Kick-off of regional center for virtualization with partner universities

The University of Education Freiburg, the University of Applied Sciences Offenburg, and Furtwangen University, together with Freiburg University's IT-Services, are planning a timely, stable, continuous, and secure supply of IT-Services. Towards this aim, the cooperative setting is intended to develop and supply services with respect to virtualization and storage. The aim is an advancement of concepts and business processes of the respective IT-Services for future demands.

In order to realize these aims, a joint procurement request (according to 143c GG) has been made, which received a positive vote in early November. The request outlines four central elements under direction of IT-Services:

• constitution of a regional center for virtualization for higher education facilities
• consolidation of central IT-services for virtualization
• establishment of a high fail-safe security with geographical redundancy
• design of a federative management, hardware sustainability, and a cooperative business model

Consolidation of existing server- and storage-basis is the foundation for an improved offer, a resource effective operation, and for improved high-availability of central services. This entails virtualization of central mission-critical systems, such as LDAP, mailing server, web server, domain-controll, boot server, which had previously not been part of the virtualization structure. At the same time, this provides the basis for geographical distribution and redundancy for services. The aim of high availability of crucial services (see also announcement in "Anruf 1/14, p. 11 ff. https://www.rz.uni-freiburg.de/inhalt/dokumente/pdfs/anruf/anruf1401).