University of Minnesota
Office of Information Technology (OIT)
www.oit.umn.edu
oitweb@umn.edu

Office of Information Technology (OIT)


Server Hosting

Photograph of CERN server stacks

Host departmental applications, data, & servers


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.

Benefits of OIT Hosting Services

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.

Choosing a Hosting Service

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.

Purchasing a Physical Server

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.

  1. Central Services & Systems

    Choose an existing common good service that could support your need (i.e., using University Gmail rather than hosting your own mail server).

  2. Web Hosting

    If you just need web hosting, choose our common good web hosting service.

  3. Virtual Server Hosting

    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.

  1. Physical Server Hosting

    If your physical departmental server cannot be hosted by our virtual hosting service, we provide common good physical server hosting.

  2. Tenant 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.

  3. Monitoring

    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.