My EDTEC 685 class at Ball State took an interesting (for me, at least) field trip yesterday: we toured the Univeristy Computing Services (UCS) server farm in the Robert Bell building.
Couple of things I noted:
- While the "standard" is a 1U HP/Compaq server, Sun, IBM, and Apple hardware each shared some of the rackspace.
- UCS is starting to value internal diskspace in a 1U over external RAID arrays.
- The University currently has 30Mb/s of Internet connectivity (shown at the bottom of the Network Specification page), although their network diagram shows less. Our guide mentioned about 100Mb/s, which would probably represent the additional consideration of their two 45Mb/s IHETS connections. For reference, our DSL line at home is 0.5Mb/s; dialup would be 0.005Mb/s on a good day.
- There were three Akamai caching appliances on the core network.
- The 25MB student limit on webspace won't trigger any alarms until the usage passes 500MB -- usage can actually surpass even this level during the day but should be under when the watchdog script runs nightly at 3am.
- Web and email accounts with BSU will remain active for 6 months after you finish attending, and up to a year-and-a-half if requested.
- BSU is currently transitioning from the regular webspace (something like
www.bsu.edu/web/username) to their new iWeb servers, which will offer unique subdomains for student and staff accounts (likeusername.iweb.bsu.edu). - The server room itself has four 20-ton air conditioning units, two large uninteruptable power supplies (think semi-trailor sized batteries) that condition the power, and a diesel gen-set to handle power outages.
One other thing that I saw were co-located commercial servers. I can't remember the site directly, but some company had located their servers within BSU's network to serve up $2.50 movies-on-demand. Interesting that an .edu would host a .com.
All-in-all, a very worthwhile tour.
