Campus servers are taking up less space, storing more

By Casey Jones

At any modern college or business, most of the computers and other systems are wired through a system of servers linking everything together.

Hutchinson Community College is no different in this matter and it is continually upgrading.

In the Office Tech building, compact blade chassis cabinets are housed containing all of the servers maintaining the campus.

The framework holds the physical servers, and currently has a capacity of about 40 terabytes (a terabyte is equal to one trillion bytes of information.)

Interestingly enough, they still have room for many more servers.

The rotation on these chassis is a four-year cycle with two getting replaced every two years.

The next replacement is scheduled for this May, meaning that both are getting close to two years old.

The others are close to four years old.

To put that into perspective, desktop computers from that time could only house close to 500 GB storage, and it was difficult to run out of hard disk space back then.

However, HCC houses a single system of HP Business Class servers dwarfing this in size, and close to half of it is filled.

All of the information pertaining to the college is backed up nightly, and is constantly being maintained by the maintenance staff, stored in one room with only a relatively small space dedicated to it.

In 2011, the server didn’t even have its own building; it was just tucked away in a room in Lockman Hall.

At that time there were only 32 servers.

Now there are eight compact blade chassis that can hold hundreds of servers with more power efficiency and less of a fire hazard.

In such a small time, HCC’s information technology has taken a huge leap forward.

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