Information Services 2004-05 Annual Report Prepared by IS Management Group & Andrea Flanagan

Oregon State University’s Information Services IS division serves as the Information Technology IT backbone for the University as we strive to achieve OSU’s strategic themes of optimizin

Information Services 2004-05 Annual Report

Prepared by IS Management Group & Andrea Flanagan

Table of Contents

Oregon State University’s Information Services (IS) division serves as the Information

Technology (IT) backbone for the University as we strive to achieve OSU’s strategic themes

of optimizing enterprise, innovation and economic development Information Services serves

as a cornerstone of IT innovation, providing the highest quality services and products to the OSU community Information Services directly aids the University, departments, teachers, and researchers in making OSU a world-class institution with regard to

quality-of-intellectual-life, education, and research.

Some of the critical services making up this backbone include:

 Technology in direct support of OSU’s primary goals: education, research, and outreach

 Technical and administrative support to the OSU administration, affiliated colleges and universities, Oregon University System (OUS), and other off-campus customers

 Enterprise network and telecommunications infrastructure

 Enterprise Computing facilities, operation and management for OSU, the Chancellor’s Office and the four regional universities (EOU, SOU, OIT, WOU)

 Telecommunications: “Hub” for all OUS schools

 Desktop support for over 50% of campus colleges and departments

 Education and training in support of IT literacy

 Software and media development and delivery

 Design and operation of general purpose enhanced classrooms and open access student computing facilities

 OSU and OUS leadership in adaptive technology

 Core web services provided by Central Web Services

 COHO: University-wide helpdesk solution

 Technological and management support of Wireless Instructional Network (WIN), Oregon Public Affairs Network (OPAN), K-12 Integrated Database Project, and other OUS-wide outreach endeavors

 Software, media and graphic development and delivery

 Outreach to regional and national news, research and public affairs networks

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Customers

Information Services serves a number of different customer groups both on and off campus,

including other universities, campuses and Extension Services Each of these groups has

different needs

Students

Students form the backbone of any university culture, and are an important part of any

service that OSU offers Students are dependent on Information Services for many services

including residential networks, telephone and communications, learning environments, and

personal and career development

Administration

The OSU Administration cannot function without many of the services that Information

Services provides Critical administrative services such as accounting, payroll, research,

communications, and facilities are all dependent on IS for daily operations and strategic

initiatives

Colleges and Academic Faculty

Comprising the bulk of education, outreach, and research opportunities at OSU, colleges and academic faculty are critical users of IS services All of these activities make heavy use of

technology services provided by IS Information Services adjusts to changing university

needs in order to deliver quality, robust technology solutions and services that allow faculty to

IS Administration Curt Pederson, Vice Provost & CIO Donetta Sheffold, Exec Asst.

Jim Corbett, Dir of Admin Svcs.

Personnel, Accounting, Marketing

Shay Dakan, Director

Network Services

(36)

Telecomm.

Operations

Technical

Services

Network Eng.

Open Source

Lab

Catherine Williams, Director Central Computing

(42)

Admin.

Computing

Systems Admin

5th Site Admin Comp

Tammy Barr, Director Technology Support Svcs

(25)

Community Network

Help Desk

Software Site Licensing

John Greydanus, Director Media Svcs & Outreach

(33)

Central Web Svcs

Multimedia Services

Technical Services

Technology Access Prog

Technology Across Curriculum

Outreach (OPAN, WIN)

commit to new research, create new outreach programs, and educate students through new innovative means

Other Schools, Campuses, and Extension Services

Many other schools and campuses that are part of the Oregon University System rely on technology services provided by Information Services The IT superstructure for the four regional universities and the Chancellor’s Office is hosted and operated by IS In various configurations, this includes student, financial, human resources and financial aid support Information Services helps each of these units meet their technology needs as they grow and evolve within the Oregon educational community These customers include:

 The OSU Cascades Campus

 The “Fifth Site,” which includes: Western Oregon University, Southern Oregon University, Eastern Oregon University, Oregon Institute of Technology, and OUS Chancellor’s Office

 Extension Services

 Oregon Health Sciences University (telecom)

 Portland State University (telecom & aggregate reporting)

 University of Oregon (telecom & aggregate reporting)

 Oregon’s Community Colleges

Research Centers

There are highly specialized research centers usingservices offered by IS including Hatfield Marine Science Center, the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering, and the Food Innovation Center

The Oregon, National and Global Community

OSU has many programs directly impacting the public such as television broadcasts,

scientific research, education, and outreach programs Information Services helps OSU reach these customers more effectively and promote OSU to regional, national and

worldwide constituents through computer technology and video networks including the

