Data Center Move to Affect Technology Services
July 2, 2009
As Georgetown prepares to migrate its 100-plus servers to a new, state-of-the-art data center in Laurel, Md., many applications and services, including GUMail and university Web sites, will be unavailable to users during three successive weekends in July.
Although some services will be down during those weekends, the university will have a secure and sustainable location for its servers once the migration is complete.
The new data center will replace one currently maintained by University Information Services (UIS) in Poulton Hall. That data center has been in use since the university began using servers in 1983, but it lacks the expansion capability to maintain and support Georgetown’s growing technology needs. The university also maintains a backup and disaster recovery data center in Loudon County, Va.
“About 18 months ago, we hit capacity with power capabilities (in Poulton Hall). If we hadn’t moved the data center, we couldn’t bring even one more server online,” explains Beth Ann Bergsmark, director of academic and information technology services in UIS. “The only way to bring in additional power would have required a substantial renovation to the building, which would not have made sense financially.”
