There has been an IT department at FHWS for almost 50 years. In the past, the computing centres at the Würzburg and Schweinfurt locations were operated separately. It was not until 2008 that they were merged and the current IT Service Centre was created.
TR440 – that was the name of the mainframe computer that started everything for today's IT Service Centre, or ITSC for short, at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt. Study guides from 1975 onwards show that there was a computing centre in Schweinfurt as well as in Würzburg from the establishment of the Computer Science degree programme. The two computing centres at the locations started with two employees each and two managers, Prof. Wolfgang Fischer for Würzburg and Dr. Ottomar Götz for Schweinfurt.
In Würzburg, there was close cooperation with the University from the outset. The TR440 mainframe, a Telefunken computer, which the computing centre was connected to via dedicated lines at 9,600 bit/s, was shared. At that time, the data station at Sanderring consisted of a room with card punchers. Jürgen Kranz, a student of Computer Science at FHWS from 1979 to 1984 and later a long-time employee at the ITSC, talks about his work at the data station: "We students could sit there and punch programs into punch cards. Data contents could be mapped onto the punched cards using a 'punch code'. The data was thus stored in the specific hole pattern on the card. If you wanted to process the data, you had to read the punch card.” By the way, there is still collaboration with the University of Würzburg today: The Würzburg FHWS site gets its Internet from the University via a cluster connection, since the university operates a city-wide fibre optic network.
Historical development of the computing centres
The first IBM AT PCs were available at FHWS from 1985. Basic programming was possible from this time on thanks to the stand-alone PCs. FHWS was connected to the German Research Network (DFN) shortly thereafter, in 1991. This provided access to all national and international information databases. While Schweinfurt used its own connection for geographical reasons, the Würzburg site continued to get its Internet via the University of Würzburg. Widespread WiFi was not added until ten years later.
Over time, the continued increase in local computers and the ever-increasing importance of networking of communications services led to a change in the role and importance of the two computing centres. While their main job used to be to provide computing power, over time the computing centres increasingly came to see themselves as IT consulting and IT service centres. The introduction of virtualisation from 2007, with the aim of saving IT resources at FHWS, was another step in the development. The use of few, higher-performance servers for which the resources are distributed among multiple virtual machines (VMs) is important for this. Around 1,600 VMs are currently already running across all sites.
Kranz, who witnessed these developments, took great pleasure in his work until his retirement: "The reason I stayed here for so long is because I simply enjoy the technical work at FHWS. I see myself as a technician, always making sure the technical environment is efficient and up to date."
Computing centres merge to form the ITSC
After the computing centre directors Dr Ottomar Götz, Prof. Dr. Heribert Weber and Prof. Dr. Walter Kullmann in Schweinfurt and Prof. Wolfgang Fischer and Horst Grauer at the Würzburg site, the big merger was planned in 2008: The two computing centres merged to form a joint IT Service Centre on 1 October 2008, under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Robert Grebner who is president of FHWS today. Grebner himself suggested the new name. For four years, he was then responsible for merging and integrating the Würzburg and Schweinfurt sites, employees and services.
What once began with two employees per location has now grown to 19 employees. In addition, there is a help desk with six employees. The ITSC is now the point of contact for students and staff in first and second level support for all questions relating to IT at FHWS. Overall, the ITSC’s duties include planning and operation of the basic IT infrastructure and information services, advising the degree programmes on IT concepts and computer procurement, coordinating framework contracts for hardware and software, licence management, and offering courses on basic IT knowledge and IT applications. Nowadays, IT is established in all areas of teaching, research and administration at FHWS.
Current challenges for the ITSC
Since 2014, the IT Service Centre has been managed by Martin Kraus. Current challenges include fending off increasingly sophisticated cyber and social engineering attack variants, he says: "In the past, phishing mails could be identified on the basis of incorrect spelling and unknown senders and addressees, or by an unprofessional design." Nowadays, it has become more difficult to identify the attacks using external characteristics. "New applications and technologies are opening up more and new avenues of attack that we need to guard against," says Kraus.
The Covid-19 pandemic also brought new challenges for the ITSC, as the existing in-person workplaces ultimately had to be converted to remote workplaces in order to maintain the ability to perform in both teaching and administration. "FHWS is an in-person university and is therefore technically designed for on-site operation. Due to the pandemic, a different operating model had to be made available to the FHWS members for a transitional period," Kraus explains. This required both monetary and human resources that had not previously been planned for. According to Kraus, the further development of all of the infrastructure is also progressing in ever shorter and faster cycles, and the number of increasingly complex IT systems in areas such as collaboration and artificial intelligence are continually demanding further developments.
Just as IT has changed over the past 50 years, the ITSC at FHWS has continued to evolve. FHWS president Prof. Dr. Robert Grebner also confirms this: “The ITSC is currently up-to-date and state-of-the-art. Looking back at the time the ITSC has existed for, it has undergone a tremendous amount of development and has always adopted and implemented new technologies promptly. We can be really proud of the ITSC and its employees, of what they accomplish and implement."
