Facilities

The GIS Research Laboratory has its own server room with an IBM Blade Center System H Chassis, HS20 Blade Servers, Xiotech Storage Area Network, Cisco MDS 9000 Fiber Channel Switches, and Quantum PX-502 Tape Library. The servers are located behind a Sonicwall Pro 5060 firewall with stateful and deep packet inspection, potentially analyzing packets all the way up to the application level. Applications requiring high-performance are attached to high-speed fibre-channel drives, 15k RPM, RAID 10. Second tier storage for static data that does not require high performance is provided on 7200 RPM SATA drives, RAID 5. Data is backed up daily incrementally and full backups are completed once a week and once a month. Tapes are rotated off site to Iron Mountain weekly as well.

The software resources that are supported from this hardware platform include Microsoft Windows 2003-2008 (64 bit), .NET v.2.0-3.5, PHP 5, Microsoft IIS 6-7, Apache Tomcat, Microsoft SQL Server 2005-2008, the CommVault Data backup software, the ESRI web tools (ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, ArcSDE, GeoPortal Toolkit, etc.), and Sentinel LM. The network resources include a Sonicwall Pro 5060 Firewall and Linksys 48-Port Gigabit Switches. Independent development, staging and production environments are maintained for all web and database servers including the Geocoding, Shortest Path, and Green Visions web applications and the USC geospatial data portal project.

The lab administers the ESRI campus site license and provides the ESRI GIS, IDRISI GIS, and Trimble GPS software suites plus standard office, multimedia, and statistical analysis tools for the 40 or so faculty, graduate students, undergraduate research assistants and staff that are affiliated with the GIS Research Laboratory at any one time. There is a dedicated computer lab for undergraduate instruction and separate facilities for graduate and undergraduate research.

All of the aforementioned computer facilities are supported by the College Information Technical Services Center and a dedicated computer services consultant housed in the GIS Research Lab itself.