Harvard-MIT Data Center

We work constantly on improving and extending the configuration of our file sharing services to facilitate equal access to data from all supported operating systems. Our existing storage infrastructure divides into two use cases: research computing through the RCE, and group administration through CGIS accounts. The main distinctions are between the types of access and performance profiles.

All of our storage is built on our enterprise-class infrastructure and uses RAID technologies for performance and availability. We are able to configure back ups to meet all data needs, and can offer additional protection by mirroring data to our disaster recovery location.

For collaborative purposes all storage is designed for direct access from a personal computer. See Accessing Files and More for detailed information.

For information about research data hosting, see Research Data Hosting.

For additional information, please contact us.

We offer access to our internal trouble ticketing system, which is based on RequestTracker (RT). RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system that enables a group of people to manage intelligently and efficiently the tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users. Our implementation leverages our existing Physical Hosting infrastructure for a robust and stable solution.

RT can ease the expense of delivering common responses, increase the visibility of requests, and capture and preserve institutional knowledge. In addition, our trouble ticket system offers the following advantages:

• Centralized location for support and information requests
• Storage of standard responses for common questions
• Records of previous requests and communications
• Rights delegation for work management

Interested groups should contact us so we can discuss how to best tailor RT to meet your needs.

We recognize that the web is an increasingly important communication medium for the departments and research centers at CGIS. Currently we offer a variety of web-based services that include database-driven websites, mailing lists, and event managment systems. Each of these systems has proven valuable for members of the CGIS community.

We support web-based calendar systems, contact management databases, wikis, blogs, and other useful administrative applications. These applications help the CGIS community by enabling departments and centers to share information about upcoming events, post information to their public web page, or streamline internal administrative processes.

For additional information, please contact us.

For Harvard groups we are able to host email for an entire domain. Our services are built on stable, secure, and scalable infrastructure and implemented with open standards. Our email servers can be accessed from inside or outside the Harvard network using standard, non-proprietary protocols (SMTP and IMAP). Secondary access also is available via our Webmail.

For information about how to use your mail account, see Email Services.

We can work with you to discover the appropriate level of resources to best meet the needs of your group. For more information about our email hosting services, please contact us.

Email accounts that we host automatically identify and tag SPAM for your convenience. There is nothing you need to do to activate this feature. In addition, our virus protection blocks known viruses, and modifies any remaining suspicious attachments so they do not execute automatically.

For more information, see SPAM & Virus Protection.

We aggregate SPAM indentification techniques from several industry standard sources. We constantly enhance this service to add increasing amount of accuracy. A partitial list of tools in use are:

• Spamhaus
• ClamAV
• Spamassassin
• Multiple Blacklists (SURBL, URIBL, SORBS, etc)
• Message Checksum Mechanisms (DCC, Pyzor, Razor)
• Global Bayesian filtering
• Custom rule creation, on demand

Our upgraded SPAM identification uses a number of different techniques to attempt to determine if a message is SPAM. These methods include analysis of the email headers for obvious spammer tricks; analyzing the content of the mail for text that is known to be SPAM; consulting automated, internet-wide databases of spammers; and keeping a whitelist database of addresses from which you recieve email frequently (and thus are regarded as less likely to send you SPAM).

SPAM identification is inherently probabilistic. Every message is scored, using dozens of rules, to determine if it is SPAM. This means that it is possible for a legitimate message to be filed mistakenly as SPAM, or for a SPAM message to pass through as legitimate mail (especially when a new form of SPAM first appears). Our experience is that the error rate is very low. In addition, the system is dynamic; databases of known SPAM messages and senders are updated continually, and the system learns about your email habits over time, so accuracy of the system becomes higher with use.

SPAM filtering usually is quite accurate, but note that if a message is identified or filtered as SPAM, the sender does not receive any notice to this effect. Because of this, if you opt for filtering we recommend that for the first month of use, you check your SPAM mailbox weekly for mail falsely identified as SPAM.

As part of our mail domain hosting, we offer mailing list hosting for mass mailing, newsletters, or general user groups.

Our mailing lists are built on top of MajorDomo, an open source mailing list management solution.  Additional features of our mailing list software include:

• Digest subscription options for high-traffic lists
• List moderation to limit access to message sending
• Dedicated list domains (lists.<group>.harvard.edu)
• Web visibility of your list via http://lists.<group>.harvard.edu/
• Web-based list archives with optional password protection
• Web-based subscribe/unsubscribe capabilities
• Web-based management of list settings

For more information regarding mailing lists please contact us.

Our web hosting services are available for Harvard affiliated groups and CGIS affiliated persons.

Our basic web service offerings include LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl) web and database hosting. We can work with you to discover which of the technologies available best suits your needs.

For a consultation, please contact us.

We offer two personal web site hosting options to support affiliaties with publishing their credentials. 

If you do not have an existing web site, please investigate the IQSS Scholars' Web Sites Project. This project is designed to meet many of the needs for personal sites.

If you already have an existing site or you determine that a Scholars' site does not provide the services that you need, we also offer a site hosting option that uses your existing RCE account to provide web services.

For additional information, please contact us.