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The Office of Information Technology Computing Infrastructure team provides a range of technological know-how and support that most of us have come to rely on to do the work we do at the university. This team manages the high rate of technological changes and advances, occurring pretty much instantaneously, with quiet, calm conviction.

Among their team of ten, they have decades of experience in systems administration including hardware, software and servers. Sam Tovbis, who has served as program director since the formation of OIT more than five years ago, embraces the OIT culture of being customer-focused and committed to the service the team provides. After dedicating more than 19 years to his work here, in a nutshell he says, “Above all, we want to make sure that things work well universitywide.”

Making things work for infrastructure this substantial across two campuses is no small task. Providing high level services to applications to support the needs of faculty, staff and students requires exceptional analytical, problem solving and subject matter expertise. The team provides centralized services such as:

• File sharing – read more about our new pricing for Isilon storage, a service supported by the Computing Infrastructure team
• Physical and virtual server hosting including Windows servers administration and Linux servers administration (Request provisioning of a server on the OIT self-service portal.)
• Managing the VMware Horizon Environment – read more about the upcoming changes to virtual desktops with the implementation of multi-factor authentication 
• Centralized backup services for storage and recovery
• Microsoft Windows security patching and administration of the System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)

In addition, two team members are supporting special projects managing Google cloud administration for the Health Data Compass department. Tovbis says he is particularly excited about the work they just completed “making the VMware Horizon environment fully redundant across both campus data centers,” while working on preparing the virtual desktop environment for implementation of multi-factor authentication – meaning they no longer have the worry about a data center outage at one location causing the VMware environment to be down. With this multi-year project completed, there is now a backup system at each campus to provide consistent accessibility.  

The Computing Infrastructure team will continue to remain busy with the multitude of behind-the-scene services, like those outlined above, making up the technological foundation to support the university’s priorities.

Services in the Spotlight is a series of articles highlighting teams within the Office of Information Technology. OIT has been instrumental in helping move exciting initiatives forward and impacting success for the university. For an overview of more services offered by the department, watch the CU Productions video on our YouTube channel or visit our website: oit.ucdenver.edu.