 2.5 times that of the same semester in 2002.

Mr. Lee reported satisfaction with the results: “We processed 70 percent of all requests (34,000) during the five minutes after opening. And our system response time was consistently less than five seconds.”

Section Chief Kim Jin-ho was pleased as well. “As a field worker who knows very well how difficult the registration work was before,” he said, “I am glad to finish registration successfully—this year was very different from the past.”

Bringing Other Systems on Board

Because the registration system easily managed the heavy transaction load, the university decided to move the rest of the EASY components from its client-server network to the Interstage-based system, including administration, employment, research management, and attendance. Ultimately, Fujitsu’s Interstage Application Server enabled not only flexible integration of Youngnam’s registration system, but it also improved mission-critical operations through increased system performance. Because Interstage Application Server provides a stable, robust environment for all Web-based tasks in the university, Fujitsu Korea plans to make registration packages available to other universities.