Research Channel, the Oregon Wireless Instructional Network (Oregon WIN) and the Oregon Public Affairs Network (OPAN) Our successful Open Source Lab (OSL) is recognized as one

of the top academic Open Source labs in the world

Information Services

The units within Information Services are often consumers of their own services and

products The IS departments work not just to innovate new technology for the OSU

Community, but to innovate in a collaborative fashion Each IS unit works together to expand offerings, reduce costs, and create strong new customer focus

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Programmatic Achievements

Enterprise Computing Services Significant Accomplishments (FY05)

 Banner

o Computer center upgrade including HVAC and generated power

o Improved security and disaster recovery

o Implemented electronic bills and eliminated paper bills

o Implemented Internet Native Banner, which allows web browser access to Banner

o OSU ID conversion from SSN to generated IDs

o PEBB benefits implementation

o Rewrote SCARF reporting in response to the Chancellor’s office redesign

o Comprehensive Rate Information System (Finance & Administration Rate

Proposal) implementation

o Banner Self-Service Curriculum, Advising, and Program Planning (CAPP)

implementation

o Financial Aid Common Dataset for Princeton Review Survey

 Blackboard

o Upgraded to three application servers for improved performance and failover

 ONID

o Upgraded ONID mail and storage – Replaced single ONID mail server with multiple mail servers for increased performance and redundancy Upgraded and combined ONID mail and file storage into a SAN storage solution

o Automated ONID account creation based upon Banner data

o Increased frequency of account creation from once per business day to 4 times per week day

 OSCAR

o Migrated from ASP to NET

o Made progress on new functionality for OSCAR tasks

o Implemented spreadsheet tasks: A major complaint about OSCAR from

departments was the requirement to do each employee action separately The new spreadsheet tasks allow departments to do some employee actions in a spreadsheet batch format Spreadsheet tasks are available for Fixed-term

renewals/non-renewals for existing faculty members, Graduate assistant

reappointments for fall term and summer leave for classified academic year staff The spreadsheet tasks were warmly received and we have more scheduled to implement for the next fiscal year

o Added OSCAR to Banner data interfaces

 Warehouse Enhancements

o Vendor information enhancements

o Fixed Assets enhancements

o Multi-fiscal year transaction ledger

 Milne Computer Center Upgrade

o Improved security and disaster recovery: In FY05 Information Services partnered with Facilities Services on a project to greatly improve the Milne infrastructure Prior to FY05 Milne had a limited battery backup capability that did not power the server room HVAC A power outage of more than a few minutes required the doors to the computer center to be opened to release heat from the server room A power outage of more than twenty minutes put the Milne server room out of

business Additionally, the HVAC was old and unreliable, causing additional

failures in the server room

The upgrade project provided new HVAC, a diesel generator and StarLine

overhead power The new HVAC is redundant We can cool the room on two of our three air handlers The compressors switch from chilled water to compressors,

in the case of a chilled water failure The new generated power configuration has two uninterruptible power supply (UPS) battery strings in series In the event of a power failure, the battery strings maintain power until the generator fires up The generator runs until city power has been restored for ten minutes All of the HVAC and power switching is done automatically without any human intervention The StarLine overhead power configuration allows us to add power circuits by snapping

in a cable, eliminating the requirement for an electrician every time the server room needs an additional circuit

This new configuration had a chance to prove itself on July 7, 2005 during a city power failure Everything worked exactly as it was designed

To improve our disaster recovery capabilities we contracted with Iron Mountain in April to transport and store our production backup tapes and disaster recovery plan The Iron Mountain site is a 1.5 hours away from Corvallis giving us some protection from major disasters

To improve security, Enterprise Computing partnered with the Office of Human Resources to automate the Banner account deactivation process when employees terminate employment at OSU

Technology Support Services (TSS) Significant Accomplishments (FY05)

 Open Source

o COHO Help desk software being used at various higher education institutions, government agencies, and private companies throughout the world (including University of Newfoundland)

 Community Network Expansion

o In the past two years the Community Network customer base grew from 1600 customers to more than 2200 New customers included Finance and

Administration, University Publications, OSU Press, Academic Success Center, OSU Space Grant, and Alumni This growth is based on high customer

satisfaction, quality services, and an effective cost recovery model We have been able to promote efficiencies through economies of scale and elimination of

redundant services

 Continued Site License program savings

 Cascade Campus

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o OSU Cascades Campus Desktop Support: This has been an evolving project The original desktop support model for the campus was established in July 2002 Under this model, Central Oregon Community College (COCC) provided both the network resources and desktop support for the Cascades staff and faculty The following year, we evaluated the past year’s support model and decided to provide the desktop support services by OSU staff, while continuing to utilize COCC’s network resources These support level decisions were make after careful service strategy evaluation Time was spent communicating and meeting with both

