IBM NUMA-Q for Scottish Qualifications Authority

The move to new technology comes as a result of changes to the Scottish qualifications system. SQA was formed on 1 April 1997 by a merger of the Scottish Vocational Education Council (SCOTVEC) and the Scottish Examination Board (SEB). One of the main reasons for the merger was to provide a unified awarding system for all school, college and workplace-based education and training in Scotland, leading to the issue of a single cumulative certificate showing all achievements, the Scottish Qualifications Certificate.

For this Certificate to be issued a new technological platform needed to be put in place. SQA inherited two distinct sets of business applications running on two main hardware platforms, Sequent Symmetry and IBM AS/400. While these systems worked very well for the predecessor organisations, SQA felt that neither could support their future business.

SQA's main business application is a bespoke, in-house development called the Awards Processing System (APS). As well as processing all of the data associated with approximately 350,000 candidates every year, APS maintains cumulative records on over 1.5 million candidates. In early 1999 SQA began the tendering process for procuring suitable hardware platforms for APS.

IBM NUMA-Q will provide two NUMA-Q 1000 machines, one for SQA's Glasgow site and the other in Dalkeith, Midlothian. The Dalkeith NUMA-Q server acts as the main transaction box, continually processing information sent from all over Scotland.

This data is replicated to the Glasgow NUMA-Q server which supports all public and user queries. In addition this server provides a development and test environment, as well as an uninterrupted flow of information to the main transaction box.