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- Datacenter location and Location Independence for the service is determined by our Service Classification below.
- Our expertise and troubleshooting is gratis as part of the service, but depending on your storage and server requirements some costs may be associated with hosting your service. Before a server is built the extent of the cost model will be discussed with you and approved via IDR.
- Our servers are virtual hosts and are either RedHat Linux 6.2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 64b Enterprise. It may not be possible to support requests of operating systems outside of our standard, although on a case by case basis we can make allowances for self-enclosed Appliance Images.
- Servers are digitally or physically backed up unless specified not to be by our customer
- Servers are monitored at a base level for: Ping, HTTP (if Applicable), Database Availability (if Applicable), Available disk space
- Additional, more complex monitoring is possible
- Servers are patched on a biannual basis and may require downtime from the hosting providerdigitally in accordance to our back-up retention policies. Server back-ups are made available for disaster recovery reasons only.
- We monitor our enterprise environment using a number of monitoring systems and support many basic service health checks.
- Hosted servers are patched in the months of Dec-Jan and Jun-July each year. Patching will require downtime per host, but depending on how the application/service is architected may not require a service disruption.
- Standard maintenance windows are below as well as Uptime targets.
Service Uptime
UIT Strives TTS strives to maintain high service availability for all of our services. In order to ensure we are targetting targeting the correct uptime models, we will classify your service based on the following criteria:
- Your expectations set with your customers
- The ability of the application/service to target high-availability through design and implementation.
- Impact of your service to the overall university communitythe core missions of the University.
The following is a matrix we use once a service has been classified
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Planned vs Unplanned
Planned maintenance is discussed, tested, and scheduled prior to 48 hours before the occuring maintenancethe occurring maintenance. For servers classified as "non-production" it may be necessary to schedule and complete work outside of the 48-hour prior window or outside described maintenance windows below.
Schedule for Planned Maintenance Windows
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Accessing your server
We will provide remote desktop access and local administrative access on appropriate level access to the server for approved administrators. Shell and Remote desktop Desktop access will require connection access to the Tufts VPN.
Communication
When creating servers for you, we will collect a primary service owner and e-mail contact for your team. If this communication entry should change, please update us of this. For any planned maintenance or changes to our services we will communicate via this email addresscollected communication.
In the event of an unplanned interruption to your service, EI will communicate through one of the following communication vectors:
- Always
- Service Owner escalation if identified as required in the SLA, or for Class I or II services by default.Monitoring Escalation Emails provided during monitoring configuration
- Sometimes
- Tufts Service Advisory Team Discussion List (SAT@elist.tufts.edu)
- Tufts Front-line Service Personnel Discussion List (FSP@elist.tufts.edu)
- Tufts Infoboard (infoboard.uit.tufts.edu) if a service or services are being impacted requires direct customer communication.
- Tufts Service Announcements Discussion List (tied to Infoboard Postings)
- Tufts Service Advisory Team Discussion List (SAT@elist.tufts.edu)
- Tufts Front-line Service Personnel Discussion List (FSP@elist.tufts.edu
- )
Costs
Servers as described above are provisioned at a $5,000 per four year cost basis, per server. For a service with a single production and single test virtual machine, the cost is calculated as two servers, or $10,000 per four year cost basis. This cost is to be billed by Inter-Departmental-Requisition once the server is handed over provided to the customer.
There are a few things that can modify the cost of the server:
- Servers that require a SQL Server Database must also include the price of the license for the database which is dependent upon the number of processor cores in the virtual machine
- Servers which fall into the "other" category for RAM and Processor requirements may incur additional cost, to be discussed with the responsible server provisioning group.
- Servers which have large storage requirements that exceed 100gb of enterprise storage may incur additional cost, to be discussed with the Enterprise System and Services department.
Resource Allocations (CPU, RAM, Storage)
- We will track performance usage of provisioned servers and in the cases where server requests were over-provisioned, we may recommend a course of action to reduce resource allocation or virtual location of the server. In most cases a simple reboot will allow for these changes to take place during a defined maintenance window.