State, UW enter data center services partnership

Ushering in a new era of collaboration between the State of Wisconsin and its flagship university, the state Department of Administration and the University of Wisconsin–Madison have entered a data center services partnership in support of the university’s information technology infrastructure.

UW–Madison’s Division of Information Technology has long had a mutually beneficial relationship with the State of Wisconsin’s IT providers. In expanding its partnership with the state Division of Enterprise Technology, DoIT will add the state’s DOA data center facility to UW–Madison’s campus data center portfolio of service offerings, in what’s known as a “colocation” agreement.

DoIT already supplements its on-campus data center capacity with substantial commercial colocation capacity off campus, at OneNeck IT Solutions in Fitchburg. The new colocation services at DOA’s facility increase the overall availability, security and capacity of UW–Madison’s data center options.

Anticipated benefits for UW–Madison of the new colocation agreement include:

• Increased “availability” — or the degree to which a system or component is operational and accessible when it’s required for use.
• Highly redundant power and cooling backup systems, which is critical to maintain the right environmental conditions for IT equipment to function optimally.
• Increased physical security and audit capabilities, which is important for university systems that host sensitive data (such as data subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA).
• Geographic diversification of data center facilities while remaining conveniently local.
• The ability to scale up or down in a relatively short time frame as technology infrastructure needs change, without significant capital investment.
• Robust, high-speed networking between all UW–Madison data center locations.

For DOA, the mutually beneficial agreement with UW helps the state make more efficient use of its existing data center investments.

Often described as the hub of all things critical, an organization’s data center acts as the nerve center for its IT infrastructure.

In UW–Madison’s case, IT equipment housed in its data centers support a variety of critical applications, data and services across campus, within the UW System, and beyond — from security cameras at campus residence halls and buildings to the ResearchDrive storage infrastructure that powers data-rich and computation-intensive discovery across campus, from sophisticated genome sequencing to new methods of light sheet microscopy.

DoIT’s Data Center Service Lead Terry Bradshaw described the state-university data center agreement as a game-changing step forward for both partners.

“We’re partnering on a major piece of infrastructure that underpins a fair amount of our core operations,” Bradshaw explains. “Especially as IT has taken a front-and-center seat in the operations of many things in 2020 and beyond, real, concrete, foundational-level support in this space is pretty powerful.”

During a pandemic in particular, when IT services must be up and running to allow the university to maintain its mission of teaching, learning and research, Bradshaw added that hosting IT gear in a colocation data center is “a very intimate thing.”

“You’re handing off your most precious assets from an operational standpoint and entrusting your hosts to keep it safe. That requires a trusted partner,” Bradshaw explained. “The DOA has welcomed us with open arms. And because of that level of trust in this relationship, this is absolutely the right partnership for us.”

DoIT and DOA are targeting the second quarter of 2021 to bring an initial round of resources online in the colocation agreement. For DoIT’s current campus data center service partners, the transition to this new service will take place through 2022, through a carefully planned and executed migration process.