University Takes Lead in Systemwide Shift to Shrewsbury Facility

Data Center Optimization project
Now that the university's data center has moved to a state-of-the-art facility in Shrewsbury, Nick Siakotos, left, Steve Athanas and the IT department won't have to worry about outages in the Olsen Hall basement.

12/02/2015
By Ed Brennen

A little Saturday evening snowstorm wasn’t going to stop Steve Athanas, director of platforms and systems engineering for Information Technology, from taking his wife out for Valentine’s Day dinner.

In fact, their babysitter had just arrived when Athanas got the phone call: A burst pipe at Olsen Hall had flooded the basement, causing an electrical transformer to blow and bringing down all 300 servers housed in the campus data center. Even worse, the leaking water was now threatening to destroy the hardware responsible for all information technology on campus, including university email, voicemail and web applications.

So Athanas hopped in his car and drove through the blizzard to Olsen, where he and Senior IT Systems Engineer Nick Siakotos assessed the damage.

Luckily, water wasn’t yet seeping into the servers and Athanas and Siakotos were able to restore the data center with minimal interruption. “We very easily could have been down for days — or weeks,” Athanas recalls.

It wasn’t the first close call at the aging campus data center, but university leadership was more determined than ever to make sure it would be the last. 

So the UMass Data Center Optimization project, a systemwide plan launched in 2013 that calls for the Lowell, Boston, Dartmouth and Medical School campuses to move their data centers under one roof to a state-of-the-art facility in Shrewsbury, became a top priority for the IT department.

“It was a day of reckoning,” Chief Information Officer Michael Cipriano says of last February’s outage, one of at least a half-dozen to hit the data center in recent memory. “It committed us to knowing that we were on the right path with the DCO project.”

So what are the benefits of the Data Center Optimization project? For UMass Lowell, it means students, faculty and staff can count on a more reliable platform for everything from the uml.edu website to the HVAC controls of campus buildings — all housed in a top-tier facility (managed and maintained by the UMass Medical School) with proper levels of backup. 

It also means the university won’t have to spend nearly $250,000 a year maintaining the Olsen data center, which may now be converted into academic space, and it streamlines the work of IT system engineers like Siakotos.

“The project allows the IT department to focus on strategic initiatives that make the campus more competitive, things like vLabs, Microsoft Office Suite for students and Salesforce,” Athanas says.

For the UMass system, meanwhile, it addresses the strategic priority of reducing and optimizing the amount of hardware, software, space and energy utilized across the five campuses.

Virtual Reality

If you’re wondering whether IT services will be interrupted or slowed while the data center moves 35 miles south to Shrewsbury, there’s good news: The move is already 81 percent complete.

“We’ve been working on this for two months and it’s been uneventful, which it should be,” says Cipriano, who praised the work of his entire team, particularly Siakotos. “We’re quite pleased with the first step. I couldn’t be happier.”

Of course, moving to the Shrewsbury data center didn’t mean loading all 300 servers into trucks and physically relocating them. Instead, thanks to the university’s commitment to (http://www.uml.edu/News/stories/2013/vLabs.aspx) transitioning all servers to virtual servers over the past five years, it meant compressing the workload being handled by virtual machines (VMs) here on campus and copying it into the DCO cloud in Shrewsbury.

“Because we are in the enviable spot of being the most virtualized UMass campus, we were ahead of the curve in that we were able to move that up into the Shrewsbury cloud reasonably easily and very, very quickly,” Athanas says.

Since the university filled its allotted quadrant of space in Shrewsbury so quickly, the only workload remaining in Olsen at the moment is email and Echo360 lecture capturing. The IT department’s goal is to move those to separate clouds within the next six months.

Network News

One barrier in moving to Shrewsbury was the lack of a network with the necessary speed and bandwidth to keep data running smoothly between the two locations. That was solved last spring with the creation of UMassNet, a network loop linking all UMass campuses with 10 gigabits of connectivity. 

With a reliable network in place, Cipriano says the university volunteered to be the first to make the virtual move to Shrewsbury.

“UMass Lowell not only took a lead role, but we’ve actually been part of the whole design process,” he says. “This wasn’t a case where it was built and we just had to move things there. It’s been a yearlong project to get it straight so when we did move it would be flawless.”

UMass Amherst, which is building its own new data center, is the only campus that won’t move to Shrewsbury. Instead, the Amherst and Shrewsbury data centers will serve as backups to one another “just in case of pure disaster,” Cipriano says.

And while most students, faculty and staff using an IT application will never know or care what the room temperature is in the data center or how many backup generators it has, the bottom line is the Data Center Optimization project will reduce overhead costs for the university.

It will also mean that Athanas, or any of his colleagues, won’t have to miss another Valentine’s Day dinner.