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Data Center Colocation - Remote Hands

What is the Remote Hands service?

OIT offers the Remote Hands Service as an extension of both your eyes and hands within the data center environment. This service is provided to assist with troubleshooting measures that may be needed for your Data Center hosted equipment/environment.

OIT Data Center staff is experienced with equipment and operating systems of various manufactures following industry best practices. Remote Hands requests can include, but are not limited to:

  • Equipment Power Cycles
  • Equipment Installs/Removals
  • Cabling (Tracing, patch cord installs/removals, labeling, and testing)
  • Inspecting physical environment for alarms
  • Connecting Crash-Carts (Reporting on-screen errors; Directed command line/configuration entry)
  • Hot-Swappable Replacements/Installs (Hard drives, tape drives, power supplies, SFPs, and any other hardware component deemed hot-swappable)
  • Cold-Swappable Replacements/Installs (CPUs, motherboards, RAM, on-board drives, fan units, batteries, and peripheral cards)
  • Shipping/Receiving preparations

Unsure if your issue can be addressed by Remote Hands? Contact us for assistance.

Benefits

Engaging OIT staff for Remote Hands assistance can save you an unnecessary trip to the data center/campus. Leveraging this service can also help expedite your issue to a faster resolution as data center staff typically operate on campus during normal business hours. Utilizing Remote Hands can also allow you to focus on additional measures while OIT Data Center staff completes your request.

Who can get it?

Faculty, staff, and affiliates of CU Boulder who operate and/or manage equipment hosted in the CU Boulder Data Centers. There is no additional cost for this service.

Availability

The Remote Hands service is offered during both business & non-business hours. Please see below for additional details:

Business Hours

Both Non-Emergency and Emergency requests can be submitted during regular Business Hours.

  • Fall & Spring Semesters: 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
  • Summer Semesters: 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Please note: Remote Hands service is not available during regular campus holidays.

Non-Business Hours

Only emergency cases will be addressed during non-business hours. These requests will be performed by on-call personnel and should only be leveraged during events where the request cannot wait and there is impact to production services. Emergency cases are periods of when an environment is experiencing impact to services and/or operating in a degraded state to which support cannot be offered to end users/services.

How to get it

Contact the IT Service Center at oithelp@colorado.edu or call 303-735-4357 and reference opening a ticket for the data center queue. You may also email the OIT Data Center Team directly at dcops@colorado.edu.