Challenges in IT Operations Management at a German University Chair -- Ten Years in Retrospect

Over the last two decades, the majority of German universities adopted\nvarious characteristics of the prevailing North-American academic system,\nresulting in significant changes in several key areas that include, e.g., both\nteaching and research. The universities' internal organizational structures,\nhowever, still follow a traditional, decentralized scheme implementing an\nadditional organizational level -- the Chair -- effectively a "mini department"\nwith dedicated staff, budget and infrastructure. Although the Technical\nUniversity of Munich (TUM) has been establishing a more centralized scheme for\nmany administrative tasks over the past decade, the transition from its\ndistributed to a centralized information technology (IT) administration and\ninfrastructure is still an ongoing process. In case of the authors' chair, this\nmigration so far included handing over all network-related operations to the\njoint compute center, consolidating the Chair's legacy server system in terms\nof both hardware architectures and operating systems and, lately, moving\nselected services to replacements operated by Department or University. With\nrequirements, individuals and organizations constantly shifting, this process,\nhowever, is neither close to completion nor particularly unique to TUM. In this\npaper, we will thus share our experiences w.r.t. this IT migration as we\nbelieve both that many of the other German universities might be facing similar\nchallenges and that, in the future, North-American universities - currently not\nimplementing the chair layer and instead relying on a centralized IT\ninfrastructure - could need a more decentralized solution. Hoping that both\nbenefit from this journey, we thus present the design, commissioning and\nevolution of our infrastructure.\n