Data Center options for housing departmentally owned IT equipment

On this page:

Overview
Virtualization
Colocation services: Departmentally owned or UITS-managed research IT systems and system components
Leasing of Enterprise Class Data Center space

Overview

The Indiana University Data Center provides a superb, robust, and well-secured environment for housing IU's valuable information and information technology assets. UITS offers various options to host departmentally managed IT services and departmentally owned IT hardware within the Data Center. In the Data Center, the Enterprise Pod and Research Pod house IT equipment.

Virtualization

Use of the UITS Intelligent Infrastructure (II) virtualization service provides a cost-effective, robust, and energy-efficient mechanism to deliver IT services through virtual machines (VMs). This is the approach taken by many leading cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. UITS recommends this as the best approach for departmental web, application, and database servers. Moving to IU's virtual environment achieves benefits of hardware efficiencies, reduced environmental impact, and increased flexibility to respond quickly to changing service needs. Servers operating within VMs can be administered by a departmental staff person acting as the system administrator as if that person had direct control of a physical server. These systems can be backed up automatically. For more, including rates, see IU Intelligent Infrastructure.

Colocation services: Departmentally owned or UITS-managed research IT systems and system components

Departmentally owned systems

If you or your IU sub-unit have money available to use for a computing cluster, you always have the option of buying and operating your own cluster, as well as managing it, backing it up, and securing it against hackers. For departmentally owned clusters housed in the IU Bloomington Data Center, UITS will also provide hosting services under a facilities management agreement. Such hosting agreements improve physical security and reliability of power supplies to clusters. UITS offers these hosting services for a fee that reflects the cost of Data Center floor space, electricity, and cooling.

To inquire about a departmentally owned cluster in the Data Center, email dcops@iu.edu.

UITS-managed systems

Alternatively, you can purchase nodes that are compatible with IU's Carbonate cluster, have them installed in the very secure IU Bloomington Data Center, have them available when you want to use them, and have them managed and secured by UITS Research Technologies staff. This colocation service gives schools and departments access to compute nodes that are dedicated solely to their use within Carbonate's physical, electrical, and network framework while leveraging the security and energy efficiency benefits provided by location within the IU Data Center.

To inquire about the colocation service on Carbonate, contact the High Performance Systems (HPS) team.

Leasing of Enterprise Class Data Center space

Departments can lease physical space for their servers in the Enterprise Pod of the IU Bloomington Data Center or in the ICTC Data Center at IUPUI. This is intended primarily as a transition strategy to the II virtualization service described above. Under some specialized circumstances, a departmentally owned IT system may be housed in leased Enterprise space and administered by departmental personnel if technical requirements make it impossible to use the II virtualization service. The UITS server colocation environment for departments provides space, power, cooling, and operator services. The colocations in the Enterprise Pod will use the standard racks. For current charges, see Rates and costs of services. For more about server colocation agreements, contact Data Center Operations.