With a new year underway, UCR Information Technology Solutions (ITS) is pleased to announce that Project Genesis is making significant headway towards project completion.
ITS began the process of moving critical data center infrastructure to a new leading-edge facility in the summer of 2019. The decision was prompted by UCR Information Technology Executive Governance (ITEG) after several campus power outages took down critical systems needed for campus operations, and concerns mounted regarding aging infrastructure in UCR’s existing data center, which supports core campus systems and applications.
“Project Genesis will improve data management that supports teaching, learning, and research at UCR. I’m proud to report that we have reached several important milestones in the project thus far,” said David Gracey, Interim Chief Information Officer and Project Genesis Executive Lead.
Notable accomplishments include application and hardware inventory and documentation, migration planning, network and server hardware procurement, installation of hardware and networking equipment, move event planning, and a proof of concept move event.
Migrating UCR’s data center infrastructure and equipment to a new leading-edge facility is one of the most momentous projects ever undertaken by ITS.
“This project is truly an organization-wide effort that requires the expertise and talents of every unit within ITS, as well as collaboration with our IT partners across campus,” said Gracey. “The progress we have made so far is a great indicator that the planning that went into this project will pay dividends as we commence the application move events.”
The efforts of this project are critical to the long-term sustainability of computing and data management at UCR, and significant improvements have already been made.
“The team has logged hundreds of hours analyzing and documenting every system and application we manage at UCR to ensure that we understand our systems’ interdependencies,” said Mike Kennedy, ITS Chief Technology Officer and Project Genesis Lead. “As a result of the installation of computing and storage hardware and networking in the new facility we already see improved performance and connectivity in our test environment.”
The next phase of the project is to move applications to the new data center. This process takes place in what ITS calls “move events,” where a bundle or group of applications migrate together as a unit from the existing data center to the new one. The initial move events—which are already underway—will focus on migrating applications’ development and testing infrastructure. Production service migrations of all applications are slated to commence in March.
“Careful planning and implementation is key to the success of move events,” said Patrick Wagman, Project Genesis Program Manager. “We engaged our campus partners to create an optimal move event schedule and will keep open lines of communication with our partners throughout the process to best enable their success.”