Published August 10, 2017 by Doug Cook

Bowdoin IT Staff Pulls Off Major Storage Upgrade

IT crew
(L. to r.) Laura Jackson, John Duggan, Ron Kay, Jon Shaw, Brett Bisesti, Adam Lord, Craig Bowden, Mark Leaman, Steve Blanc, Jason Lavoie, Jason Scott, DJ Merrill, Sue Kellogg, Abbie Brown. Not shown – Mike Bowden, Amy Kerr, Jeff Doring. Photo credit:  Brian Horne

Following months of planning, testing, and implementation, Bowdoin's Information Technology staff is finally on the other side of a major upgrade to the College's digital storage system.

The IT staff replaced what had been known as the Microwave storage system with a whole new system. "It greatly increases how much data we can store — yet takes up less physical space, uses less power (to run it and to cool it), plus is faster, more redundant, and should enable less-disruptive maintenance in the future," said project manager Jason Scott.

"The new gear increases storage capacity by 200 terabytes to nearly one-half of a petabyte – or the equivalent of roughly 600,000 old floppy disks!"

Staffers from IT's infrastructure, networking, enterprise systems, and high-performance computing groups worked closely with departments across campus to schedule the upgrade and minimize downtime once the upgrade was complete. The changeover to the new hardware was made in the early morning hours of August 10, 2017.