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That's the difference between "university IT" and "research computing". Those are typically two separate groups. Think of it as the difference between running t

by mbreese 10y ago

That's the difference between "university IT" and "research computing". Those are typically two separate groups. Think of it as the difference between running the IT (helpdesk, support, backups) at a tech company vs. running a cloud datacenter. You need both, and they are both "technically" IT, but they require very different skill sets. What they are talking about here is pretty standard corporate IT. I'm not sure if the outsourcing contract involves the hospital's EMR or not, but for those numbers, I'd guess not. In my experience, once you start using the terms "high performance" or "cluster" university IT starts to push the problem back on to the lab or over to research computing. If the university doesn't have a research computing group, then you have a whole lot of other issues. There are still plenty of research computing staff at UCSF. Edit: slight wording change about IT (see below)

Symbiote 10y ago
"University IT" is more than a helpdesk, and also requires services like storage, backups, networking and monitoring. It's very cost effective to host these in a university data centre. They probably get a good deal on power. The Internet connection costs a token amount at a few peering points. Petabytes of research data probably already needs a fancy backup system, adding some documents isn't going to increase the cost of that by much. There are already staff who deal with hardware.
- mbreese 10y ago
  I know this... I was just trying to make an analogy for others. (Poorly, it seems) It's the same IT structure that you'd have at any major company of the same size. And even at that scale you have good IT departments and bad ones. However, it can be rare for the University IT systems and research systems to share too much infrastructure, aside from maybe a building with common networking and power. For one thing, University IT typically supports Windows desktops and servers while research systems are by and large Linux/Unix based. They also have different security requirements. Research usually doesn't deal with PHI, and so doesn't have the same backup security concerns that IT does. In the specific case of UCSF, they already made the decision to offsite all of their business systems (I think it was because of local power costs, seismic concerns, and lack of a modern datacenter). But they still maintain some research computing onsite, but it is not centralized.
munin 10y ago
What I described is taken directly from a scenario that happened to me personally while working in a neuro-imaging lab. The lab didn't have any research computing support, neither did their department, neither did their college. The university had an IT department. The CS department had research computing support, but it was in a totally different college (and about a mile away on campus). In my story, university IT had solutions for the scenario I described. And really, their computing requirements are far from a "research computing" group. You just need to store 50 TB of data ("I forgot how to count that low?!") and have a single 8 or 16 core computer to do some number crunching. The entire setup could (and did) fit in a half rack in the neuro-imaging lab (which is what they wound up doing).

by mbreese 10y ago

Symbiote 10y ago

"University IT" is more than a helpdesk, and also requires services like storage, backups, networking and monitoring. It's very cost effective to host these in a university data centre. They probably get a good deal on power. The Internet connection costs a token amount at a few peering points. Petabytes of research data probably already needs a fancy backup system, adding some documents isn't going to increase the cost of that by much. There are already staff who deal with hardware.

mbreese 10y ago
I know this... I was just trying to make an analogy for others. (Poorly, it seems) It's the same IT structure that you'd have at any major company of the same size. And even at that scale you have good IT departments and bad ones. However, it can be rare for the University IT systems and research systems to share too much infrastructure, aside from maybe a building with common networking and power. For one thing, University IT typically supports Windows desktops and servers while research systems are by and large Linux/Unix based. They also have different security requirements. Research usually doesn't deal with PHI, and so doesn't have the same backup security concerns that IT does. In the specific case of UCSF, they already made the decision to offsite all of their business systems (I think it was because of local power costs, seismic concerns, and lack of a modern datacenter). But they still maintain some research computing onsite, but it is not centralized.

munin 10y ago

What I described is taken directly from a scenario that happened to me personally while working in a neuro-imaging lab. The lab didn't have any research computing support, neither did their department, neither did their college. The university had an IT department. The CS department had research computing support, but it was in a totally different college (and about a mile away on campus). In my story, university IT had solutions for the scenario I described. And really, their computing requirements are far from a "research computing" group. You just need to store 50 TB of data ("I forgot how to count that low?!") and have a single 8 or 16 core computer to do some number crunching. The entire setup could (and did) fit in a half rack in the neuro-imaging lab (which is what they wound up doing).