To provide central, reliable IT standard services is one of the basic tasks of an information technology centre. The SCC-division SYS (Systems and Servers) under the management of Klaus Scheibenberger is distributed over the two main KIT campuses, North and South, and is responsible for planning and operating central server services and standard plattforms for all KIT members as well as for external users.
This means, amongst others, operating the webserver infrastructure for the web sites of KIT divisions, a huge virtualisation environment at both campuses, as well as storage systems and storage area network (SAN) to provide storage capacity for systems. Operation of central directories (AD, OpenLDAP), including their interconnection to the identity management as well as central fileservices with standard NFS (network file system) and CIFS (common internet file system) and monitoring of systems and services are also under SYS' responsibility. Regarding these topics consulting and support is also done for other KIT divisions.
Beyond this, directly user-related IT services are supported, e.g. operating systems for mail in- and egress with delivery-, spam- and virus-check, as part of the central mail environment, as well as cluster-systems for central databases and virtual machines, not only used for the central SCC services (with a high virtualization degree) but also available for KIT-divisions internally, e.g. databases and VMs regarding the 24h KIT library or research groups. Infrastructure support for the GridKa project, related to the LHC experiment at the Cern, complete the scope of duties of SYS.
All these tasks face the challenges of consolidation, harmonization and automatisation of processes. An increased availability of the basic central services is reached in particular by the two campuses concept and the continuous rising virtualisation.
Beneath these operational tasks continuative, operations related concepts are developed coupled with the neccessary planning and activities for their realization.
