Rearchitecting IT: Simplify. Simplify

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Rearchitecting IT: Simplify. Simplify

6/26/2006

By Joseph C. Panettieri

Step 3: Centralize and Automate Your Help Desk

Another key infrastructure consideration is the university help desk. Frequently, help desk phone lines are decentralized and flooded by users who have forgotten or misplaced their passwords. Resetting those passwords manually can be an expensive process, typically costing $14 to $28 per incident, estimates Gartner.

Eager to eliminate such costs, the University of Alaska has simplified password management across its network. Specifically, the university licensed P-Synch password synchronization software from M-Tech Information Technology. The software securely manages user passwords across the organization, and drives down operational costs because users can reset their lost or forgotten passwords through a self-service application that requires no help desk assistance.

AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY, LANDesk
software is cutting software installation costs.

Step 4: Address Convergence and Storage Issues

All IT infrastructure projects require careful consideration of the future. For instance, many universities already run data, voice, and video on their IP networks. And bandwidth-intensive traffic will only increase as students embrace video-enabled instant messaging, online movie downloads, and other multimedia services that are rapidly moving into the mainstream.

As movies and other content converge onto IP networks, schools will require greater and greater amounts of storage. Gartner estimates the typical business or university will see its storage requirements double or triple every 18 months. Such is the case at NYCOM, where class lectures and other digital content are available on multiprocessor-based servers from Dell. But as each new lecture comes online, NYCOM finds itself in a never-ending race to expand its server and storage systems.

One practical solution involves deploying blade servers, which consume far less space than traditional rack servers. Not surprisingly (thanks to their thin, spacesaving design), sales of blade servers are rising swiftly: During mid-2005, yearover- year blade server sales jumped 67 percent, according to the International Data Corporation.

But deploying densely designed blade servers in a university data center can lead to significant heat issues. Indeed, organizations using dual-processor blade servers report heat output of as much as 14 kilowatts per server rack, according to The Uptime Institute, a NM-based firm that specializes in data center design. Aware of these heat issues, companies such as the American Power Conversion Corporation now offer cooling systems and consulting services for organizations seeking to standardize on blade-based systems.

Step 5: Go Virtual

In order to consolidate applications onto fewer servers, many universities (and businesses) are deploying virtualization and exploring the use of grid computing. Popularized by EMC’s VMware software family, virtualization software allows a server to easily run multiple operating systems and applications. For instance, a single server could run a Linux-based Oracle database and an unrelated Windows-based e-mail system, side-by-side. Through virtualization software, university CIOs can therefore ensure that processing power on each server d'esn’t go to waste.

Consider the situation at the University of Missouri-Rolla, which deployed VMware on Dell servers as part of a strategy to consolidate systems, according to Brian Buege, director of networks and computing systems at the school. The university replaced 65 servers— some of which had 5 percent utilization rates—with nine Dell PowerEdge servers running VMware. The project freed up one-third of the university’s server space in the data center, and the nine new servers have 40 to 50 percent utilization rates. In other words, the university leverages VMware to complete far more tasks with far less hardware.