One community college system stages a yearly event to help member institutions hone their emergency-management skills.
A Catholic liberal arts college in Vermont is significantly reducing the number of its physical servers by going virtual. The effort is not only paying off in energy efficiency and cost savings, but it's also allowed the college to establish a second data center dedicated to disaster recovery.
In a multi-phase project that started in January 2010, Pennsylvania State University has done an analysis of the emergency preparedness and response capabilities of 21 campuses in its system. This initiative is a follow-up to a university-wide assessment done in 2009.
At the CT2010 Executive Summit on July 19 in Boston, the morning session was dedicated to a scan of the IT environment in higher education; the afternoon would focus participants’ attention on leadership issues. Discussions suggested that the trend to exclude top IT leaders from the president’s inner strategic circle was premature and perhaps ill advised. And that CIOs who represent their jobs as primarily or exclusively maintaining IT operations may be missing significant national trends and changes.
Purdue University has chosen HP's Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) to expand and expedite its ability to deliver research projects. Earlier this year, the institution began rolling out a strategic plan for IT that included a focus on improving operations.
South Carolina's Coastal Carolina University uses technology to steel its IT infrastructure against weather emergencies.
Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion has gone public with its deployment of storage equipment from Quantum to replace a system using a Dell tape library and Symantec NetBackup version 4.5. The newer setup uses a DXi7500 Express disk-based system with 9 TB of disk space, along with a Quantum Scalar i500 tape library.
Students at Auburn University are involved in an ambitious geospatial mapping project of infrastructure elements of coastal Alabama, that will, after a disaster such as a hurricane, offer responders a tool that will expedite recovery and reduce recovery costs by an estimated 40 percent.
The challenges of data integrity and storage on a college campus can be immense. With 30 TB (and growing) of crucial files to keep both backed up and accessible, South Carolina's Furman University is taking on those challenges using a differential process, one that cuts down on the duration of backups and saves on administrative load.
Cornell University in Ithaca, NY expects to expand usage of a software utility from Laplink Software that moves programs, files, and settings from one PC to another.
