Server Hosting and Administration

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 within one week of receiving the customer request: 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:

  • OS support (Windows or Linux) including license fees, upgrades and security patches.
  • Nightly backups with restores available for 30 days.
  • Hardware maintenance and monitoring 24 / 7 / 365 with alerts and optional reports emailed to customers.
  • High-speed low latency interconnections to enterprise-grade storage and the NIU network with bandwidth speeds up to 1Gbps.
  • Network connection fees.
  • Virus protection.
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