Harvard-MIT Data Center

Our services are designed to be secure, but we do not warrant them for storage of high risk confidential information (HRCI). This includes, but may not be limited to: social security numbers, credit card numbers, medical history, employment history, etc.

We are not responsible for monitoring the content of your data. It is the sole responsibility of the account holder to ensure the application is being used to store data in accordance with Harvard's Information Security & Privacy guidelines.

If you have confidential data or questions about data privacy as it applies to your data, please contact us.

For more information please see the following:

• HMDC Policies
• http://tinyurl.com/fas-it-policies
• http://www.security.harvard.edu/enterprise-security-policy

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 to 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.

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 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 systems hosted in our data center we provide enterprise-class network storage built on stable, secure, and scalable infrastructure, and implemented with open standards.

We can customize access to match security concerns as well as offer choices for backup frequency to meet the needs of your application.

To discuss, further please contact us.

For physical servers that we host, we offer administrative access without the need for physical contact through remote graphical consoles, serial consoles, and power management tools. Using the remote administration service in combination with our Monitoring service reduces drastically the time of most server outages. In emergency situations, you can address the problem immediately, without waiting for support personnel to respond.

Our remote administration service provides console access to your server from any web browser with Java support. Serial console access also is available via SSH. In the event of a network interface failure on your hosted system you have persistent access to the server via the remote console. If your server locks up completely you can access its power feed remotely to reboot it.

Any hosted system with a display device can be configured for remote console access, which provides a graphical remote desktop that includes keyboard and mouse support without the need to run additional services. Any hosted system with serial line login support also can be configured for textual serial console access.

Virtual media support enables you to access a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive on your desktop workstation from your hosted server by using the web-based console viewer running on your desktop workstation. This provides remote access to removable media for software installation and can reduce the need to copy files over the network.

We check the status of our services continuously. If a problem is detected at any time, we are notified immediately. If you experience a problem with any of our services, please check http://mon.hmdc.harvard.edu before contacting support. If your problem is listed there, our staff was notified and we are working on a resolution.

Note: You can receive notification about all scheduled and unscheduled outages through email or RSS feed, or by checking a web page. For more information, please visit Outage Notification.

If your problem is not listed, please contact us with as much information as you can provide regarding your problem. You receive an automated response immediately, and the message is routed to the appropriate staff member. We will respond as soon as possible.

For outages affecting large numbers of people outside of business hours, our best effort is made to investigate the problem, and to resolve it.

We provide acces to our existing Cluster Computing infrastructure with an RCE account. If you have recurring or continual needs for greater resources than are available through our standard service offerings, we might be able to work with you to purchase additional equipment to supplement our public resources.

We set up and manage the resources on your behalf. Final approval is subject to our review of requested resources against available resources.

For additional information, please contact us.

Our data center is designed to maximize the availibility of physical resources. The power infrastructure is served by a large-scale generator, uninterruptible power supplies, and filtered city power. The data center has redundant air conditioning units, and is equipped with a preaction, gas-based fire supression system. Physical access to the data center is limited to our server staff. The room is also equipped with motion and glass break sensors.

If you have any specific questions about our data center, please contact us.

We rely extensively upon open standards products for interoperability, stability, and flexibility. Because we are committed to supporting a wide range of areas of academic endeavour, we avoid the constraints of proprietary solutions whenever feasible.

Wherever applicable our infrastructure is built upon commodity hardware from major vendors. As such, we benefit not only from enterprise-level hardware support, but also from the confidence that as technology changes and develops, we can continue to integrate a broad array of technical solutions and provide the best possible environment for research computing.

While our existing infrastructure provides support for many aspects of quantitative research, we also are prepared to assist you with hardware purchases of your own. In most cases we prefer to acquire servers that are 1 rack unit (1U) in height, with redundant power supplies, a RAID configuration, and a minimum 3-year hardware warranty.

For additional information, please contact us.

It is your responsibility to follow Harvard's policies on data security while working with our systems.

Be aware that data that contains information about students or is related to Harvard's business and operations can be classified as confidential and require special handling. In addition, private data that could be associated, even indirectly, with a specific individual usually is considered high-risk confidential information; such data can be stored and processed only on specially designated computer systems.

Please refer to http://security.harvard.edu/ for detailed information on Harvard's policies. If you have any doubt whether your data should be classified as confidential, please contact the University Technology Security Officer listed on the previously listed site.

Special Considerations

If your research requires that you work with confidential data, please contact us. We are happy to consult with you to create a workflow that enables you to work productively while at the same time complying with data security constraints, and have at our disposal a number of access control techniques that can be used to selectively grant access to restricted information.

While the University's data security policies might appear onerous, they exist for good reason. While we cannot assume full responsibility for your compliance with Harvard's security policy, we can work with you to find a solution that meets your needs.

The IQSS Dataverse Network repository is designed to host research data for researchers who need a safe place to store, share, or publish them. It can be customized easily to look like a researcher's own website, even though it is hosted on the repository's servers. Currently there are over 30,000 studies and over 600,000 files hosted in the Dataverse Network, and these numbers grow on a daily basis.

To learn more about the IQSS Dataverse Network, or to request your own IQSS-hosted dataverse, please visit http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/.

The Henry A. Murray Research Archive is a permanent repository for a wide range of research data. The MRA's holdings include quantitative data, interview transcripts, audio, and video, which are made available to researchers via the Research Data Hosting.

For more information about the Murray Research Archive, please visit the archive at http://www.murray.harvard.edu/.