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Phase 1 of 3
Quantitative Survey
33% Completed
Part 1: Institutional Firmographics and Infrastructure Scale
1. In which country is your institution located?
2. What is the primary academic profile of your institution?
Technical / Engineering / IT
Medical / Life Sciences
Humanities / Social Sciences
Comprehensive / Multi-disciplinary
3. What is the approximate number of enrolled students?
Under 5,000
5,000 - 14,999
15,000 - 29,999
30,000 and over
4. What is the scale of your primary on-premises IT computing infrastructure?
Small (Fewer than 50 hosts)
Medium (50-199 hosts)
Large (200+ hosts)
Fully migrated to public cloud
5. What is your current role within the organization?
C-Level Executive (CIO, CTO)
IT Director / Infrastructure Manager
Lead System Architect
Senior System Administrator / Engineer
Other
6. Approximately how many full-time equivalent (FTE) IT staff members are employed?
Fewer than 10
10 - 29
30 - 99
100 or more
7. What is the approximate annual IT budget (excluding staff salaries)?
Under €500,000
€500,000 - €2 million
€2 million - €10 million
Over €10 million
Prefer not to answer
Part 2: IT Economics, Licensing, and Vendor Lock-in
8. Which hypervisor technology currently dominates your on-premises infrastructure?
VMware ESXi / vSphere
Microsoft Hyper-V
Proxmox VE
KVM / OpenStack / OpenNebula
XenServer (Citrix)
N/A (No on-premises virtualization)
9. Estimate the % increase in virtualization licensing costs between 2022 and 2025.
0% - 10% (Minimal impact)
11% - 50%
51% - 100%
Over 100% (More than doubled)
N/A (Do not use proprietary)
10. 'Our institution is heavily restricted by vendor lock-in regarding our infrastructure.'
1 (Strongly Disagree)
2
3
4
5 (Strongly Agree)
N/A
11. To what extent do Egress Fees limit your university's ability to process large scientific datasets?
1 (Not at all)
2
3
4
5 (Critical barrier)
N/A
12. What is the preferred financial model for core infrastructure over the next 5 years?
Strongly prefer CapEx (purchasing own hardware)
Prefer CapEx, but selectively using OpEx
Prefer OpEx (Cloud subscriptions, SaaS)
Strongly prefer OpEx (Migrating entirely away from owned hardware)
Part 3: VDI Services and Hardware Lifecycles
13. Does your institution provide Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments?
Yes, heavily
Yes, but limited to specific use cases
No, students use physical lab computers
No, students bring their own devices (BYOD) exclusively
14. If you use VDI, what contributes most to performance degradation during boot storms?
Storage I/O saturation
Host RAM saturation
CPU contention
Network bandwidth
Identity provider delays
N/A
15. What is the typical lifecycle of physical servers?
3 years
5 years
7 years or more
16. How have Windows 11 hardware requirements (TPM 2.0) impacted your lifecycle?
Forced premature retirement of capable machines
Accelerated migration to cloud VDI
Triggered shift to Linux-based VDI
No impact (hardware naturally refreshed)
N/A
17. Are you evaluating micro-virtualization (e.g., Firecracker) as an alternative to VMs?
Yes, currently testing or deploying
Planning to evaluate in next 12-24 months
Aware but no current plans
Not aware of these technologies
Part 4: GPU Utilization and AI Resource Harvesting
18. Does your institution host on-premises GPU clusters?
Yes, extensive GPU infrastructure
Yes, but limited
No, we rely entirely on public cloud
No, we do not use GPU computing
19. If you possess on-premises GPUs, how is their utilization during off-peak hours?
Mostly idle (<20%)
Lightly used (20-50%)
Moderately used (51-80%)
Constantly saturated (>80%)
Don't know / N/A
20. How do you share GPU resources between interactive VDI and batch AI computing?
Strict physical separation
Static hardware partitioning (e.g., MIG)
Dynamic time-slicing
We do not currently mix these workloads
21. To what extent is the lack of dynamic GPU sharing a problem?
1 (Not a problem)
2
3
4
5 (Critical bottleneck)
N/A
22. Are you planning to deploy localized LLMs to avoid sending sensitive data to external AI providers?
Yes, already deployed
Yes, planning within 12 months
Under discussion
No, prefer external commercial APIs
N/A
Part 5: Digital Sovereignty and Security Compliance
23. How strongly do EU regulations (e.g. GDPR, NIS2) influence your decision to keep IT on-premises?
1 (No influence)
2
3
4
5 (Primary factor)
N/A
24. Does your institution conduct research requiring Air-Gapped environments?
Yes, regularly
Yes, occasionally
No
25. To what extent are you planning to utilize Open Source Software (OSS) to achieve technological sovereignty?
1 (Prefer proprietary)
2
3
4
5 (Active mandate for OSS)
N/A
26. How confident are you in operating core services offline if disconnected from global identity providers (like Azure AD)?
1 (Zero confidence)
2
3
4
5 (Full confidence)
N/A
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