2015 in review

This post is meant to give you a short overview of what has been accomplished in D-PHYS IT by ISG this year. We’ve been hard at work to further improve and extend our services for you, our customers. Some highlights of 2015:

  • new team members: both Christian Ringger and Christian Schneider joined ISG this year and have already made significant contributions to our setup.
  • new D-PHYS website: the department website moved from the self-hosted Zope system into the ETH-wide AEM/CQ5 content management system. While the hard work of migrating all the content was done by Andreas Trabesinger, we had to sort out a lot of technical details to ensure a smooth transition and to keep D-PHYS's various web services operational.
  • Printing: the majority of the department's printers have been migrated to the new pia printing system. We are now waiting for Informatikdienste to support student printing in order to complete the project.
  • Storage: in 2015 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 685 TiB to 929 TiB, further increasing the yearly growth rate. We are also preparing to keep an off-site disaster recovery copy of D-PHYS data on tape.
  • Outages: apart from a hardware failure of our mail server on December 2nd and a short interruption on July 2nd our system have been very stable this year.
  • System upgrades: 2015 brought OS upgrades for almost every system: Debian Jessie on many servers, OS X 10.11 for the Macs, Ubuntu 14.04 on the Linux workstations and the first pilot installations of our new Windows 10 setup.
  • Core services: a lot of infrastructure work has happened in the background to ensure smooth operation and seamless growth of our services in the future. Examples are: more IPv6 work, 802.1x / NAC in our network, a new network zone in the server rooms, an upgrade of our iPXE boot screen and enhanced monitoring.
  • IT security: we participate in and support the ETH-wide IT security initiative.

Happy Holidays and see you in 2016!

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