ITS Infrastructure Services
Bill Wrobleski (wrob@hawaii.edu)
Director, Technology Infrastructure
Goals
• ITS would like to provide a set of “for fee” infrastructure
services that meet the needs of departments and researchers
• Ideally these services would:
o Allow consumers to benefit from the relatively robust infrastructure
that ITS uses to run the University’s enterprise systems
o Save you time and energy, so your effort can be focused as much as
possible on your mission-specific work (rather than on running
infrastructure)
Challenges
• What services and features are most important to the UH
community?
• What is the right balance between features and cost in our
services?
• We need to automate provisioning, de-provisioning, and
billing
• Leverage existing staff to provide services
Service Level
• We’re trying to establish a single SLA for each service, rather
than individual agreements with each customer
• We want to give plenty of advance warning when rates may
change
• We usually bill annually on first day of the month of service
activation
• We want to gradually improve services over time
Virtual Servers
• Run your Linux or Windows
systems on ITS’ virtual server
infrastructure
• Base server
o $280 for 1 CPU, 4 GB RAM and 75
GB of Disk
• Expansion
o
o
o
o
$170 per CPU
$11 per GB of RAM
$0.80 per GB of “Performance” disk
$0.13 per GB of “Value” disk
(All prices are per year)
ITS Storage Tiers
Tier
Name
Description
Price
0
Parallel
Scratch
Lustre file system.
Only used on HPC system.
N/A
Solid State
Very high performance.
Used for high transaction enterprise DBs.
Performance
SAS-based.
Used with transactional databases.
Value
SATA-based.
Most economical option.
1
2
3
(Included in HPC rates)
N/A
(Enterprise systems only)
$0.80 / GB / Year
(Available in 100 GB increments)
$0.13 / GB / Year
(Available in 500 GB increments)
About Virtual Servers
• MS Windows and most popular Linux distributions are
supported (licensing for RHEL and Windows is covered
as part of the price)
• MacOS is not supported
• As your needs change, you can add or remove CPUs and
RAM to your virtual servers
• Back-up services are available
Co-Location
• Physical support for your
computing equipment in an ITS
data center
• IT Center
o $125 per rack unit per year or
$3700 per cabinet per year
• Keller Hall
o $3300 per cabinet per year
About Co-Location
• We’ve developed a three-meeting planning process to collect
information and prepare for your move
• Power is not currently included in our rates; it may need to be
added in the future if UH changes funding model for power
• Co-located servers can be on the same network as virtual servers
• Operators on site 24x7x365. They can provide physical access to
your equipment and do some “remote hands” work on your
behalf
Value Storage
• Its name comes from our goal to
provide moderately performing,
large scale, inexpensive storage
• $130 for 1 TB for 1 year
• July: HPC users
o SFTP & Globus from HPC cluster
• Early Fall: Other users
o SMB/CIFS, SFTP, & Globus Online
About Value Storage
• We currently have .5 PB of storage in our environment and
will expand to approximately .9 PB later this year
• We will offer the ability to have a replica of storage at a
second site (DRFortress) for disaster recovery purposes
• Initially will be tightly coupled with HPC environment, but
later this year will be available separately
Backup
• For our VM service and our Value Storage service, we are finding
that offering backup capabilities is costly so we’ve made it
optional
• We are offering backup as an optional part of the VM service, but
are only offering an off-site replica as part of the stand alone
Value Storage service
o “Backup” … traditional back up software and includes daily
incremental backups and a weekly full backup
o “Replica” … a single real time copy of data at a second location
Future Services?
• Are there other services you think ITS should offer?
• Are there features you would like to see added to existing
services?
• Are there any barriers that keep you from using these
services that we can help lower?
Ordering
• See www.hawaii.edu/its/ for
more information
• Contact itsdc@hawaii.edu to
order