Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblem Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblem?atomcommentsDWiki2020-11-13T12:24:16ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblem.By Blissex on /blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblemtag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblem:f5c2729f1a9264617df6fe199bf059768539a3efBlissex<div class="wikitext"><p>«funding model, which you could describe as 'erratic' or 'nonexistent'. Our equipment funding is quite erratic and as a result we have to buy stuff mostly in bursts.»</p>
<p>I have seen really famous (much more so than the already excellent UofT) top-tier, "rich", academic institutions where the budget for "business as usual" IT operations was by deliberate choice <em>zero</em> (except for a bit of "caretaker" manpower), and everything was funded by development projects tied to specific needs, and funding terminated at the end of the project.</p>
<p>This was driven by eminent professors in top level resource planning committees whose experience was that every academic only gets funding by bidding for specific research projects, never for merely existing. So they applied that model to persistent IT infrastructure that required continuity as it was used by multiple time-overlapping academic projects.</p>
</div>2020-11-13T12:24:16ZBy Ben Cotton on /blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblemtag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblem:37f971e20bfab3c10e5415ac4ede96dbbe71a810Ben Cottonhttps://funnelfiasco.com<div class="wikitext"><p>The counterproductivity of the funding model is one of the things I miss the least about working in academia. Our problem was that it was easy for faculty to buy hardware on grants and very difficult to buy services. For faculty without grant funding and for department operations in general, we relied a lot on hand-me-downs from other departments. The result was a lot of old and wildly-different hardware, which increased the support burden.</p>
</div>2020-11-10T13:15:00ZBy Mark C on /blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblemtag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/VirtualizationFundingProblem:a4316ba48a67bd9af3341041f0d92a5df26addc4Mark C<div class="wikitext">
<p>Am I the only one that constantly reads different stories about virtualise everything/none/something and for infrastructure - hybrid/only-cloud/on-prem-only. Finally all these are applicable for different circumstances (as you say). Sometimes all these are needed concurrently. Say the economics department is OK with a huge Samba share (local/cloud - do not care), whereas the Physics department wants everything local to analyze million images. </p>
<p>Not sure about Canada's IT/Uni payscales, my view is that this is a recruitment problem - funding of these skilled IT people with long-term contracts in EU (whether it is HPC stuff or ZFS or virtualisation or hybrid) - at a (low) payscale of Universities (not easy). Otherwise one gets a mismash of whatever a short-term employee implements. If there are long-term employees then one can reasonably optimise costs but...</p>
<p>(Love your posts)</p>
</div>2020-11-10T12:27:02Z