Research and Teaching: The SRA Data Center

By Therese Boyd ’79

This story was originally featured in Penn State Altoona’s online research magazine, Research & Teaching at Penn State Altoona, which highlights the research, teaching, scholarship, and creative activity of the college’s faculty, students, staff, and alumni. For more stories, visit the website.

The demand for computer processing power and storage space—far beyond simple email—appears to have no limits in academia. Instructors are requiring students to use computers ranging from systems the size of a deck of cards to notebooks to high-powered server systems loaded with an expansive array of software applications. Security risk analysis (SRA) students need to understand hacking from both sides—doing it and preventing it, which means they have to practice the art of hacking in a safe environment (one that doesn’t endanger the university system). And then there are the research projects—both faculty and students need to access, collect, and process information in large amounts. Where and how does all this happen?

For Penn State Altoona, it all happens in an unassuming little room known as the SRA Data Center on the downtown campus—a few desks with monitors, some shelves, and eight black boxes, some no bigger than a good stereo receiver. But appearances can be deceiving—despite all of the computing power available in this room, it still isn’t enough to meet the classroom and research needs of the SRA major’s students and faculty. “We have eight servers set up. About half supply the labs. Others are used for virtual research,” explains Dave Barnes, senior instructor in computer science. The goal is always “more power for less money,” he says. Every effort is made to extract as much power and life from the available computing resources.

Students can work as interns under Barnes’s supervision. Once they complete the internships, “we continue to employ them because they’ve learned this.” What they’ve learned is how to think creatively to manage both the storage elements—divided between the servers and the Cloud—and the processing. There is no one “right” way to manage it all; presently the students working in the SRA Data Center are actually researching options for systems management.

Hannah Roddy
Hannah Roddy moving network cables to test connectivity

This summer three students are working in the SRA Data Center. Hannah Roddy, a junior majoring in security risk analysis (SRA) with a minor in information science and technology (IST), is also a senior airman (coincidentally abbreviated as SrA) in the US Air Force. She easily rattles off a list of current projects, including “preparing to start Hyper-V [visor]; it’s a virtualization. We’re just starting our research on it. We’re also working on organizing everything in our storage. ” Data may be virtual but moving it into storage is somewhat of a manual job: “We’ll put the operating system on USBs and put them in a server with open storage and then allocate data to go to that one server. Anytime we save things it would start going to one server. That way everything’s not all over the place.”

Another project for the students is replacing traditional hard drives with solid-state drives in four of the servers. Solid-state drives, says Roddy, are “faster, have more storage capacity, they’re much better.” Solid-state drives use microchips to store information, which makes for more efficient retrieval than having to utilize the moving parts of a regular hard drive.

And then there’s always preparation for a number of courses. “It’s different classes each semester. For the IST 210 database class we have to put up a server for that class so that they can do the lab the professor wants them to do,” Roddy continues. “We set up what the professors need to get their classes done. It takes us about two months to get everything set up. For one class we created the lab with the things students needed to learn. We create accounts for the students, we give them the IP address, and they will take over.”

Donte Perino
Donte Perino testing the connection to a new virtual machine

Especially when prepping for a course that has two classes, Roddy admits, “sometimes it gets repetitive,” but she enjoys her work and understands what an advantage she has. “I feel really lucky to have landed this job. I have a lot of opportunities and interviews already. We’re a few steps ahead. I’m learning more than most have learned all through college.”Donte Perino, a senior majoring in SRA cybersecurity and minoring in IST, says the biggest subject he has to tackle in the SRA Data Center is “learning about virtualization. We basically have virtual computers—one server with the capacity of 10 computers, including graphics, storage, all that. The IST 210 class is all on this one giant virtual server.” He understands the benefits: “It centralizes everything, is cheaper, and uses less processing power.”

A job people might not envision for those working in a data center involves separating colored wires. “We have a spool of a bunch of Ethernet cables. We cut them to length, take a little peel off, and put the wires in the right order,” Perino says. “It takes time to straighten the wire out. You get better at it the more you do it.” Why do they do this? “We have different colors for different networks, such as all the ones for storage are purple, domain controllers are red.” While sorting wires is necessary, “it’s just a little bit of our time with Ethernet cables. Most of the time is spent in front of a computer.”

Sean Harrity
Sean Harrity working on the ISCSI file transfer setup

The newest member of the team is Sean Harrity, who started two months ago and is learning quickly. “We have projects, things we’re striving to work toward, and general maintenance. I was overwhelmed at first but now I know the four-letter acronyms they spit out.” He explains some new equipment, the “UPS [uninterrupted power system], which powers the other servers so that the electricity is all the same and batteries would run if the power went out.” And, he says, “we’re currently trying to build a network attached storage array so other servers point to that server when they need to access something.”

Each new technology, each new course, each new hacking attempt puts more demands on the SRA Data Center and the people who work there. Especially considering that “one million casual attacks per day and dozens of coordinated attacks” occur on the university system, as Barnes says, staying up to date on the latest developments in computers, providing our students with technical resources and a strong education is imperative for them, their future employers, and society as a whole. And that’s exactly what the faculty and students in Penn State Altoona’s SRA Data Center do.