OneIT is constantly bettering technologies and services to evolve with the university’s needs. Here are some key projects completed in 2024.   

Classroom technology improvements: 64 university classrooms saw major technology improvements in the summer 2024 thanks to the hard work of the Learning Spaces Technology team. Classrooms across campus received new height-adjustable teaching stations, touch screen computers and second monitors, and new A/V electronics.   

Website migrations: OneIT communicators completed the migration of two major websites to a newer version of the content-management system, Drupal. The Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology site launched in March and the Information Technology Services website launched in mid-September. These new site launches required training for site editors in the new system. The ITS web and support staff trained over 100 site editors on how to use the new layout builder system in Drupal 10. The ITS website continues to receive high-level traffic reports from across campus, with 2.2 million page views in 2024.

Data initiatives 

Building data awareness: A foundational element of data literacy is a clear understanding of the available data systems and infrastructure. A new data hub website serves as a centralized resource that aims to equip university employees with the knowledge and tools to work confidently with data. They can explore topics like data governance, join data communities, enhance data literacy skills, and discover centrally managed data resources. The data hub is a dynamic project, and the Strategic Plan Action and Resource Committee (SPARC) group will continue to refine it based on user feedback.  

Enhancing data communication and collaboration: The Institutional Data Users Group and Data Providers Group continued meeting, with announcements posted on the data hub website and Teams chat. Those interested in joining can find details on the data hub site. These forums unite diverse data teams and individuals to strengthen university-wide communication and collaboration. 

Data literacy training initiatives: To enhance data literacy, the Data SPARC is collaborating with a departmental executive officer (DEO) action group and the Office of the Provost to create introductory resources for new university DEOs. Other recent initiatives included a three-day Microsoft Power BI training hosted by Data Analytics and Insights, University of Iowa participation in the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Luv Week events (including presentations and a multi-institutional panel on data literacy), and student involvement in the BTAA Data Visualization Challenge. 

Advancing data governance infrastructure: The data SPARC team is working with campus partners to identify key data governance roles and responsibilities. In February, the Data SPARC launched the first data warehouse governance meeting, establishing a group focused on improving visibility of data management and protection protocols for university employees. A steering committee has begun planning on next steps for future data governance conversations. 

Infrastructure initiatives 

Networking enhancements: Multiple projects continued to upgrade the campus datacenter and border networks in 2024, including preparations and work for migrations to the new network architectures in these areas. This work will continue to build toward the next generation of network capability for all areas of campus and creates the foundation for improved network security and performance. 

Major storage system upgrades: Several million dollars were put towards upgrades for major storage systems (NAS and SAN) and backup platforms. These upgrades were made to platforms that provide storage for critical IT systems such as financial and student learning systems, as well as departmental shares, and virtual systems that support many departments and areas of campus. These updates improved performance and increased capacity to help keep up with growing needs for data storage. Additionally, the completion of the updated backup and restore systems have improved performance and time to restore for the data backups across all our systems. 

College of Engineering network migration to ITS management: A key milestone in the long partnership between Information Technology Services and the College of Engineering, this project was 20-plus years in the making. The work involved deep collaboration between Network Engineering and College of Engineering IT staff to migrate network management to a centrally managed architecture, which allows ITS to manage College of Engineering networks at scale with the rest of the campus networks and frees up time for College of Engineering IT staff to focus on other priorities to help serve their customer base. 

Hot aisle containment at the Information Technology Facility: Enterprise Infrastructure and Research Services partnered to install better cooling for high-performance computing workloads. This project invested over $70,000 toward the addition of barriers to improve the direction of hot air from the high -performance computing cluster away from the compute equipment and out to air exchangers. This in turn has improved cooling of the HPC equipment allowing Research Services to better serve its HPC customers in the face of increasing server density, workload, and heat and electrical demands. 

Linux server migration: The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences migrated 400 servers from CentOS7 to Ubuntu or Rocky Linux. CentOS7 went end of life on June 30, 2024. The team started this migration in August 2022 and spent hundreds of hours migrating each user’s application to a new operating system, where each underlying application jumped multiple versions ahead. Careful planning and coordination was key to a successful migration with minimal downtime for their application or research project. 

Interactive Data Analytics Service (IDAS) expansion: Seven new compute nodes were added to IDAS in 2024 to bolster both standard compute and graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities for the growing AI demand on campus. This expansion included the first AI specific GPUs in IDAS that were purchased with AI model building and tuning in mind.