The University is investing in your IT and throughout 2013 there will be significant activities to support the delivery of these improvements.
You will already be aware that the University has committed to delivering a new Data Centre during 2013, together with related developments to our technical infrastructure. The new Data Centre will deliver much higher levels of service availability than were ever possible from the existing facility.
To move IT services to the new Data Centre there are two fundamental stages:
- Firstly the preparation stage. This means the change from machine based service provision to service provision through virtualised platforms: this results in a more resilient fail over architecture, a smaller physical footprint and reduced electricity requirements
- Secondly is the actual migration of the IT services to the new Data Centre
To achieve this there will need to be planned outages for each service. Our aim is that most of these outages will coincide with agreed service upgrades. However where no upgrades are planned, approval will be sought from business stakeholders on suitable dates for outages. We do not plan to have multiple sequential full day outages similar to those experienced in early 2012.
There will be individual or clustered service outages required: the timing for these outages will be set and agreed in collaboration with the main business owners of each service. At all times we will try to keep these outages as short as possible so that we reduce the inconvenience you.
Recent achievements – June / July 2013:
- A new core network has been installed at Highfield : This completes work to connect the new data centre to the rest of the University via Highfield. The new core is much faster and has introduced more resilience. There is still a lot of work to complete, and as this progresses further benefits will be realised.
- A new DNS / DHCP (mechanism for managing and acquiring network credentials) has been deployed: The legacy solutions for these vital underpinning services have been replaced with an enterprise solution. The new service is much more resilient and is already allowing a lot of historic configuration to be improved due to greatly improved reporting, monitoring and management
- An updated High Performance Computing service has been rolled out – providing a world class facility for our research community and additionally benefits from the improved mechanical and electrical facilities within the new Data Centre.
Coming up:
Migrations of Qlikview and Planon are being investigated and prepared for. Prior to these services being migrated, the majority of the underpinning technology that support much of the end user IT services will have been also put in place.
For more detailed information related to this extensive investment programme, please visit: IIP Home Page