To Host or not to Host?

UA Campus Community,

We’re no longer in a deciding mode—we’ve made a decision…Last fall we issued an RFP for the Mosaic Project hosting solutions.  We tailored the RFP in such a way as to solicit responses for hardware alone, data center co-location facilities alone, or a combination of the two.  We received a number of viable responses to the RFP and after painstaking analysis and discussion awarded the hardware purchasing component to Dell.  At that time we did not award this particular RFP to any of the respondents for the data center co-location and/or environment management RFP.

We realize that it has taken a while for this decision to be made. This is in part due to the fact that we had the time.  However we now have production go-live dates on the horizon, so now is the time to commit to a direction so that equipment can be purchased and prepared for deployment.

After much consideration we have made a decision on the hosting of the Mosaic environments.  The question hasn’t been “can we?” but rather “should we?”. Based on our experience building and managing the various configuration, development, test, etc environments we are confident in our ability to take this challenge on.  Additionally we know that UITS operates a first class operations environment complete with capacity, redundancy (in power, network and facility), and personnel.

We’ve decided that hosting ourselves is the better choice, so we will.  That means that the systems and storage devices will be housed in UITS data center facilities and managed by University staff.  In addition this will mean that the database administration and application configuration and administration will be handled by University employees.

Should circumstances change in a material way we might re-evaluate this thinking.  That is true of any and nearly every decision that is made, but for now we are no longer in a deciding mode – we have made a decision and will commence the delivery of same.