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ECU's ITCS department receives national recognition
Data storage team named Laureate by Computerworld Honors Program
Jimmy Galloway
Issue date: 6/4/08 Section: News
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ITCS received the award in the form of a medal in a noon 0ceremony at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington D.C. on June 2.
Due to the increasing size of the student body and the increasing need for data storage and application hosting, ITCS was faced with the prospect of constructing a new data center to house the servers necessary to meet that demand between a $26 and $30 million project.
Instead, ITCS used virtualization software called VMware that allowed them to create up to 12 virtual servers on each physical server. By doing so, they consolidated the servers down to 50 percent of the physical units used previously. They also consolidated data storage in the same way. As a result, the data center is still in its current facility.
According to Joe Norris, Chief Technology Officer, ECU is the state leader in virtualization.
"Only NC State has started to work with virtualization," said Norris, "And we started three years ago."
In contrast, UNC-Greensboro is planning to construct a new data center; the estimated cost for which is around $60 million. Most of the reason that data centers are so expensive is because of the specialized cooling and air-circulation equipment that large numbers of servers require.
Because virtualization allows organizations to use fewer servers, it has other advantages as well.
"Virtualization is definitely green, because you're saving on power and cooling for all those servers," Norris said.
The Computerworld Honors Program, established in 1988 by Computerworld, an IT magazine, seeks to recognize IT excellence. The heads of top companies in the technology industry, such as Dell, Intel, IBM, Yahoo!, Sprint and Microsoft nominate "innovative users of technology," both domestic and international. ECU was nominated by EMC Corp.
After being nominated, the organization submits a case study to the Honors Program, which is reviewed by independent judges. If the case study is approved, the Honors Program catalogues it and "Laureate" status is granted to the organization, according to the Computerworld Honors Program's nominee guide.
The Honors Program recognizes organizations in 10 categories, including healthcare, arts and entertainment, business, finance and government. ECU was recognized in the "Education and Academia" category.
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