Server Hosting & Data Centre Management

The Computing Services Centre (CSC) manages six data centres of different sizes.  One of them is the primary data centre in which most IT services are hosted and run most of the time; while another one serves as the disaster recovery site which will be in operation when the primary data centre is out of service due to planned maintenance or unplanned outage.  Others are set up for major communication links, backup, and as co-located server rooms for departmental usages.  All data centres are equipped with dual source electric power supplies, uninterrupted power supply system, backup generator sets, efficient cooling units, appropriate fire-safety system such as FM200 or Novec1230, as well as higher floor loading capacity.

In order to provide high availability and resilience for application services, the CSC had set up virtualized environment using Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) technology, which are robust, scalable, resilient and fault tolerant.  Apart from central services, the CSC will also host departmental applications.

Apart from Windows and Linux operating systems, the CSC also deployed Oracle virtualization environment which supports live-migration of Oracle virtual machines using SPARC CPUs.  The environment allows virtualized workloads to be migrated from host-to-host and data-centre to data-centre, thus achieving higher availability.