The development of the central IT services at the University of Pécs
Nagy Ders
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Pécsi Tudományegyetem
The presentation provides an overview of how the central IT services have developed over the last 10 years at the University of Pécs. In the early 2000s, independent servers were scrappy and their performance was inadequate; minimal services were offered centrally for the whole University and the smaller units. Human services were available only during work hours offered by a few employees. At the same time, the clinical center of the University created their own “central” IT organization using separate hardware infrastructure and services.
After continuous development, by the second third of the last decade, the hardware infrastructure was expanded with such elements like SAN based storage and 10Gb bandwidth on the core network. In parallel with the improvement of the hardware infrastructure the services also developed. In the clinical area an e-health systems was deployed with its own hardware infrastructure financed by the EU in the HEFOP 4.4 program, whereas the central services shifted from Novell based systems to Microsoft based systems.
On 1st January, 2009 the IT Department was established by integrating the central IT organization of the University with the clinical area IT organization. In the first phase only human resources were merged; the integration of the hardware infrastructure and the services started at the beginning of 2010. The hardware infrastructure got expanded with new, high performance storage systems and servers VMware based virtualization technology, with the financial support of another EU program. After slow but effective work nowadays most of the central services run in this virtualized system on 15 servers with more than 1 TB memory, 70 CPU core, and 30 TB data in one place.
Presently, we are planning a new phase of future expansion in this environment with higher availability, more memory and CPU resources and much higher data redundancy. This development will allow us to expand the number of users of the central services (like email, file service, web hosting, etc.) and to create new services.