The University of Michigan's leadership and excellence in its mission of discovery, learning, teaching, societal engagement and the allied administrative services are supported by data center capacity. The U-M is confronting the challenges of ever increasing demands for computational and data storage resources, especially in service of computational and data intensive research.
Efforts to meet current and anticipated research data center needs are actively and aggressively being investigated and pursued. The time needed to acquire and prepare acceptable research data center capacity is typically two years although some quicker near term solutions are also possible. However, these quicker options are usually interim and not feasible for long term solutions.
Guiding principles for this effort include: 1) tailoring a system of data centers to actual user reliability demands, 2) consolidating distributed, under used machines into virtual machine clusters and federated research computing clusters 3) using new modular packaging technologies coming into wide spread use in the commercial world, and 4) careful outsourcing of computation loads to external provides including multi-university ("above the campus") consortia.
Primary data centers existing at the University of Michigan now are:
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October 19, 2009