Zoran Piljevic, the Director of Information Instructional Technology Services at UTSC, describes the original ad hoc data infrastructure supporting the university.
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0:05
We’ve seen a jerk or a shift, sudden shift when Franco Vaccarino came on to become the principal at UTSC.
0:15
And prior to that, we had this one-off, ad hoc investment in IT infrastructure, and I wouldn’t even call it infrastructure.
0:26
It was only, “Okay, we have an issue in this corner, let’s, you know, come up with some money to fix it.” There was not really a plan
0:35
to elevate the IT infrastructure to what it needed to be. So in the, now I fail [to remember], I believe around
0:50
2010, yes, just around 2009, 2010, Franco came up with this vision of making UTSC as the significant
1:05
research institution on its own right, and the intellectual anchoring institution of the Eastern GTA.
1:13
And at that time, the IITS had a server room or data centre. I mean, data centre is kind of a,
1:24
not really appropriate term for what we used to have to house all the servers that were running the business at UTSC. And that was essentially an expanded office that was modified well before my time, sometimes maybe in the mid ‘90s.
1:45
And when Franco presented this vision, I realized that our infrastructure, there’s absolutely no way we can support that. So I went to the executive team with a proposal to build, to upgrade our infrastructure and build a proper data centre that can support all those activities.
2:10
And I snapped a couple of pictures that I took along to illustrate my point, and in one picture was a fan that John Harper, who is still a manager of systems, he was in charge of Data Centre. That was actually a fan from his home that he brought to help to cool down the servers that we had in that really tiny data centre.
2:37
And to Franco he says, like, “You could have told me, like, whatever information you came to prepare them, but the moment I saw a fan cooling down the systems that all our board administrators and academic activities depend on,”
2:56
that’s when he decided, and I believe to investment around the neighbourhood, $5 million to build the Data Centre on the roof of the library.
3:04
And we also leveraged the construction in the Instructional Centre, or construction of the Instructional Centre, and we built another one, so we have now two data centres that are acting as a failover.
3:20
So essentially, you know, maybe I can use an analogy. It’s like a brain, the two halves of the brain, the data centres think they are the same brain, even though they’re physically, what,
3:30
12 kilometres physically separated from each other. And at the same time then, we invested significantly into our network infrastructure to connect all the buildings and to architect it in such a way
3:45
that a single problem doesn’t bring the entire building down. And then it was crucial to embed the IT in the planning of all the new buildings, because then we address the infrastructure issues going forward by simply being part of the planning process.
4:04
But it was, as I said (chuckles) going back, it was that home fan cooling down the systems that was the, kind of kicked off the huge investment in the infrastructure of UTSC.
4:20
[Leslie:] Do you still have that picture? (Laughs)
