Service Owner: Andrew Johnson
NIU’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) provides and supports a variety of hosting and management options for virtual server environments.
Virtualization allows multiple and independent virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server. Currently managing more than 1,000 VM’s, DoIT has dramatically lessened the cost of cooling systems and network infrastructure while saving additional space in our data centers. Moreover, these VM’s can be configured and delivered at a fraction of the time it would take to quote, purchase, and install a physical server.
At NIU, RAM and CPU can easily be scaled up or down for anticipated increases or decreases in use throughout the year. Popular cloud-hosting services like Amazon and Microsoft currently do not include support or backups in their advertised monthly fees, making the DoIT offering more than cost-competitive. DoIT support includes:
Option | Rate | Request |
---|---|---|
OneDrive for individual and shared drives: 1TB | no charge | auto-provisioned for current faculty, staff, and students |
Network Attached Storage for shared drives: 25GB blocks | $1.00/25GB/month | Submit request at it.niu.edu |
Option | Rate | Request |
---|---|---|
Option 1: Version Control | File storage and backups on a single storage array, and by itself does not protect against a catastrophic array or data center failure. It is instead designed to work with your existing departmental data copies as part of a full 3-2-1 strategy. | Submit request at it.niu.edu |
Option 2: Geo-Redundancy | Files and single snapshots for 30 days on a primary and secondary NAS environment. This guards against a catastrophic environmental failure in one of the data centers but only allows for data retrieval within a 30-day period. | |
Option 3: True Backup | File storage and backups on a primary NAS with files, nightly |