PROFILES: Using NCS services in our GU community:

Survivable Web and Fatwire Services Migrated to Laurel Data Center

Over the past year, the University Information Services NCS division migrated key business applications and services from expensive third party external hosting to cost-effective internal hosting by using existing resources in the Laurel Data Center (LDC) and the Virginia Data Center (VDC). This migration was made possible by the enterprise infrastructure designed for business critical services, including monitoring, backups, redundancy, failover capabilities, and 24x7 data center supported staff.

For example, Georgetown University’s Survivable Web and Fatwire Services were originally hosted by the commercial Rackspace vendor. "Survivable Web (or Top Tier) is the main Georgetown website (www.georgetown.edu)" says Raghu Pemmaraju, Associate Director for System Management and Database Administration, adding "This was previously hosted at Rackspace, and is now hosted at LDC at significantly less cost. LDC hosting also provides more reliability and improved infrastructure."

NCS successfully migrated these important web services to the LCD/VDC in 2011. This migration project started at the beginning of the 2011 calendar year and was completed from start to finish in a little over seven months.  The migration included a three phase approach to the various components that make up all the services.  It also comprised of adding additional network ISP's for full external redundancy of services at the backup data center, VDC and the LDC.

NCS successfully built out and configured a total of 22 Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual systems with the necessary storage and database services. The systems are now hosted in the LDC and VDC on VMware ESX cluster managed by the Network and Computing Systems (NCS) team. This enabled the University to reduce approximately seventy percent of the annual cost of these services.  It was also noted that there were noticeable performance increases that includes application and publishing response. 

Benefits: