{"id":39,"date":"2021-06-21T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/copyright.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/?p=39"},"modified":"2025-04-07T09:24:33","modified_gmt":"2025-04-07T08:24:33","slug":"stuff-stuff-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/2021\/06\/21\/stuff-stuff-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuff. Stuff, everywhere."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>You&#8217;re a member of staff, a new student, an established student, a researcher, a partner, a tenant, a visitor. You could be a lecturer, manager, undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD candidate, programmer, one of the grounds team, a plumber, joiner or electrician, the VC, a counsellor, someone coming for an interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you&#8217;re walking along University Road and you can&#8217;t see the electrical distribution system or the district heating pipes, or the drains, because they&#8217;re underground, you may not realise that there&#8217;s an awful lot of invisible (unless you know where to look) IT&nbsp;<strong>&#8220;stuff&#8221;<\/strong> all around you, making the University&#8217;s many and varied systems work. Underneath, alongside, over and &#8211; surprisingly to some &#8211; through you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have lots of stuff:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Three datacentres: two active and one backup, where we can run the University&#8217;s entire set of IT systems from one alone if we need to<\/li><li>Independent, but connected, compute platforms (big servers) in the active datacentres<\/li><li>Over 600 virtual machines (what used to be separate physical servers) powering all of the central IT applications and many of those run by departments<\/li><li>Hundred and hundreds of disks providing a lot of storage (an increasing number of which aren&#8217;t disks but flash, solid-state disks)<\/li><li>Literally miles*, and miles, and miles of fibre optic cable between buildings<\/li><li>Over five thousand wireless access points, meaning you stay on eduroam wherever you are on campus, including outside (in most places)<\/li><li>Over a thousand network switches, providing tens of thousands of wired network points, with many thousands of metres of network cabling connecting them together<\/li><li>Two HPC clusters (with large numbers of calculations floating inside them, very quickly!)<\/li><li>Large numbers of managed lab machines, and rather more managed staff desktop machines<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>*or kilometres, if you&#8217;re more used to that. I&#8217;m old enough to work in metric and imperial!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Supporting all of this (and far more) are over 140 staff, spread across campus. We are, collectively and in no specific order:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Systems engineers<\/li><li>Network, wireless &amp; data communications engineers<\/li><li>System administrators<\/li><li>Unified communications specialists<\/li><li>Datacentre, power and cooling specialists<\/li><li>Programmers, writing C\/C++\/Java\/Perl\/PHP\/Bash\/Ruby\/Python\/C#\/Powershell\/Javascript\/Go\/whatevernext!<\/li><li>Web designers<\/li><li>Technical support specialists<\/li><li>Windows server, Linux server specialists<\/li><li>Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop specialists<\/li><li>Storage administrators<\/li><li>Project managers<\/li><li>DBAs using Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL<\/li><li>Software engineers using a plethora of different commercial and open source platforms<\/li><li>Managers<\/li><li>First line support specialists on our Service Desk and in the PC Clinic<\/li><li>IT Security gurus<\/li><li>High Performance Computing (HPC) specialists<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>So, next time you&#8217;re standing at a bus stop submitting coursework through Learn from your mobile phone while it&#8217;s attached to eduroam, remember that there&#8217;s an awful lot of stuff in place to allow you to post your stuff to your lecturers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;re a member of staff, a new student, an established student, a researcher, a partner, a tenant, a visitor. You could be a lecturer, manager, undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD candidate, programmer, one of the grounds team, a plumber, joiner or electrician, the VC, a counsellor, someone coming for an interview. When you&#8217;re walking along University Road<a class=\"button\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/2021\/06\/21\/stuff-stuff-everywhere\/\" title=\"Read More\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":469,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/469"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/it-spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}