About ITSS

ITSS Service Catalog

The Medical College of Georgia contains a multitude of researchers, faculty, staff and students requiring advanced information technology services available when they need them. MCG’s Division of Information Technology Support and Services provides the reliable, complete IT services which a premier health sciences university demands. By removing the burden of IT infrastructure and services, ITSS allows employees and students to focus on executing the institution’s mission with full confidence that their data and applications will be available, accessible, and secure.

Facilities

The quality services provided by MCG’s division of Information Technology Support and Services begin with a fully equipped, well managed data center. Spanning nearly 300 square meters in the MCG Annex, the ITSS data center houses the equipment that supports enterprise applications. Production servers and devices are afforded a fully controlled, uninterrupted power delivery system which eliminates all power spikes, brown outs, and power disruptions. The battery backup system can carry the entire data center load for approximately 20 minutes which is more than ample time for the emergency diesel generator to start and supply power indefinitely. The data center is additionally equipped with four environmental conditioners which keep the air at proper temperature and humidity levels for electronic equipment at all times.

Top of the line LAN electronics and cabling provide the best possible infrastructure to build IT services upon. The data center’s network switches and routers provide redundant gigabit connections for all ITSS managed servers.

Finally, access to the Data center is controlled by automatic doors which utilize card readers for entry and are monitored by Public Safety. All vendors and contractors must register before entering the data center and they must be escorted by authorized personnel at all times.

For building and testing non-production servers, ITSS has established a fully functional lab which is completely isolated from the MCG local network. The lab is well equipped and capable of simulating almost any production environment in an offline setting.

For critical storage needs, ITSS has developed a substantial storage area network (SAN). Composed of two enterprise class arrays and several 2-gigabit fibre channel fabric switches, the ITSS SAN provides over four terabytes of data to the back end of about 20 mission critical servers. Additional storage and computational resources can be provided using Southern Light Rail (SLR) providing National Lambda Rail (NLR) access to the Georgia Research Alliance universities, other universities in the Southern region of the United States and governmental and private sector organizations involved in university research initiatives.

People

The ITSS division staff of more than 60 employees includes some of Augusta’s most experienced and accredited technicians, programmers, database administrators and systems analysts, most with more than a decade of background in information technology solutions. ITSS staff receive the finest technical training from software, OS, and hardware manufacturers, and most go on to achieve industry standard certifications following their training. Our people are organized into several fields of expertise, and though these groups interact often and well, their knowledge and efforts can be focused appropriately. This enables a deeper understanding of problems and challenges and ensures that solutions will be effective and timely. And most importantly, members of the ITSS team accept responsibility for the systems they support, and support those systems with passion and enthusiasm.

Systems Support and Services

ITSS manages the systems (hardware and software) needed for applications and data delivery, so faculty, staff, and students can be completely dedicated to their primary functions, unbothered by the annoyances associated with managing an IT infrastructure. ITSS systems support consists primarily of two major areas of support, application/database support and server administration.

Server Administration
The primary responsibility of the Server Administration team is to ensure the proper installation, configuration, and maintenance of infrastructure file servers, including the hardware, operating system, and server management applications. The servers are the foundation for hosted services provided by ITSS. For this reason, they are managed with tested and proven standards. Standard hardware manufacturers and configurations have been adopted to ensure the most effective use of resources and the highest familiarity with server configurations. This also allows us to establish strong relationships with vendor support as well as keep a cache of spare parts for all servers in house.

Server operating systems are kept up to the most recent versions and critical patches are applied promptly once released and tested. All ITSS managed servers are also protected from viruses, internet worms, and other forms of malicious attack through a network of the most recent antivirus and local firewall software. The licenses and updates for these defenses are managed meticulously, and any attempted infection is reported to our system administrators immediately through a centralized management system.

Additional security is provided through a series of stringent policies and guidelines which ensure that we don’t lower our guard to unexpected penetrations. Most notably is our policy of “minimum access required” which simply states that while the need to provide our customers with proper access to data and applications is self evident, all individuals will be granted only the minimum privileges necessary to effectively accomplish their role at MCG. This allows all employees and students to carry on their daily functions with the peace of mind that their sensitive data will not be compromised by undesired individuals.

Availability is the highest goal for the server administration team. All ITSS managed servers are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and team members are waiting to respond to any outage. All data hosted on the servers is backed up to tape media nightly and the tapes are sent to an offsite storage facility. Regularly scheduled restores to offline servers allow us to spot check the integrity of both the backup system and the magnetic media. Critical systems that need to be highly available can be configured in a clustered configuration, allowing all services hosted by the cluster to draw upon the resources of every cluster node.

Application/Database Support
MCG’s Database Administration Support team works with Server Administration to provide a range of service levels based on customer needs including:

• Proactive technical support of applications and database configuration
• Database security
• Systems analysis and design
• Application and database hosting services
• Consultation services.

The following are technical support tasks performed for customers by the Database and Applications Administration:

Technical Support of Applications and Database Configuration

• Creation and proper configuration of new RDBMS environments
• Database system upgrades and patches and testing new versions prior to production
• Installation and configuration of applications including database environments
• Overseeing migration of systems from development to production
• Refreshing test and development databases with production data
• Creation and maintenance of scripts to automate database administration tasks such as backup and tuning of existing databases
• Version control
• Application patches and upgrades
• Monitoring and optimizing database performance
• Reorganizing the physical placement of databases
• Automated RDBMS start up and shutdown
• Database user registration and definition of privileges
• Implementation of security requirements and compliance
• Database security monitoring
• System user and group management (password restrictions, registrations, permissions, etc)
• Resolution of problems and exceptional circumstances occurring from routine operations
• Investigation of system errors
• Management of database administration activities that ensure minimal impact on production systems.
• Logging and resolving technical support calls
• Backup and disaster recovery of file systems
• Offsite storage of tape archives
• Capacity planning
• Advice on hardware/software levels

Database Security

• Monitoring and maintaining security of databases and database software on corporate, database, role, program, and when applicable, table, view and column levels in cooperation with security experts and systems programmers
• Granting, monitoring use of and revoking access rights
• Maintaining database software licenses
• Maintaining application security if requested

System analysis and design

• Review and development of data models and database design with development teams; entity relationship models used to create relational databases, normalizing, de-normalizing, indexing and defining views
• Creation and proper configuration of new RDBMS environments
• Provision of project and technical expertise

Hosting services

• Procurement and maintenance of database software and related development tools
• Provision of technical expertise on hardware/software requirements
• Provision of technical support for hosted applications and related databases
• Provision of 128 bit encryption for web enabled applications

Consulting Services

• Technical advice on hardware/software requirements
• Advise to developers on tuning database related programs, and giving guidance in effective use of database features.
• Technical consultation on matters pertaining to all provided services
• Project management

Other Services

• Video-streaming
• GIS
• Web application and development
• Data Storage