Increasing demand, new technologies, reduced budgets, and a desire for improved efficiencies led to establishing or strengthening partnerships with colleges. Information Technology Services (ITS) and the colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences established shared goals and outcomes in 2011, and other colleges are currently considering ways to partner with ITS toward meeting their immediate and future needs.
“About a year ago, Jim Davis from ITS, Jim Kurtenbach from Engineering and I, representing LAS, wanted to do a lot of things, but none of us had the money individually to accomplish what we wanted to do,” said Arne Hallam, Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. By initially working together and later, through the Strategic Initiatives program, they were able to find efficiencies and combine some of their own funding while obtaining grant money to achieve many of their goals, including more servers and disk space, along with networks to support them.
David Popelka, Associate CIO, said the joint investment between LAS, Engineering, ITS, and the Stategic Initiatives fund resulted in about $1.4 million in funding, mostly contributing to a joint buildout of additional storage and virtual server capacity.
In collaboration with colleges and departments, ITS studied virtualization technologies and assessed campus-wide virtualization needs. As a result of this study, ITS now offers a high-availability, high-capacity, enterprise-level server virtualization environment for use campus-wide.
Read the full article here.