Challenges in IT Operations Management at a German University Chair – Ten Years in Retrospect
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Over the last two decades, the majority of German universities adopted various characteristics of the prevailing North-American academic system, resulting in significant changes in several key areas that include, e.g., both teaching and research. The universities' internal organizational structures, however, still follow a traditional, decentralized scheme implementing an additional organizational level – the Chair – effectively a "mini department" with dedicated staff, budget and infrastructure. Although the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has been establishing a more centralized scheme for many administrative tasks over the past decade, the transition from its distributed to a centralized information technology (IT) administration and infrastructure is still an ongoing process. In case of the authors' chair, this migration so far included handing over all network-related operations to the joint compute center, consolidating the Chair's legacy server system in terms of both hardware architectures and operating systems and, lately, moving selected services to replacements operated by Department or University. With requirements, individuals and organizations constantly shifting, this process, however, is neither close to completion nor particularly unique to TUM. In this paper, we will thus share our experiences w.r.t. this IT migration as we believe both that many of the other German universities might be facing similar challenges and that, in the future, North-American universities - currently not implementing the chair layer and instead relying on a centralized IT infrastructure - could need a more decentralized solution. Hoping that both benefit from this journey, we thus present the design, commissioning and evolution of our infrastructure.
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