Enterprise Operations and Systems

Mission Statement

The mission of University of Texas at Arlington Office of Information Technology Enterprise Operations and Systems is to anticipate and service the computing needs of the University of Texas at Arlington community by offering full-service academic and administrative enterprise operations and support. In addition, the operations staff provides a variety of operations-related support and consulting services to educate and orient users who wish to take advantages of the services offered.

The mission of UT Arlington/OIT/EOS also includes leading by example in the implementation of best practices, automated systems, and state-of-the-industry methods in the areas of production control, change management, environmental and security controls, and other data center disciplines. The UT Arlington/EOS group sees itself as the operational foundation upon which UT Arlington´s research and educational goals involving information technology rest. As such, we take our responsibilities in helping UT Arlington meet its goals seriously.

Servicing both UT Arlington and other UT system clients who cannot provide their own services, Enterprise Operations and Support provides the following services:

• Custodial operations and monitoring services for mission-critical servers and equipment that require state of the industry security and support,
• Consulting services in the specification, purchasing, configuration, maintenance, and management of hosted hardware and servers,
• The promotion of strategies for cost-effective, secure, computing architectures that incorporate current trends in storage, processing, power, high availability, and environmental efficiencies,
• Assuming a leadership role in the promotion of best management practices for servers and equipment outside the UT Arlington Computing Center in educational academic departments and research lab environments,
• Assuming a leadership role in initiatives defining and implementing disaster recovery, business continuity planning, operational fault tolerance, and high availability.
• Provide proactive systems management including systems capacity planning, monitoring for security alerts and other critical updates and patches, and new software to enhance systems functionality.

Values Statement

Enterprise Operations and Systems (EOS) is committed to attaining the highest level of quality service, reliability, excellence and integrity in its provision of services to students, staff and faculty. We promote open standards, interfaces, and protocols where appropriate, yet work with our customers to engineer the best alternative approaches when their needs require unique solutions.

We value our customers as collaborators in these joint efforts and assist them in defining their needs, problems, and potential resolutions. We find that partnerships work best when they are entered into on terms of mutual respect and clarity of roles. All of our client relationships are defined in terms of mutual rights and responsibilities.

We believe that active communication across teams within EOS and with outside customers provide opportunities for effective learning and improvements in services. This enables Enterprise operations and support to grow and accommodate future requirements and anticipate technological change.

Core Beliefs

• Information technology is a arterial strategic resource of the organization;
• Students, faculty and staff require network access and production services on a 24x7 basis,
• Administrative applications must be stable, easily accessible to authorized users, standard, centralized, and secure;
• Academic computing environment is by their very nature less predictable, often non-standard, decentralized, yet are just as arterial to the mission of UT Arlington;
• User training (i.e., faculty and staff) and support is an essential element of success; and,
• Information technology initiatives may be implemented at an individual college but the majority involves a system-wide effort, with system-level collaboration.

Service Responsibilities

• Computer Room Coverage and systems support will be 7 x 24, 365 Days
• Monitoring All Servers and Systems
• Guaranteeing the Integrity of the Backup Processes
• Providing Off-Site Storage of Backup Tapes
• Monitoring Production Jobs to Ensure Processing Completion
• Initial Problem Determination and Assistance with Problem Resolution
• Initiate Shutdown, Reboot and IPL of Systems
• Provide Backup, Archival and Recovery for Systems
• Build, Test and Maintain state of the art Servers
• Aid in the Backup to the Helpdesk After Hours and During the Weekend
• Renegotiate Hardware Maintenance Contracts
• Maintain an Environmentally Sound Data Center
• Facilitate in the Process of Hardware Acquisition
• Manage the Disaster Recovery Plan for Operations
• Partner with Customers to Develop and Deliver Timely Solutions for Their Production Needs
• Enforce Physical Security and Data Center Access Standards
• Assist in Infrastructure and Architecture Planning