SMTP
ITS has been looking into replacing the hardware supporting our mail delivery system for the University. Currently their are 5 inbound servers, two outbound servers, and two auto-responder servers running on physical hardware. ITS will consolidate these physical boxes into virtual machines as a result of this replacement effort. ITS successfully completed a POC and is now looking into a small testing initiative to continue this effort.
Exchange Consolidation
ITS is consolidating the VUMC and the University exchange environments in an effort to reduce overhead eliminate unnecessary redundancies. The effort will involve deploying a new exchange 2007 environment with an email archive offering, and systematically migrate users from University and VUMC to it. This month ITS successfully provided an architecture for storage solution as well as the email archive platform from concept to vendor, and has begun initiating purchasing processes for both.
BlueARC Upgrade
This month ITS expanded the capacity of the HPC NAS environment by 35TB of RAW capacity. This enables ITS to take on additional customers in need of HPC NAS space for research endeavors. However, in order to facilitate the new request, ITS has had to perform a number of maintenance task involving moving file systems around to free contiguous space on storage frames. ITS has nearly completed all maintenance tasks needed and will be complete in the coming week or two.
Virtual Desktop
ITS has been evaluating the plausibly and functionality of a Virtual Desktop Offering to the community to assist in lowering TCO of desktop computing resourced. This month ITS successfully created a POC environment using OS and application streaming to alleviate unnecessary computing and storage resources from being oversubscribed, but underutilized.