Computer Centre at BITS-Pilani Hyderabad Campus facilitates access to Information Technology (IT) resources and communications networks amongst the user community within the campus. Computer Centre provides IT facilities/services to augment academic ambience of the institute. IT staff strives to expand, and maintain the existing Campus wide LAN spreading kilometres of fibre backbone with over 5000 data-ports. The network is built using Cisco three-tier architecture with wired and Wi-Fi access to users. All hostel rooms, staff housing, laboratories, class rooms, offices, and research labs are wired. Wi-Fi is available at places where there is a mobility pattern of users like, library, academic blocks, placement seminar halls, technology business incubator, director offices, lecture theatre complexes, auditorium, work integrated learning programs division, board room, telepresence class rooms, TP meeting room, and student activity centre. The Internet connectivity is available from three different links, 155 Mbps, 110 Mbps and 760 Mbps fibre leased lines. The load on these two links is balanced by a Radware load balancer along with fine-grained application level control to ensure end-user Quality of Experience (QoE). For ERP and Telepresence facilities, separate MPLS links are available. The campus data network is integrated with voice solution from Avaya call manager to facilitate around 300 IP telephones within the campus. A Cyberoam is used as a Universal Threat Management (UTM) device at the periphery with features like web filtering, user authentication, anti-virus, anti-spam etc. IT staff also creates and manages official e-mail IDs for all students, staff and faculties using Google’s centralized e-mail solutions. An e-mail account in the e-mail solution offers 25GB mail storage space, 5GB file storage space, collaboration tools, file sharing, personal web pages, calendaring etc. There is a Virtualization platform available for students to experiment with their assignments/projects. Computer Centre also manages the other server class hardware (clusters, storage area networks etc.) procured by various Principal investigators of different projects in the entire institute. Computer Centre also conducts BITSAT every year with sizable applicants writing their online entrance test at Hyderabad campus. Computer Centre also maintains 2 labs with 7 partitions to provide centralized computing facilities to the students, six laboratories and two research laboratories for Computer Sc. Department. These labs/terminal rooms have around 450 computers (Desktop and Workstations). It also maintains ERP Disaster recovery rack that serves ERP needs of Pilani, Goa, and Hyderabad campuses.
Computer Centre has following servers- IBM eServer BladeCentre with SAN running on Windows Professional edition, Ubuntu Compute server, and FTP servers. All the PCs are on the LAN and can connect to any of the compute servers. The development tools available are: TC Plus, Jdk 1.8, Visual Studio, Compilers (gcc/g++ & Sun’s JDK), Script Interpreters (Tcl/Tk, Perl 5.0, gawk). Other development tools include (GNU Assemblers, flex, flex++, X-Development tools), Oracle and graphical viewers (gsview, gimp, X-fig, xpdf, xdvi). Netsim network simulator, and Symantec Antivirus are also available. All users can work on Linux environments. With these computing facilities, laboratory work for courses like Computer Programming, Data structures, Operating Systems, Computer networks etc. are being conducted. All these above computers are connected to uninterrupted power supply for safe operations. Computer Centre also maintains Tele-presence facility that is used to connect Pilani, Goa, Dubai and Hyderabad campuses (faculty/students) for organizing tele-meetings, research discussions, and conducting classes through tele-presence mode.