CCS has upgraded its data centre, a major undertaking that has set our campus clients up for increased capacity, improved network security, and better performance.

The next generation data centre houses 16 servers, 32 CPUs, 448 cores, and more than 8 TB of memory

The University of Guelph data centre is the largest IT facility on campus, with hundreds of TB of storage and hundreds of servers. A major initiative this year was to upgrade the hardware in this facility to improve compute capacity, increase network capacity and security, and optimize performance. The result is the next generation data centre.

This project, in partnership with the Network Infrastructure team, was of high importance for the Systems Management team, as the previous environment is aging and close to reaching the end of its useful life. Older hardware will run modern software slowly and the risk of unscheduled and extended downtime is greater as vendors drop support and spare parts become increasingly difficult to obtain.

In addition to creating a more reliable environment, the upgrade provides many other benefits:

• improved performance of our primary storage with the introduction of the new all-flash array and a second hybrid array;
• a safer and more secure campus network, as a result of adopting Cisco ACI network technology; and
• the ability for the Systems Management Team to service larger servers (in the past the team has had to run servers with large memory footprints on hardware, however, in this new environment those servers can be implemented as virtual servers).

With its leading-edge infrastructure, the next generation data centre has pushed our service delivery to the next level, allowing CCS to provide safer, more efficient, and more reliable service to clients.