The Facilities Management section is responsible for much of the central IT infrastructure which underpins the University’s business critical processes – servers, storage, databases and data centre facilities. Quality and reliability are at the heart of all that we do; from innovation and the deployment of new technologies and solutions, through service operations, to decommissioning.
The Team supports many hundreds of servers - both Windows and Unix - coupled with large scale storage systems holding multi terabytes of data, all housed in energy efficient data centres. They also manage a significant number of complex databases supporting most of the core business applications.
Equally important is the role of the team in providing computing support to the University’s research community, across all Colleges. The Team is responsible for ‘BlueBEAR’, the University’s high performance computing system. Over 100 research projects currently exploit BlueBEAR for simulation, modelling, and data mining, in a wide range of fields – from traditional science/engineering (e.g. analysing results from the Large Hadron Collider) through to arts and humanities (e.g. modelling the progress of an army marching across ancient Byzantium.)
Key people
IT Services - Head of Facilities Management
John Owen
Email - j.g.owen@bham.ac.uk
Telephone - +44 (0)121 414 6808