Arizona State University
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Meeting Notes for June 2, 2005

 Announcements
Feature Presentation
  • State of IT - Dr. Glick
    Dr. Glick touched on the many changes happening at ASU and its move from a ‘triple AAA’ university up to the ‘majors.’ As a result many organizations are watching with great interest what ASU is doing and how it is accomplishing these changes. Dr. Glick discussed the following:

    • Use of technology to enhance teaching, discovery of new knowledge and community enrichment
    • Downtown Campus has funding from the City of Phoenix to purchase land, along with renovation of existing buildings. Anticipate approximately 15,000 students at downtown campus.
    • Development of new schools on existing campuses, planning of Los Arcos Innovation Park
    • Goal of 100,000 students online which requires cost effective method for teaching increased number of students
    • Consequences of all the changes is stressing and stretching the current system. Result is upgrade to basic IT infrastructure which was covered in more detail by Dr. Lewis.

  • State of IT – Dr. Lewis
    The following notes was taken from Dr. Lewis’ presentation

    • ABOR issues/pressures
      More oversight by ABOR over the past two years. A committee involving the Tri-Universities has been established with each president participating and identifying how they are actively accomplishing:
      • Centralization of Administrative system
      • IT Architectural Standards
      • Project Review process
        • Any IT activity of $100,000 or more over a 5 year period must follow ABOR approval process
        • One third of expenditures are by Central IT. The remaining is within the Colleges

    • Funding Pressures
      • Increase demand for resources and services
      • Demands for IT as utility service
        • Security
        • Storage (approximately 122TB of data being handled by Central IT now)
        • Archiving
        • Networking
      • Resources/Services required by New American University

    • Need for Enhanced Communications
      • Link IT to Planning and Budgeting process
        • Not just in Central IT but at unit level as well
      • Share information to maximize impact of investments

    • Exchange 2003
      • Planned migration during July
        • Enhance functionality
        • Test servers already up and running
      • Improvements by move to Exchange 2003
        • OWA interface
        • RPC over HTTP available (VPN will not be necessary)
        • Improved efficiency and security (compression and encryption)
        • Outlook mobile feature
        • ActiveSync

    • E-mail Archive
      • Planned implementation date: July 27
      • Reduce the number of high performance disks necessary for storing email
      • Archive oldest items in mailboxes over 100MB
      • Archived item will be replaced with a shortcut. Icon will be different than regular mail in order to distinguish it. Archived item will still be available but will have slower access time
      • Use Web interface to manage, search archive and restore message from archive
      • Archive will impact Inbox only, does not impact calendar, contacts, personal or public folders
      • Legal counsel has approved
      • Education campaign will be in place
      • Quota of 1GB for archive. Archive is compressed
      • Items in archive over two years old will be deleted
      • Large attachments will be archived

    • Blackberry
      • Upgrade to 4.0 BES completed
        • Blackberry users must update their software to version 4 to take advantage of new features
      • Expanded to two servers

    • myASU (uPortal)
      • Departmental development now supported
      • Two hour training for channel developers
      • New look and feel with increased functionality

    • HelpDesk Services
      • Expanding hours in August: 6:30AM – 12:30AM daily
      • Improve communications among Helpdesk systems across campuses for better coordination
        • Currently there are approximately 7 helpdesk systems being used
        • Encourage folks to use common trouble ticket system

    • Administrative Systems
      • All under review for possible refresh/replacement including SIS, HR, Finance
      • Primary issue is the cost of implementing a new system

    • Data Network
      • Two diverse path gigabit connections to Internet
      • Sterling Networks is our new ISP provider
        • ISP service is 200Mbps
        • Previously had 4 ISPs but now have service level agreement with Sterling
        • Reduction of cost by move to Sterling which will allow aggregation with NAU and UofA to further reduce cost
      • Joining CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California)
        • Internet 2
        • National Lambda Rail (NLR)
          • Next incarnation of high speed networking
          • Configure dedicated research paths between institutions
          • Getting into CENIC through NLR
      • Wireless Network Expansion
        • Enhanced wireless access
        • Guest access service
        • Cisco Clean Access (Perfigo)
        • Downtown Tempe Public Wireless
          • Possibility of Downtown Phoenix as well
      • CDP status
      • Research Cluster network investigation
      • Valley Light Rail Fiber
        • 72 strands of fiber to be laid under the rail system
      • Possibility of Metropolitan Research Network (preliminary stage)
      • Fulton School Network Support
        • Joint collaboration with Fulton School of Engineering to move networking into central IT

    • ASURite Infrastructure
      • Doubled uPortal servers
      • Increased Webauth servers
      • Upgraded DB2 environment
      • Installed enhanced DHCP
      • Upgraded IMAP servers
      • New strong password procedure
        • Implement in June (now)
          • New individuals and individuals changing current password will need to use a complex password
        • Procedure will be enforced in November

    • Telephone Services
      • Modular messaging
      • Network assessments
      • VoIP pilots
      • Develop cell phone strategy for enhanced coverage for interior/exterior spaces

    • New Computing Sites
      • ISTB1 = 5,000 sq ft space primarily for researchers
      • Downtown campus

    • Blackboard
      • Fall 2004 -> 3,080 courses with 49,200 students
      • Spring 2005 -> 3,109 courses with 49,800 students
      • HD inquires
        • 2004 Jan-Dec -> 10,890
        • 2005 Jan-May -> 4,310
      • 8 servers with fully mirrored disks
      • Fall 2004 -> peaked at 100% during finals. Tuning done for Spring 2005 kept utilization below 60%

    • Instruction Support
      • Breeze = multimedia
      • Flex = Data visualization
      • Turnitin = Plagiarism prevention
      • AccessW = Video collaboration

    • Services
      • Ruckus Network = digital video/audio subscription service

    • Research Computing
      • Held sessions with faculty to discuss needs
      • No architecture will work for all
      • Upgraded existing research computing servers
      • Ordered two Cray XDL systems
      • Looking for large memory grid system that can be grown

    • Classroom/Computing Sites
      • Upgraded 192 old systems
      • 4127 classroom support calls
      • 569 Instructor training sessions
      • 9 classroom performance systems installed with 10 more to be installed over the summer
      • Charge for print in classrooms this fall
      • Implementing ‘Virtual Site’


   
  Updated June 3rd, 2005