In the "new normal" of declining budgets in higher education, University faculty and staff need to carefully evaluate hosting methods for applications, data, and servers. Choosing appropriately is a crucial component of departmental stewardship.
A recent study found there are over 4,000 servers in 125 buildings at the University. This is expensive, inefficient, and unsustainable, since the total cost of ownership (TCO) of hosting a departmental physical server can be nearly seven times the cost of OIT hosting the same server in our virtual environment. It is also a risky way to host critical operational and research data if the server is not in a secure, environmentally-controlled data center.
If you are planning to purchase a new server for your department or are interested in OIT hosting your applications, data, and server(s), please follow the steps below until you find an appropriate hosting method. The options are listed in order of preference for the University; the first is the most economical and the last the most expensive.
If services 1–4 below will not work for your application workload and you need to purchase physical servers for OIT Tenant Server Hosting or to be housed in your own department, please purchase a standard U of MN server through UMart to receive competitive pricing and to qualify for hosting in an OIT Data Center or future OIT system administration support.
Choose an existing common good service that could support your need (i.e., using University Gmail rather than hosting your own mail server).
If you just need web hosting, choose our common good web hosting service.
If there is no other existing common good service to meet your need, choose our common good Windows or Linux virtual server hosting service. The University's goal is to have 75 percent of all University servers hosted in this virtual environment.
If your physical departmental server cannot be hosted by our virtual hosting service, we provide common good physical server hosting.
Finally, if your server cannot be hosted by our virtual service, we provide common good physical server hosting in our data center environment for your server hardware as long as it meets University equipment standards.
Customers of our Virtual Server Hosting and Physical Server Hosting services can use our Monitoring service to collect data corresponding to target status or conditions for applications managed on OIT systems.
