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By Anita Warren
Not many people on campus will ever see the servers in the
Kiewit Machine Room, although there are more than 200 of them, running 24/7.
Not many people even think about the servers, how they store and enable access
to the data that keeps Dartmouth running 24/7. No one thinks about these
machines, that is, until there's trouble.
Mike Hogan
“If the servers stop running or if they have problems, someone needs to
recognize that there is a problem,” says Mike Hogan, Computing Services manager
of operations. “It's my staff who basically are the ears and the eyes, who look
for that to happen. They're also the hands. Data has to be transferred between
computers and that's not always electronic.”
Hogan and his crew of four operators are the invisible line of defense on
Dartmouth's Computing Services team. These unsung heroes not only maintain the
physical security of the College's central computer systems, they also manage
disk drives; create and store magnetic tapes; maintain public printing stations
around campus, such as the GreenPrint Release Stations; and calm users'
frazzled nerves when a device, such as a BlitzMail server, goes down.
Clockwise, from top: Jim Cardente, Scott Gaudette, Toni Morse, Rob
Crossett
It's a tall order for such a small team, but the Operations Group is
constantly searching for and implementing ever more efficient solutions to
Dartmouth's data-transfer needs. At one time, for example, the College's
computing systems had to be shut down for several hours every night to back up
all information generated by Dartmouth users. Now the group runs backups around
the clock, thanks to Net BackUp, a sophisticated system they put in place that
controls several robots containing multiple gigabytes of data. Another example:
the Operations Group converted the campus to the GreenPrint system, which
changed the approach to students' printing requests, thus reducing paper waste
and realizing an estimated 40 percent cost savings for the College.
“We are behind the scenes, almost invisible, in a way,” notes Hogan. “At the
same time, we're at the center. I see it as sort of like a bicycle wheel. There
are spokes all coming from the center; everything comes to the center and
everything goes out from the center. And the center is exactly where the
operations group is.”
Photos by Jay Collier
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