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Communications Building Data Center Migration

Project Overview

Information Technology Services has developed the Communications Building Data Center Migration project to evolve the university’s compute and data storage capabilities and services to meet the needs of the UCSC research, academic, and administrative communities. This project aims to relocate services/servers located in the Communications Building on campus to better facilities. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Please use this form to submit additional questions that you think would benefit from being addressed in the FAQs.

This project is aligned with UCSC’s overarching campus goals:

  • Improve efficiency, effectiveness, and resilience
  • Increase UC Santa Cruz’s research profile and impact

Project goals and objectives

  • Build resiliency with redundant power and connectivity.
  • Give back data center space to campus by consolidating systems or storage in modernized data centers on campus, and various off-campus locations
  • Compliance with industry-standard guidelines can help us scale infrastructure and systems with lean support models.
  • Save costs by minimizing distributed cooling, racks, and networking
  • Meet decarbonization goals for the power supply
  • Improve security monitoring and controls
  • Improve Disaster Recovery by mitigating disaster risks identified.
  • Evolve the network at various data center locations to fully support a variety of requirements including those for academic research and instructional systems (example: Science DMZ, high-performance/ high-speed, and low-latency requirements).

Project Approach

Project goals will be achieved through a phased multifaceted approach with three phases that embrace various options including campus consolidation, relocating/migrating equipment based on the research, instructional, or enterprise workload needs with the goal of optimizing performance, redundancy, and disaster recovery for each system.

Phase 1 Timeline & Project Milestones

Project Initiation

December 2021 An alternative Colocation facility service became available to UCSC campus (NTT DATA Western Technology Center in Quincy, Washington)
January 2022 First campus server hosted at the collocation facility

Discovery (Oct 2022 - Feb 2023)

Oct 2022 - Feb 2023 Discovery and assessment of systems within specific data centers targeted for phase 1
of the data center Strategy project. The project team initiated the gathering of
Use cases and requirements.

Planning (March - June 2023)

Mar 2023 - June 2023 Assessment of specific campus data centers, and systems hosted within
these data centers for migration readiness.
March 2023 - June 2023 Migration and timeline planning for applicable ITS Research and Academic systems in the Communications Building Data Center and Westside research park.

Implementation Phases

Phase 1:
FY2023-24 to
FY2024-25
- Initiate migration of various ITS, instructional, academic, and administrative unit assets based on migration readiness of each system.
- Consolidate data center footprint through virtualization and migration to more modernized data centers off campus.


Phase 2: 
FY2025-26 to FY2026-27
- Continued consolidation of UCSC on-campus data center footprint.
- Continued migration of various ITS, academic, instructional, and administrative unit
assets from the UCSC campus data centers to Virtual Clouds or colocation facilities.

News

Related resources

Project Sponsors 

  • Executive sponsor: Aisha Jackson
  • Program leadership: Byron Walker

Program team

  • Program manager: Pam Swain, ITS
  • Governance and policy: Shawn Duncan, ITS
  • ITS Divisional & Research Liaisons: Jay Olson, Hart Hancock, Angie Steele, Jeffrey Weekley, Paul Sosbee, Tania Pannabecker, Mike Nardell, Yuri Cantrell

Project Managers

  • Pam Swain
  • Jocelyn Ferialdi
  • Heather Sevedge
  • Geoff Smith
  • Stephanie Nielson
  • John Lallemand

Contact/Feedback

Reach out to Program Manager, Pam Swain, if you have any questions or feedback. 

Visit the project’s FAQs for answers to common questions about this project.