About Us
The Enterprise Services Section in Information Services provides a range of technical services to the University hosted on Windows Server, OS X, Unix and Linux systems. We also provide storage services hosted on our Storage Area Networks. Most of our server infrastructure is delivered on a virtualisation platform providing an on-premise cloud service. We also manage datacentres housing the IT infrastructure for Information Services Group.
Our history
The section was formed by merging the Architecture and Unix Sections.
The Architecture Section managed Windows and OS X based server infrastructure including Active Directory, file services and data backup facilities. It had previously formed by separating out the support of desktop computing and server management into two teams. One of these became Architecture and the other Desktop Services.
The Unix group was formed in 1980. At that time the computing environment in the University had been based around the Edinburgh Multi-Access System (EMAS) which was a highly innovative joint development between Computer Science under Professor Sydney Michaelson and the Edinburgh Regional Computing Centre (ERCC) under Dr G.E. 'Tommy' Thomas.
Other operating systems had made their presence felt in Edinburgh, namely various Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) operating systems that were common in academia at the time running on DEC's PDP range of machines, particularly the PDP-11.
The PDP-11s had their own proprietary operating systems, but Unix from AT&T's Bell Labs had been ported to this hardware. A community of the five University departments who ran Unix at the time began to develop and the University Unix Committee was formed.
One of the goals of this committee was to put pressure on ERCC to provide central support for this operating system.
Our role
Over the years our role within EUCS, as ERCC had become, expanded to encompass the management of more and more of the University's critical systems and services.
In 2006 we took on the role of supporting the Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility providing computing and data facilities to researchers. In 2015 the people managing this service were moved into a new section called Research Services and the Architecture and Unix Sections merged to become Enterprise Services.