Network Services General Information

Overview

The Network Operations Center (NOC) is a state-of-the-art technical facility that houses servers and network equipment to ensure stable and reliable service for University enterprise systems. It is a centralized management center that is capable of identifying, notifying, and repairing problems when they occur and projecting when and where they might occur.

NOC services include secure hosting and management of Enterprise technology services such as email, web services, enterprise network firewalls, and student and financial systems. Many University departments leverage the NOC's enterprise-caliber server hosting service for applications that require a high level of availability and security.

 

Detail

The NOC is staffed 24/7 and systems are constantly monitored for problems. The Enterprise Monitoring (Netcool) and Enterprise Backup (NetBackup) services are provided via this facility. The NOC hosts the Center for Research Computing's (formerly Center for Simulation and Modeling's) high-performance computing cluster. This helps to facilitate computational-based research across the University, as well as several departmental high-performance computing clusters. NOC engineers provide support for the research network and server infrastructure. The NOC also hosts all websites in the University's Enterprise Web Infrastructure and provides managed server hosting (both physical and virtual) for University departments. The NOC provides a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)-compliant environment to researchers working on projects that require special handling of sensitive data. The NOC has redundant power sources along with uninterruptable power supplies and backup generators to prevent widespread system failure due to electrical outages.

The functions of the Technology Help Desk are also closely integrated with the NOC to provide the best possible level of service to the University community.

Case Studies

Learn how the University's School of Education seamlessly migrated its IT infrastructure to the NOC and converted their servers to a virtual environment, eliminating the high cost of maintaining and replacing their physical servers.

Read about how the NOC provided a secure and scalable technology solution for the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (MMG), a top medical research department.

 

Related Information

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Pitt Information Technology provides the option to departments with enterprise systems to host their servers at the Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC is a state-of-the-art technical facility that is staffed 24/7.