Professor Claudio Margulis describes his positive experience consolidating his research clusters from the Chemistry server rooms to central facilities. The project team is working through a list of roughly 1,000 servers on campus, aiming to consolidate over 46 server rooms and closets to a significantly smaller number of centrally governed, managed, and supported multi-tenant data centers.

Migrating servers to a central facility addressed a retirement gap in the College of Dentistry and freed up staff to work on projects that are important to the college. Dentistry was able to look strategically at the salary line and where they could add the most value to the college. They re-purposed the retirement budget line to hire a new application developer, who has focused on key projects, like a lab information system for dental pathologists, and systems to track externship placements and courses taken for certifications.

OneIT unified a team of IT professionals from various campus units to address a common need. In assessing research data storage services at the UI, they determined that faculty would benefit from having access to more free storage—five terabytes, rather than the existing three. Having data stored in a central location makes it easier for researchers like John Prineas, a professor of physics and astronomy, to access and analyze information.