Since the summer of 2004, Bowdoin’s IT department has increased provided services dramatically, bringing the number of servers from 76 to 133. This was done without increasing the footprint in the datacenter through an aggressive consolidation effort. IT has migrated to the new “Blade Servers” from Hewlett-Packard in an effort to get maximum performance while maintaining a conservation of space within the datacenter. We are now able to fit 42 servers in a single rack where before we could only handle 10-12.
In addition to physical consolidation, Bowdoin is one of the nation’s leaders in adopting virtualization technology in the datacenter. We host over 70% of our servers within our VMWare virtualization infrastructure, granting us the flexibility to provide more servers and services to the community while keeping within budget. VMWare also increases the reliability, sustainability, and security of our computing environment by increasing the availability and performance of the services we provide.