Farewell to the DIT Building. The University Information and Communication Technology Management were hosted in the small pink building in Via Briamasco, close to the railway, for 15 years. A few days ago the University Data Center was moved to the technology center in “Fabio Ferrari”, in Povo.
Andrea Mongera Head of the Information and communication technology management said that “The massive migration of the University Technology and Communication Management has been challenging. The current technology facility was physically moved to the venue of the new single UniTrento Datacenter in Povo2”.
The improvement of services is the reason behind the moving. Mongera explained “There were significant problems in the technology facility located in Via Briamasco. We had suffered HW troubles, SW bugs, data recovered with difficulty. Some components - first of all the old storage system - caused bottlenecks for the performance of many of our applications”.
The server migration and the activation of services to the new University Data Center in Povo took place during the weekend, between Friday 13, March and Sunday, 15 March.
“It was a complex and delicate operation, which involved about 15 people of the Management, i.e. a large part of the University IT staff. The team had already performed preparatory technical activities during the previous days, to get ready for the proper massive migration. In this way we reduced the time required to finalise the twofold migration: the physical moving of the server and the more challenging migration of the archives and the restart of the applicative environments, with a different configuration, in the new Data Center of Povo 2. The preparation and arrangement of the location itself required over one year of work”.
This is a technology spring about to bloom and the new farmers (the IT staff) feel a mix of emotions and professional skills”.
The Data Center was arranged in the building of Povo 2 according to advanced criteria of physical and environmental safety, energy efficiency and saving, high reliability of the technology facilities (UPS, airco). The Data Center will host advanced services for research (e.g. servers for complex calculation, storage of large databanks). It will have a new broadband connection (10 Gb/s) to the research networks, implemented by GARR and Trentino Network. It is expected to grant sufficient technology space and resources for the University ICT services for the next 10 years.
The storage and the University single backup of the new Data Center is an important step in the strategy of renovation and replacement of technology and services which are at the end of their lifecycle”.