ITS provides a hosting service for specialized departmental research servers which benefit from:

• being in an environmentally controlled server rooms with secure physical access
• centralized and off-site backup
• maintenance by trained and experienced staff

We offer:

• Physical Server hosting
• Virtual Server Hosting (VMWare)
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a computer that executes programs like a real machine. For most applications using a virtual server is preferable to physical servers due to lower costs and environmental impact. They are significantly cheaper to implement as numerous VMs can be hosted on single physical machine.

The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a cloud-based solution similar to VMWare but can allow for scaling of services to meet demand. More information about AKS can be found on their website