For those of you in research laboratory organizations... Based on my experience (A research lab with >3000 employees and lots of sponsored research), I imagine that most large research-y places have a central IT department that handles enterprise functions (i.e. mail processing, core network infrastructure), and then each group handles its own IT infrastructure and needs, etc. My contention with this model is that lots of sponsored research programs need infrastructure items (storage arrays, analysis workstations, etc.) for field demonstrations - they buy them, and sometimes it ends up being a one time deal and then the hardware just sits around being unused. Or the time delta between field experiments is too great. Or, that principle investigators make kind of bad administrators from time to time and end up deploying something that might work but poorly implemented.
Are there any research organizations that have some sort of "research computing" group - either within the enterprise IT group or elsewhere - that maintains hardware inventory and provides best practices support to groups within the organization? How is it structured? Does it work for your organization? Do people love it and it works out well? Do people hate it and have bullet-proof vests been requisitioned? Do you have no idea but have general thoughts on the idea itself? I would be super appreciative of any insight anyone may have - on-list replies, off-list replies, IRC (I'm on freenode), or carrier pigeon welcome. - Pat (mrbucket on irc) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
