AgriLife Research Cloud (ARC) Service Center

We want to be transparent: ownership of Information Technology always stays with the Principal Investigator. Because of this ownership, you decide how your highly unique and specialized information technology resources within your research program are managed. Traditional options relegated research program owners to either hire their own IT resources, make do with limited sometimes untrained department IT support or perform the management themselves.



With the ARC offering a new option has been provided. Beyond the basic IT support provided to all within AgriLife (inclusive of Research programs), ARC provides (upon request) advanced IT management for highly unique and specialized software, system, programming, and networking needs.

If you choose the ARC services to manage your advanced research IT, ARC staff will consult with you to create a Memo of Understanding, or MOU, that details the scope of work that is to be managed.

ARC can help you with pre-award research grant and proposal writing, to make sure your research technology needs are fully accounted for and budgeted. This includes any systems, data storage, software, applications, and any advanced IT management services or technology needs your program may require. The ARC Service Center is here to support your research program from start to end of your grant or research project.

We do not just help you obtain your devices or software, then leave you to learn how to use it on your own. We can offer you support and training with your technology. From novice users who may be unfamiliar with the command line environment of a Linux cluster, to advanced users who have compilation and optimization questions about custom-developed software, we serve a wide variety of individuals with diverse levels of research computing. We also offer management & support for computational research design and implementation, software implementation and lifecycle management, application porting and tuning, data visualization and analysis techniques, and recommendations for new computational technologies and methods, should you need them.

ARC deploys all major enterprise systems for your high-performance computing needs. We offer enterprise storage systems like our Dell EMC Isilon, on-demand cloud storage, and long-term archive storage with petabytes of storage capacity. We also offer numerous advanced, specialized, scientific software applications and libraries. If we do not have exactly what you need in our toolbox, we will work with external vendors and you to identify what platform best serves your needs.

Subscribers to ARC receive security & compliance management services, at no cost, to you and your active research projects. Some of these services include developing security best practices, resolving security issues, conducting investigations, and reporting. We work with TAMUS, its members, and other entities to minimize security risks and assure compliance with security policies and procedures for you. This allows you to focus on your core research activities, not your technology security & compliance.

◦ Full planning, designing, and development of software and applications for the full lifecycle of your research project
◦ Provide outsource and contract support for third-party applications
◦ Work directly with vendors for installations, upgrades, and support escalations

Completely managed, advanced system and network services
By offering these services, we can eliminate the daily chore of management for your servers and lab equipment, which allows you to devote more time and energy to achieving your research goals

Options are fully managed to meet your needs:
◦ Daily backups of your data
◦ Secure all your data storage
◦ Ensure that everything meets all security compliance needs
◦ Hot storage is best for storing data that you use frequently, or what we call active data
◦ Cold storage is optimized for storing data that you do not access often, but you still need it to be held- best for data that you will not need to access more than once within 30 days (about 4 and a half weeks)

◦ Contract and technical support for third-party applications, meaning software and applications not currently managed by AgriLife IT
◦ Work directly with vendors for all your installation, update, upgrade, and support needs

Create new website(s)
•Evaluation and projected completion (Go-Live)
•Provides hosting of WordPress web themes as provided by Texas A&M University System and •Texas A&M AgriLife that have been approved for use.
•Setup of initial theme, add users and configurations required for *.tamu.edu.

Migration of your existing website(s)
•Evaluation and projected completion of migration
•Provides compliant and secure environment hosting
•User management
•Role based security
•Multi-factor authorization required

Decommissioning of website(s)
•Provide Archive and backups
•Provide redirects if needed
•Release certificates