Milestone Celebration on April 6: BASIS Mainframe Decommission and SRX Migration

Art Miller

All campus IT staff are invited to celebrate the completion of two major milestones on Wednesday, April 6.

All campus IT staff are invited to celebrate the completion of two major milestones — the BASIS mainframe decommissioning and the SRX migration — 2:30 to 4 p.m., Wednesday, April 6, at the Garden Pavilion on Razorback Road. This date was postponed from March 11 because of the threat of winter weather. In case of rain, the celebration on April 6 will be in ADSB 240. 

"I want to personally thank all the IT services staff and campus IT partners for their hard work in reaching these two goals," Steve Krogull, CIO, said. "They were challenging projects that did not happen in isolation, and I'm deeply thankful for their commitment to work together to move our institution forward."  

More about BASIS 
The mainframe that powered BASIS, the Business and Administrative Strategic Information System, for more than 25 years was powered off Dec. 20, 2021. This was the second phase of decommissioning BASIS, which was replaced by Workday in July 2020.  

Historical BASIS data not available in Workday was successfully migrated to the data warehouse in November 2021. Decommissioning the mainframe will save the university approximately $1 million per year in service and licensing fees while ensuring the integrity of institutional data.  

More about SRX 
The Juniper SRX firewall was removed from service on Sunday, Feb. 20. Since December 2021, the university has migrated 2,046 servers as well as cameras, printers, workstations and card reading devices to newer enterprise firewalls.