(Joel Iverson, ITS Communications)
As the landscape for research and high performance computing keeps growing, ITS support is critical to the success of the university’s data intensive research efforts.
The demand for compute, storage, and faster network connectivity has challenged ITS to evaluate its data center strategy in a more holistic way. Rather than incur the high costs of a brick and mortar facility to meet these demands, ITS leadership has recommended to campus leaders a more cost effective option of leveraging existing data center assets and identifying opportunities to move some services to the cloud.
Although details are still being finalized, the current expected timeline for moving ITS systems is three years. Planning is underway to refurbish the tier 2 Michigan Academic Computing Center (MACC), including an additional 1 megawatt of power for high-performance research computing. ITS Administrative Systems will also transition from the MACC to the cloud or the tier 3 North Campus Data Center (currently managed by HITS), or a combination of both.
Infrastructure teams have started to validate inventories and capture the technical dependencies within and across services. More teams across ITS will join this effort to help prepare for upgrades and finalize a migration timeline. Stay tuned for updates on this important effort.
