What's driving the change

 

The challenges facing information technology needs in Higher Education are growing exponentially. Historically, facility support has largely led to multiple data centers serving Academic, Administrative, and other distributed Departmental and Research needs. The very nature of the academic mission led to this diversity of facilities, generally housed in buildings where competition for space to support that mission made expansion or remediation of data centers difficult and costly.  Additionally, the distributed nature of older facilities keeps operating costs high and limits the adoption of new technologies.

  

Some of the many challenges and observations that Colleges and Universities are facing includes:

 

• Facility budgets under pressure and have difficulty competing for the capital and operating expense budgets needed to support a growing, diverse demand.

 

• Growing costs for third-party services to help manage and operate older data centers.

 

• Existing data centers, those 10 to 20 years old, that are part of a potential consolidation plan, do not have a clear path to a solution that is institution-wide in consensus for change. Operating costs continue to be high due to older design and energy efficiency capabilities.

 

• Out of date governance and operations procedures impede rapid deployment or do not enforce standards needed to safely operate all types of data centers.

  

• Moving workloads to the Cloud or to Software as a Service is often done in an uneven fashion and do not take advantage of good decision analysis for their use. Many times, these decisions are done at the departmental or application level and do not take advantage of the potential for total institution scale. Expected cost savings may not be achieved or may not take into consideration the collateral effect on cost to the data centers that supported the migrated workloads.

 

• “Ghost IT and Cloud” use (casual, unauthorized, or unknown use of cloud or on-premise use of space for IT assets) represents a cost and risk that can be difficult to capture but can be critical to understanding total costs.

 

• The need for High-Performance Computing (HPC) has expanded beyond the traditional mathematics and scientific communities. The need to support “Big Data” is a growing part of every curriculum and research area. HPC demands higher density capabilities for power and cooling that most existing Higher Ed infrastructure cannot accommodate.

 

• Alternative data center sourcing strategies need to be seriously considered.  Often the use of Colocation facilities that might not be in close physical proximity to the institution are difficult to gain consensus for even though considerable cost savings may attach, and there isn’t a critical, confirmed, requirement for daily on-site access.

 ​

• Ability to cope with special circumstances such as the Covid 19 lockdown:

  • Older on-premise data centers were not designed to be low touch or lights out and rely on facility and IT personnel for daily operations.

  • The requirement to support online delivery of courseware is challenging network, compute, and storage capabilities. 

  • Increased need for media production facilities for distance learning.

  • Preventing “guard down” security attacks due to volume of network activity or launching of new services.

​

How can you meet these requirements?

​

Solutions to data center facility and associated challenges are complex but they can be faced through focused campus-wide analysis and short/long term master planning.  It is common to react with tactical solutions that are not useful in the long term. A Data Center Strategy meets the objectives of addressing the challenges detailed above by developing solution scenarios that vary in cost, time, complexity, and risk to implement. It starts with a rapid assessment of your current environment and pivots to the needs of your future state IT, application, and cloud / SaaS architectures. It should also include an assessment of the network infrastructure inclusive of bandwidth requirements to match any future state changes.

 

The process itself helps to gain consensus through the inclusion of multiple communities of interest. It helps build a plan that is focused on coping with change rather than being a static solution. It addresses capital and operating costs as equal in importance to the technical solution. It develops total cost of ownership forecasts for each solution scenario to understand the impact of technology, implementation, and growth in scale of any plan.

 

What services are included?

 

 

• Present state data center analysis including IT and network architectures, application portfolio and opex/capex budgets.

 

• Evaluation of the technical infrastructures of each legacy data center to understand capacity, resiliency, remediation, and growth potential. Cost and associated risks are used as measures for determining if any legacy facilities are good candidates for modernization. This might include any off-premise data center including the use of exiting colocation deployments and cloud / SaaS environments.

​​

• Workshops with the academic. administrative and research communities to understand:

  • Future state planning. 

  • Key data center technical requirements.

  • Application portfolio needs and growth.

  • Security and compliance issues.

  • Financial guidelines for developing solution scenario opex and capex budgets.

​

• Development of the future state through:

  • Modeling of IT requirements.

  • Developing the right mix of on-premise and colocation data center space, use of cloud and SaaS.

  • Creating alternate strategies with associated costs.

  • Analyzing best-phased implementation timelines and associated risks.

  • Develop a set of presentations to assist in the dissemination of results and report outs to gain both technical, financial, and senior-level approval.

 

 

Case Studies

​