When you're the lone ranger in a one-man IT department, "just finding enough time to stay focused on one thing" is the biggest challenge, King says. "I try to offer as much as I possibly can. We're not an Amazon. If we go down for an hour, we're not losing money by the second. It's an inconvenience but it's not the end of the world."

King provides services to about a half-dozen faculty members, and a few dozen doctoral students and researchers. Because of their high level of technical expertise, King does not have to deal with some of the minor problems that monopolize the time of a typical system administrator.

"The people here ... are all pretty savvy," King says. "I don't have to deal with [users saying] 'I can't figure out how to get my printer installed, or the sound isn't working.' That makes it possible to get other stuff done."

All in a day's work

In a typical day, King arrives in the morning, cracks open a diet Dr. Pepper and checks out his network monitoring software to make sure everything is running smoothly. Then he chips away at his long list of stuff to do, such as planning to consolidate some servers with VMware and get rid of some outdated EMC storage in order to make room for a new Pillar box. Then there's always work to do for scientists operating the fMRI scanners.