ECU's ITCS department receives national recognition

The Computerworld Honors Program has named ECU's Information Technology and Computing Services (ITCS) program 2008 Laureate for their work with virtualization software in ECU's data center.

ITCS received the award in the form of a medal in a noon 0ceremony at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington D.C. on June 2.

Due to the increasing size of the student body and the increasing need for data storage and application hosting, ITCS was faced with the prospect of constructing a new data center to house the servers necessary to meet that demand between a $26 and $30 million project.

Instead, ITCS used virtualization software called VMware that allowed them to create up to 12 virtual servers on each physical server. By doing so, they consolidated the servers down to 50 percent of the physical units used previously. They also consolidated data storage in the same way. As a result, the data center is still in its current facility.

According to Joe Norris, Chief Technology Officer, ECU is the state leader in virtualization.

"Only NC State has started to work with virtualization," said Norris, "And we started three years ago."

In contrast, UNC-Greensboro is planning to construct a new data center; the estimated cost for which is around $60 million. Most of the reason that data centers are so expensive is because of the specialized cooling and air-circulation equipment that large numbers of servers require.

Because virtualization allows organizations to use fewer servers, it has other advantages as well.

"Virtualization is definitely green, because you're saving on power and cooling for all those servers," Norris said.

The Computerworld Honors Program, established in 1988 by Computerworld, an IT magazine, seeks to recognize IT excellence. The heads of top companies in the technology industry, such as Dell, Intel, IBM, Yahoo!, Sprint and Microsoft nominate "innovative users of technology," both domestic and international. ECU was nominated by EMC Corp.

After being nominated, the organization submits a case study to the Honors Program, which is reviewed by independent judges. If the case study is approved, the Honors Program catalogues it and "Laureate" status is granted to the organization, according to the Computerworld Honors Program's nominee guide.

The Honors Program recognizes organizations in 10 categories, including healthcare, arts and entertainment, business, finance and government. ECU was recognized in the "Education and Academia" category.

According to Norris, ITCS' goal for the future is determining which of its services it can offer on a mobile platform. Since virtually all students have cell phones, ITCS is looking at a way to implement elements from Blackboard or Banner so students can access it from their phones.

"For example, imagine your professor posts your grades to Blackboard, which then sends a message to your phone: 'Grades for PSYC 1050 have been posted- you got a B,'" said Norris.

Other potential applications include registration, emergency services and even being able to see how far away the bus is.

"You wouldn't need the newest phone to use these services," Norris said, "We're working to make it work on older phones as well."

All potential services would use the existing PirateID system for logging in, but would not be mandatory.

"Students could subscribe to it or choose not to, we don't want to ruin anyone's text-messaging plan," said Norris.

This writer can be contacted at news@theeastcarolinian.com