CIO — Data center operators have to deal with regular peaks in demand. Some are bigger than others, but the influx of students into colleges and universities across the country measures as a massive spike.

To better prepare for its own rush of 10,000 young men and women, Villanova University in Pennsylvania prepared all summer, starting with moving its data center to a third-party co-location site with its own IT facilities management.

In May, the IT staff completed the physical move, ending the hosting of servers that started when the school first dabbled with computing. (Servers used for research are still hosted in those departments.)

The focus of the move was to increase reliability and services, moving to a Tier-2-or-better facility, says Stephen Fugale, chief information officer at Villanova University.

"The intent here is that we're scaled correctly, configured correctly, with the right bandwidth connections," Fugale says. "My goal is that there is absolutely no issue upon return to school."

The data center effort was mirrored by a myriad of smaller efforts across the campus' information technology groups. Villanova created a new storage-area network as part of the move and continued to make improvements system wide. Nearly 80 percent of all administrative and academic systems reside in the data center, Fugale says.

"We are making changes to all the systems through the summer, whether it be releases, enhancements, new Web sites, additional functionality or systems being purchased," he says.

A week before school started, the IT teams froze the environment and locked out changes. Fugale shares the lessons learned from the project and move to new data-center digs.

1. Take your time weighing the alternatives

Fugale and his team took more than a year to investigate all options. Key issues included integration, reliability and cost reduction. For example, the school has to integrate more than a dozen systems with its data center, including the application for allowing single sign-on via a student's ID.

"We used every second of one year, not only to review alternatives ... but moving our entire computing platform required a tremendous amount of forethought," he says. "We had to virtualize more of our environment so I could shrink my footprint and make it cost effective."

Eight years ago, they had 175 servers sprawled across their data center, now about 70 percent of the approximately 100 servers are virtualized, he says. The majority of the new data center hardware, including the SAN equipment, is from Dell (DELL).

"Obviously, some of these moves helps me avoid future cap ex, I don't want to keep acquiring hardware if I can avoid it some way and improve my overall TCO (total cost of ownership)," Fugale says.

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