Data Centers

PCI compliance can be daunting, particularly in a university network environment. Notre Dame chose a data center within a data center approach to simplify compliance and minimize integration issues. This project includes implementing the data center, a virtual network to support point-of-sale devices, and related operational procedures.

The co-chairs of the EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CCI) Working Group provide background on the group and its acitivities in the area of higher education cyberinfrastructure.

Consolidated logging systems provide a comprehensive view of system events and simplify the review and analysis of logs. Notre Dame's system collects and analyzes logs from over 300 servers. The project overcame the technical challenges of handling large volumes of logs and transforming the raw data into meaningful information.

Some simple fixes in the data center can add hard cash to an enterprise's bottom line.

Green computing is a hot-button issue right now, but not all the ideas out there are practical for data centers.

Data center managers who championed virtualization and green computing in 2007 now face the task of delivering the benefits they promised -- something industry watchers say will be no small feat. As projects move beyond the planning phase in 2008 into broader deployment, data centers managers will need to evaluate how they're going to manage and support the new technologies without overhauling their entire infrastructure.

Today, there is much concern about the effect of our computers on the environment. In addition, the issue of power and cooling is a mounting anxiety. Rapid growth in energy costs and increasing dependency on sustainable computing increasingly require 3R (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) endeavors in our information technology operations and management of our information technology resources.
From the viewpoints of environmental preservation and resource utilization, managing e-waste and eco-computing is becoming an important target for higher education institutions worldwide. Furthermore, tackling eco-friendly solutions on campus environments takes a group effort and starts at the Information Technology division. In this report we review major eco-responsible initiatives and detail moves towards more efficient and sustainable technologies. In addition, we look at ways to assess the environmental impact of our data centers and eco-friendly solutions.

For most companies, the movement is about saving money, not the environment. But it's getting better at both.

To meet the power and cooling demands of modern computing and network equipment, IT organizations will either need to retrofit or relocate their data centers. This session will focus on the project and constraints of retrofitting an operational data center at Louisiana State University and discuss some power and cooling concepts.

The evolving technologies committee is charged with identifying and monitoring evolving technologies and their impact on higher education institutions. This submission is on virtualization.