Good progress is being made to ensure that the University's critical IT systems are hosted in two reliable, inter-connected data centres. One site is the University's existing Shared Data Centre (USDC) in Oxford, the other is the Jisc-Virtus data centre (JDC) in Slough.
A major phase of the work, to migrate University IT infrastructure, previously housed in the 'Beach' data centre in Oxford, to the JDC in Slough has been completed successfully.
This was one of the most technically complex pieces of work ever undertaken by IT Services and involved teams throughout IT Services and support from colleagues across the wider University. Over 60 pieces of hardware and more than 500 cables were carefully disconnected, packed away and transported to Slough. The migration saw 380 virtual machines and over 300 terabytes of data make the move.
The outcome of the migration is that 25 key services are now provisioned from both the Oxford and Slough data centres, including BI, DARS, HRIS, Oracle R12 Financials, SITS and X5.
The project continues and the next major phase will be the migration of services out of the Banbury Road Data Centre, currently scheduled for July 2019, which will see us move services including Chorus, Nexus Sharepoint and Private Cloud Services. Consultation with colleagues that own or support impacted services will continue, as planning progresses.
For more information about the project please visit the Data Centres project website, or email the team, datacentreprojects@it.ox.ac.uk.
