Page 19 - 2020 OIT Progress Report

LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH
As faculty and students devote more time and attention to critical research projects, reliance on fast, stable, and advanced infrastructure is even more critical. Significant changes and additions to campus infrastructure were made this year, offering new functionality, providing new measures of security, and ensuring access to core components 24/7.
UNIVERSITY DATA CENTER
The foundation of our network and server infrastructure resides in the University Data Center. A key challenge is performing routine preventative maintenance on both hardware and software to ensure performance and reliability. The initial design of the data center did not allow for continuous electrical operation, which limited the ability to perform these routine maintenance tasks without severely impacting campus operations. Due to this design, OIT personnel were required to shut down services, such as my.SMU and ManeFrame II, before maintenance was performed, then restart all services and verify connectivity and functionality.
This maintenance was typically scheduled during the evening or early morning hours and
weekends to minimize disruption to academic, administrative, and research activities. Faced with this challenge, OIT and The Office of Facilities Planning and Management were authorized to implement required equipment to eliminate
the scheduled service outage for maintenance activities. The new design now allows SMU to transfer seamlessly between a primary and secondary electrical connection. This greatly reduces the need to completely shut down services, and allows greater flexibility in scheduling preventative maintenance activities. This effort required a tremendous amount of behind the scenes coordination and effort to minimize impact to the University. The majority of the work was conducted over the 2019 Winter holiday and Spring 2020 term.
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