Thursday, May 1, 2008
Agenda
- Introduction of any people that are substituting for committee members
- Approval of minutes from April 4, 2008 meeting
- Follow-up to the Horizon report - demonstration of a student developed web site and video (Jim Twetten)
- "IT Game Changers" Some new trends and opportunities in IT that could impact how we operate (Jim Davis)
- Durham Data Center - facility issues and possible future budget requests (Dave Popelka)
- Discuss future meeting schedule
- Good of the Order
- Adjourn
Attendance
- Committee attendees
- Phil Spike (chair), James Alleman, Roger Baer, Pam Elliot Cain, Jason Carroll, Ian Guffy, Steve Herrnstadt, Lee Honeycutt, Steve Jungst, Karen Lawson, Chris McCoy, Sree Nilikanta, Ann Thompson, Anthony Townsend, Eldon Uhlenhopp, and Jim Davis
- Absent members
- Floyd Davenport, Kathy Jones
- Non-committee members in attendance
- Angela Bradley, David Popelka, Jim Twetten
Minutes
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Meeting convened at 3:10 p.m.
Minutes from April 4, 2008 meeting were approved.
In a follow up to the Horizon Report summary at the March 6 meeting, Jim Twetten shared a Kansas State University video clip that demonstrated a class project using Google Docs.
-
Associate CIO David Popelka gave a presentation regarding Durham Data Center facility issues and possible future budget issues. The presentation:
-
Talked about what stresses the current data center system
- Durham 19 years old
- Energy conservation measures
- Increase in hosted systems
- High Performance Computing
- Desire to move some activities from ASB
Talked about "tier levels" from the Uptime Institute. Tiers 1-4 are classifications of uptime reliability. The Durham Data Center is at tier 1.
-
Durham Data Center expansion issues:
- power; we're OK for future expansion
- there are two UPS systems
- physical space has some flexibility
- the emergency generator for Durham does not cover air conditioning (a critical need), and there is no additional generator capacity. Even when running on the emergency generator, there's no air conditioning capacity, so heat build up from computing systems is large and fast. So some systems may still have to be turned off
- HVAC: there is a back-up chiller, but even with that, we're still at our HVAC capacity
- In a best case scenario, current possible upgrades to the data center would only get us to tier 2
-
Where are we today?
- Henneman Engineering was engaged to provide us with information and possibilities for the future
- Based on their report, we have put issues in front of engineers with FPM and the capital project planning committee
-
Possible outcomes
- refurbish Durham Data Center
- refurbish Black Engineering
- build a new data center
- outsource data center
- build smaller data centers around campus
- partner with another institution
Discussion followed. Jim Davis pointed out that while most server/system activities are predictable, high performance computing can be a wild card in planning. Densely packed HPC processors can quickly gobble up any remaining environmental capacity we may have.
-
-
The committee set a tentative schedule for the next year. The committee will meet on the first Friday of each month from 3-5 p.m. as follows:
- September 5
- October 3
- November 7
- December 5
- January 9 (not the first Friday of the month, but set to be closer to the start of the semester)
- February 6
- March 6
- April 3
- May 1
-
CIO Jim Davis gave a presentation on "IT Game Changers", a talk about when significant changes in IT lead to whole new business models. A few game-changers discussed were
- Consumer electronics. Students now bring their own electronic identities to school; provide their own computation, communications, and entertainment systems; expect our services to be at least as easy to use as the "free" services like Google, Yahoo, etc.; and utilize major systems that exist outside the walls of the academy. IT's role may be shifting from service provider to service integrator. Entities such as Google and Yahoo are developing educational technologies at a speed that no institution can match.
- Strategic Partnerships. New partnerships are being developed with vendors, consortia, and other universities. Examples include asset-sharing partnerships like BOREAS-net; community source efforts; retailers as IT providers; and cloud/grid computing. Looking beyond our campus borders can bring a wealth of resources we could not otherwise provide.
- Software as a Service (SaaS). Vendors develop software for use over the web, with institutions carrying the cost of use but not the cost of ownership. Updates are centralized, eliminating the need to download patches and handle upgrades locally. As institutions move into this realm, information protection policies need to be strengthened, and institutional branding needs to be analyzed.
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The concept is to break large, monolithic programs into smaller more generic services that can communicate with one another. Through standardization, development costs are lowered, new services are added more easily, and software and data do not have to reside in the same place.
In summary, Davis noted, these new "game changers" in higher education IT bring new opportunities to rethink how we provide services. We need to look outside of the campus borders for these opportunities, and collaborate in new ways. A discussion amongst the committee ensued.
- No items were brought forward for the good of the order.
- The meeting adjourned at 4:52 p.m.
