About the Office of Information Technology

Luther Rice utilizes a powerful and comprehensive backup solution to safeguard its data, ensuring daily backups for all servers, with most servers receiving up to four backups per day. This advanced virtual backup system allows our IT team to quickly and efficiently restore the entire infrastructure, whether locally or in the cloud, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. For more information on the cutting-edge technology behind our backup system, please refer to Datto Siris, a trusted industry leader in data protection and disaster recovery.

Luther Rice’s data is securely stored on a highly reliable onsite server, with continuous synchronization to offsite servers located in Utah and Pennsylvania—each strategically positioned over 1,000 miles from our campus. This geographically distributed setup ensures maximum data protection and redundancy. To further safeguard data integrity and security, our servers undergo hourly backups, providing a continuous layer of protection. This comprehensive approach to data management ensures that critical information remains secure, accessible, and resilient against potential threats or failures.

Luther Rice boasts a cutting-edge, high-speed fiber optic network with full redundancy to ensure uninterrupted internet connectivity. Our dual fiber optic circuits are strategically managed by an advanced load balancer, which intelligently distributes network traffic to optimize performance and reliability. This infrastructure is designed to provide continuous, high-speed access, even in the event of a service disruption, ensuring that students, faculty, and staff experience seamless and efficient online services at all times.

By investing in this robust, enterprise-grade network infrastructure, Luther Rice is committed to delivering a superior digital experience that enhances academic and administrative functions, empowering students to focus on their education without the worry of connectivity issues.

Our data center is built on a cutting-edge infrastructure utilizing Microsoft Hyper-V with High Availability (HA), ensuring that critical systems remain online and fully operational at all times. The environment is supported by multiple high-performance physical servers, each hosting over a dozen virtual servers. This configuration guarantees continuous uptime, maintaining optimal performance and preventing service disruptions, even in the event of a physical server failure.

The entire data center infrastructure has been meticulously designed with redundancy at every level. From switches and network interfaces to servers, power supplies, main power systems, and fiber channel storage area networks (SAN), each component is equipped with a backup. This robust redundancy ensures that even in the rare case of hardware failure, our network remains fully functional without any downtime. Our commitment to operational excellence and fault tolerance guarantees that critical services are always available, delivering an exceptional level of reliability and performance for our institution.

Our campus is equipped with a state-of-the-art backup generator designed to activate automatically within 3 seconds of any power failure, ensuring that the entire data center is fully operational in less than 10 seconds. This rapid response system is critical to maintaining uninterrupted service for our network infrastructure, safeguarding our academic and administrative operations.

To further enhance resilience, we have implemented an advanced battery backup system that provides an additional layer of protection. In the unlikely event of both a power outage and a generator malfunction, this system ensures seamless continuity of service, preventing data loss or disruption. Our commitment to maintaining a reliable, high-performance environment is reflected in these robust power redundancy measures, ensuring the highest level of operational security for our institution.