I’m generally with you and the wider industry on the cattle-not-pets thing but there are a few things to keep in mind in the context of a university IT department that are different than what we regularly talk about here:
- budgets often work differently. You have a capex budget and your institution will exist long enough to fully depreciate the hardware they’ve bought you. They won’t be as happy to dramatically increase your opex.
- storage is the ultimate pet. In a university IT department you’re going to have people who need access to tons and tons of speedy storage both short-term and long-term.
I’m smiling a little bit thinking about a job 10 years ago who adopted the cattle-not-pets mentality. The IT department decided they were done with their pets, moved everything to a big vSphere cluster, and backed it by a giant RAID-5 array. There was a disk failure, but that’s ok, RAID-5 can handle that. And then the next day there was a second disk failure. Boom. Every single VM in the engineering department is gone including all of the data. It was all backed up to tape and slowly got restored but the blast radius was enormous.