News
IT Services Staff Spotlight: Sean O'Mahony
Sean O’Mahony works as the Data Centre Services Manager in IT Services. The Data Centre Services Team has responsibility for the backend infrastructure such as storage, virtualisation, disaster recovery and virtual machines that are used to deliver many of UCC's applications and services.
Sean, tell us about your career to date?
I started in UCC in 1999 after graduating from CIT. I initially delivered courses to staff, then supervised the IT Helpdesk, and later joined the desktop team. I managed projects on application and operating system deployment. In 2015, I moved to the Data Centre team, became the lead engineer for the Microsoft arm, and was appointed Data Centre Services Manager nearly two years ago.
What does a Data Centre Services Manager do?
The highest priority is ensuring that services are operational and secure. The team manages over 400 virtual machines, which is a significant responsibility. A major part of the job involves planning and managing projects. One notable project was the recent Disaster Recovery (DR) tests conducted on January 7th, which required three months of planning. This involved simulating a site failure of the production data centre (in the Western Gateway Building) by shutting down critical infrastructure and applications and then failing these services over to the DR site in the Kane Building. This exercise required extensive planning as it affected all IT Services groups and many of the UCC's central admin stakeholders. The learnings from this project included technical aspects, incident management, revision of Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), and decision-making criteria for invoking a DR failover.
With the increasing focus on data centres and their energy consumption, what steps are UCC taking to operate our data centres more sustainably?
IT Services has two data centres, one in the Western Gateway Building and the other in the Kane Building. A major part of a data centre is the cooling of the compute and storage equipment that runs the workloads. The Western Gateway Building reuses the heat generated by the data centre to heat the water used in the building and in the Kane Building we use a free air-cooling system that draws water cooled air from outside and filters it before being used in the data centre. We also heavily rely on virtualisation for the majority of our workloads, this has meant that the number of physical servers that occupied our data centres over the last decade has been greatly reduced.
What do you enjoy about working in IT Services and UCC?
That’s an easy enough one, the variety of work and the people, no day is the same. One of the most enjoyable aspects of my work is seeing the positive impact it has on others. This was particularly true during Covid as I was heavily involved in engineering various remote access solutions and services which were critical to some of the central administration units being able to function while we were all working from home.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time Sean?
Spending time with my wife Rosemarie and our two teenage daughters. Our daughters are involved in sport so between dropping to football, camogie and soccer and being involved in the Ballincollig Camogie Club myself it keeps me busy. I’ll often be seen walking our dog, Alfie, around Ballincollig or down the Regional Park. I also go to the gym regularly, which is a massive help to switching off from all things work related.
Pictured above: Alfie O'Mahony