Talk About a Restart!–Computer Upgrades

In the world of computers, five years can seem like a lifetime. So when the computers in four of UMass Boston’s multipurpose academic labs reached their golden years, IT faced a staggering challenge—how to replace 181 outdated computers with stateof-the-art new ones, relatively quickly, and, just as important, as economically as possible.

With a little old-fashioned creativity and know-how, the lab operations team in IT Client Services rose to the challenge. “It began as an experiment,” says Max Razdow, a lab operations manager. “We were looking for an economical way to save these aging computers. So we asked ourselves, ‘What would happen if we put new solidstate drives (SSDs) into the old computers?’ We tried it—and saw a remarkable change.”

Indeed, “remarkable change” is an understatement of what occurred. “Swapping the hard-disk drives with solid-state drives, we transformed the 181 slower machines into high-speed modern computers able to handle new processing-intensive operating systems with ease,” says Razdow.

Binh Ly, a systems specialist in IT Ed Tech and Learning Commons, explains why. “Our legacy hard drives are mechanical, and mechanical drives have moving parts. The new solid-state drives have Computer Upgrades no moving parts, meaning there is no issue of mechanical failure,” says Ly. “Also, their electronic drive operation is much faster, with better overall performance. Start-up time alone decreased from three and a half minutes to around 30 seconds.”

Not only did Razdow and colleagues’ experiment work, but the solution saved the university upward of $200,000, a rough estimate of the cost of 181 new computers.

The transformation was accomplished over a two-year period. Last year, IT upgraded 65 computers in the purple and gold labs. This year, 116 computers in the blue and white labs, plus the fourth-floor open-computing area in the Healey Library, received a total refresh.

Several IT staff members were involved in the project. Ananta Sinha, a supervisor in Computer Operation Systems and Services, managed the process of physically replacing and re-imaging the drives; Henry Lay, supervisor of iOS and Virtual Lab, spearheaded testing; and Matt McCubbin, IT accessibility coordinator, and Ly helped with research, comparing available SSD models. “Watching this shift was exciting,” says Razdow of the project, which he describes as a seamless process thanks to the IT staff members and their focus on teamwork.