Central IT organizations under stress often cannot offer a high level of service to groups with above-average support needs. An example of such a group would be a well-funded, research-oriented computer science department. Several factors contribute to the increased demand on IT organizations. Given the availability of relatively inexpensive-to-purchase computational resources and the popularity of leveraging commodity hardware into Linux compute clusters, IT support organizations face increasingly greater pressure to support computational research efforts. It turns out that the total cost of ownership of these Linux clusters is often underestimated, however, based on the relatively low purchase price. In addition, budgets have not kept up with demand and aging infrastructure, putting a further strain on resources. This growing demand for central IT support without increasing the budget--and in the face of an aging infrastructure--limits the ability of a traditional, centralized IT organization to offer a sufficiently high level of computing support for academic research groups needing above-average levels of support. This article summarizes how departments at several research universities have addressed some of the challenges of providing a high level of service in specific computationally intensive research departments such as computer science. (Contains 1 table and 2 endnotes.)