Data Centre and Cloud

Evolving through cycles of systems enhancement, our data centres have been re-built upon a wide range of success-driven IT endeavours:

• Always-On facilities: Most of the critical data in CityU, such as departmental files and application data, are real-time synchronised across the always-on data centres. Even one of our data centres encounters an unexpected disruption, e.g. power suspension, network outage, etc, the other data centres can automatically take up the related IT workload within seconds to maintain service.
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: By forming active-active clusters with closely hand-shaken controllers, the new generation of software-defined storage and infrastructure improves functionality, scalability, flexibility and agility in compute resource allocation. It also allows CityU to leverage equipment from multiple suppliers/vendors to provide cost-effective infrastructure solution.
• Virtualisation technologies: With the latest server virtualisation technologies, a limited set of physical servers can support a large scale of virtual machines (i.e. VM). Server virtualisation allows CityU to maximise the utilisation of our physical server, minimise downtime by leveraging failover technology, accelerate our turn-around time on new services provisioning.
• Data Protection: To tackle cyber-attacks and maintain information integrity, systematic data backup using deduplication technology stores our precious data on an off-site disk pool. This guarantees business continuity in case of crisis. To ensure stringent access control to backup data, a privileged access management solution has also been applied to the related administrative accounts.
• High-Performance Computing service: A high standard HPC service with over 1 PetaFLOPS computational power is available to the CityU research community. Academic researchers at CityU can conduct larger-scale research and speed up the computational/processing time through the Central HPC facilities named Burgundy.
• Cloud services: Some services lend themselves more suitable to be maintained over cloud solutions. They include email service, web/wiki sites that can be benefitted through geographical redundancy, and options to scale out upon needs flexibly.