Boyd Data Center Hosting

More and more UGA colleges, departments and administrative units are hosting their servers that contain critical systems and data in the Boyd Data Center. The center was renovated in 2006 to include a 4,300 square foot addition (for a total of 16,000 sq ft) and is supported by an enterprise class generator, remote camera monitoring, secure card access, 2 commercial UPS units, and a gas fire-suppression system. This expansion and renovation has allowed EITS to offer data center services to UGA colleges, departments and administrative units to host their servers that contain vital systems and data. Hosting your mission-critical systems in the Boyd Data Center provides peace of mind for securing your crucial data.

In addition to the critical centrally supported UGA servers and systems - such as the student and financial information systems, eLearning Commons, MyUGA (the UGA Portal), the main campus Web server, networking and telecommunication systems - the Boyd Data Center also hosts:

• the financial and student information systems for the University System of Georgia
• critical systems for the UGA Georgia Advanced Computing Resource Center (GACRC)
• critical systems for the UGA Office of Undergraduate Admissions
• critical systems for the UGA Health Center

Hosting your important systems in the Boyd Data Center provides peace of mind for securing your crucial data.

Sensitive Information Hard Drive and Backup Media Destruction

As State and Federal regulations have become more stringent around the disposal of electronic media that may contain sensitive information, the ability to insure proper destruction of this media has grown in importance. The Boyd Data Center is pleased to support this life cycle end of sensitive information storage media with a new destruction service.

The process is easy to complete and inexpensive. Complete data destruction form. Bring the media and the form to the Boyd Data Center. Staff will register the receipt of the media and within 5 to 7 business days you will be emailed a certificate of destruction.

If you would like to utilize this service, please contact Chris Fleming at cfleming@uga.edu or 706-542-0189.

Production Machine standards

This document is not intended to endorse a particular vendor or model, but instead to suggest guidelines (which may be endorsed as "requirements") for equipment suitable for Data Center deployment.

1. "Server class" equipment (reputable vendor, no retired desktops, etc).
2. Rack mountable, unless desktop model is required for specific application.
3. Redundant (n+1) power supplies.
4. Preferred rack installation is to connect 1/2 of the PDUs in a rack to each of two independent circuits of sufficient capacity. One power supply is then connected to each of the two (or nx2) PDUs so that each server is powered by two independent circuits. Servers installed in this fashion will continue to run if power to one of the two circuits is lost.
5. Servers should be connected for onsite and out of band management, either to a rack mounted KVM for those OS’s that require it, or through the use of LOM or serial connection to terminal servers.
6. Disk failure should be mitigated through the use of locally attached hardware RAID or through redundant connections to IP or SAN-based mass storage. Critical services should be equipped with redundant pathing to storage (i.e., two HBAs connected to separate ports on the SAN fabric). RAID arrays should have designated hot spares.