Hummingbird Moves to its New Home

February 08, 2023

img_4641.jpgThe campus, in partnership with Information Technology Services (ITS), has embarked on a multi-year Data Center and Cloud Strategy initiative to evolve the university’s compute and data storage infrastructure and address the physical and environmental challenges that our campus faces. We are excited to announce a successful milestone in support of this initiative!

Research Computing Cluster Moves to Washington

On Dec. 19, 2022, ITS staff members, Jeffrey Weekley, Ramon Berger, Rion Parsons, and Kirk Loftis took a roadtrip to UCSC’s colocation facility in Quincy, Washington to relocate our campus’s research computing cluster, Hummingbird. After carefully disassembling the equipment in Santa Cruz, it was shipped to the new location at NTT DATA Western Technology Center. Computer equipment migration requires careful preparation and thanks to meticulous planning, the ITS team did a fantastic job of unpacking and reinstalling Humminbird into its new home with little downtime and hardly any service interruption to ensure a seamless transition. They couldn’t have done it without the support of fellow ITS staff, Josh Sonstroem, Hart Hancock, Doug Niven, Jocelyn Ferialdi, Nigel Jacques, and George Peek.

Addressing the growing demand for research computing and data services

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Hummingbird went live in its new Washington location on Friday, January 6. The addition of the new colocation facility expands our ability to improve our data center capabilities and addresses the growing demand for hosting research computing and data services.

The successful move of Hummingbird is a great model for future colocation endeavors. 

“This is the first complex system that we migrated from campus to the colocation and the process went really smoothly,” said Jocelyn Ferialdi, ITS Data Center Manager. 

“I felt like everyone in ITS really came together and knocked it out of the park!” said Jeffrey Weekley, Research IT Director.

For more information about the Data Center & Cloud Strategy project, please visit this web address: https://its.ucsc.edu/projects/data-center.html