Central Systems & Database Administrators

The Central Systems & Database Administrators team is responsible for four (4) areas of the University’s computing environment; Data Center Operations, Systems Engineering, Infrastructure Services and Database Administration. 

Data Center Operations comprises the responsibility for the operation of the systems and maintenance of the hardware located in the St. Paul and Minneapolis Data Centers.

• Provides front line monitoring and support to the upper-end, large-scale hardware as well as any small-scale hardware utilized to support the enterprise.
• Ensures uptimes are maintained, backups are run, and problems are tracked and reported across all platforms maintained within the data center.
  

Systems Engineering comprises the maintenance of the operating systems and system-related software.

• Analyzes and reports problems with system hardware and manages the resolution of technical problems.
• Makes recommendations concerning software and hardware support requirements for current and future systems.
• Responsible for the installation, testing, maintenance, and documentation of operating systems and related software on MS Windows 2000/2003, Sun Solaris 8 & 9, Red Hat and Fedora Core Linux, and Apple OS X platforms, as well as troubleshooting these systems in the event of failure.
• Provides consulting and planning services to the other IRT and University departments as necessary.
• Infrastructure Services comprises the maintenance of the middleware software, networked information resources, and miscellaneous operating software platforms utilized across the enterprise.

• Responsible for the installation, testing, maintenance, and documentation of software packages such as MS Exchange based email, calendaring and contact management, anti-SPAM and anti-virus email filtering, file services, MS ISS & Apache web services, DHCP, DNS, Kerberos, LDAP, Symantec / Veritas NetBackup, Communité voicemail, Cognos ReportNet, Blackboard, etc.
• Analyzes and reports problems experienced in production as well as evaluating and recommending upgrading to new versions of the above packages.
• Responsible for the analysis/design and installation of software packages as necessary to support new and/or modified requirements of the University.

Database Services comprises the maintenance of the database and related software.

Services 

• Responsible for the installation, testing, maintenance, and documentation of database software packages such Oracle 8, 9i and 10g databases and MS SQL 2000 / 2005 databases.
• Responsible for performance tuning of these databases, ensuring proper backups.
  Provide consulting to IRT and other University departments on database related issues as necessary.