Information Systems & Management Division

Information Systems & Management Division

ISMD designs, procures, builds, and maintains NODC's computing infrastructure--desktops, servers, and networks--and provides many essential services to maintain the health of this infrastructure. ISMD regards infrastructure health and stability as critical to NODC's missions, and therefore performs all of its tasks under a governing principle of protecting overall system health:

• System security is an essential component of this principle--for this reason, ISMD focuses much of its energy on improving and maintaining security. All major software and hardware procurements are fully considered in terms of their impact on security.
• Another important aspect of system health is availability. ISMD employs many forms of hardware redundancy to minimize single points of failure and assure continued availability in the face of inevitable hardware problems. NODC's firewall is fully redundant and provides automatic fail-over.
• ISMD also maintains multiple generations of tape backups, and moves copies of these tapes to offsite storage to protect NODC's data in case the NODC site is destroyed. ISMD utilizes automated systems to periodically verify the availability of all critical network services and notify administrators immediately in the event of failures.
• ISMD uses additional measures to protect NODC's data archive from corruption of any kind. All archive files are periodically verified against stored checksums so that any modification, however slight, will be detected in a timely manner. In such an event, ISMD will restore correct data from backup tape.

ISMD personnel manage the entire life cycle of every computer system at NODC,all with the objective of keeping NODC's infrastructure functioning smoothly. In addition, ISMD personnel provide technical support to assist NODC users in getting the most out of NODC's computing resources. The ISMD team takes pride in its mission to support NODC.