Cascades and COCC staff to evaluate and refine the services Strong

relationships with both COCC and Cascades staff has been built, and the model

we currently have in place is successfully meeting their needs

 Tablet PC Pilot Project

o Technology Support Services (TSS) joined into a partnership with Dell, Microsoft, and Motion Computing to develop a pilot program for an emerging technology, Tablet PC’s We chose two Colleges to participate in the pilot: the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Pharmacy Tablets were an interesting choice because of their mobility, application possibilities, digital pen and ink

capabilities, and wireless technology $50,000 of pilot funding was provided by the Microsoft jumpstart program, a partnership between Dell and Microsoft to jointly fund solutions with strategic Microsoft/Dell clients Funding provided for

equipment, software, and application development

In the pilot for the College of Vet Med, it was decided that the first phase of the project would take place in the classroom, to introduce the students and faculty to the new technology and its multitude of uses Twelve (12) tablet PCs were

randomly assigned to first year professional veterinary medical students and to four (4) first year faculty members The tablet PC digital pen and ink technology

enables the instructor to engage the students by interfacing with the lecture

presentation (e.g., Microsoft PowerPoint), and the students to take real time notes and annotations to lectures

To date we’ve deployed over 100 Tablets on and off campus for a variety of uses,

in and out of the classroom Educational applications include administrative, teaching, research, and Extension arenas

 IS Portal page

o This was a result of the Information Technology Coordination Committee (ITCC) Faculty Technology Orientation Working Group initiative The charge was to 1) develop a faculty and staff technology orientation that contains information that both new and current faculty/staff members could use to obtain relevant

information and access to IT services, and 2) revamp the Information Services web pages to make information more user-friendly so that faculty, staff, and students could find relevant information and services more quickly and efficiently

The new Information Technology resource web page is live at

http://oregonstate.edu/is This project has addressed a campus demand for IS information to be organized, easy to locate, and current

 OUS Merger

o Assumed OSU statewide- 5th site responsibilities that include desktop support, site licensing and training

o OUS IT mitigation: We held four positions vacant in TSS for a good part of the year

to avoid layoffs and bumping once the Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) folks moved into IS units

 Related to TSS, a goal for the coming year is to save additional costs by investigating both multi-year license agreements and multi-institution agreements

Network Services Significant Accomplishments (FY05) Network Engineering

 Voice over IP (VOIP) has been deployed in the HP building 11 facility (the ONAMI nanotech lab) and in Cascades Campus in the last year The VOIP phones use the data network rather than standard telephone lines and have enabled us to put on campus telephones in both of those locations

 We have been working to upgrade the connections between campus buildings all year This has included wiring upgrades and new high speed networking equipment at the core of our network We no longer have 10Mb/s building connections on campus, and have roughly 50% of the buildings on campus upgraded to Gb/s connections This means that we have significantly removed the potential for on campus network

congestion and enabled high-end network uses in most of the campus buildings

 In September of 2003 we culminated a 2-year project to build our own fiber optic cable from Corvallis to the I-5 corridor to connect to fiber that is managed through the NERO network consortium (the NERO network consortium provides us with both our

commodity Internet connection and our Internet2 connection.) This meant that we were able to immediately increase the connection off campus from OSU to the outside world from 150Mb/s to any one destination, to a Gb/s With our own “dark fiber” we able to work with our colleagues within NERO to buy the equipment necessarily to use (“light up”) the fiber and increase our capacity as we need it rather than as commercial

providers and supply it In fact we will be increasing our capacity another 10 fold this summer using this same infrastructure at very little relative cost

 We have been working very aggressively to place wireless access points all over

campus This has meant working on the underlying wired network, finding the funds to install the wireless equipment, and working collaboratively with departmental computing groups to ensure that the students and faculty have a consistent experience using wireless all over campus By the end of summer 2005 we will have approximately 90%

of the buildings covered with the OSU_PUB wireless network and will enable new and exciting ways of teaching and learning by increased mobility and “always on” network connectivity

 Network Engineering worked closely with the Open Source Lab to develop and sign an agreement with TDS Data Services under which the Open Source Lab can use up to

600 megabits in free network bandwidth (an estimated $3.2 million net value over five years)

 We are now deploying the high-end Cisco core networking equipment, which places OSU at the leading edge of networking capabilities

 Network Engineering has been designing and has begun deploying a new firewall architecture It has been reviewed Cisco and is considered in line with best practices for advanced security measures

 Network Engineering has added a total of 400 new gigabit connections in various

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datacenters in order to upgrade connectivity to critical OSU services.

 There are now 72 new ports for moving OSU campus buildings to gigabit connectivity, greatly increasing the performance of OSU’s network

 Network Engineering has increased robustness of its technologies in order to reach 99.99% uptime for Networking Services

Telecommunications

 2003-2004 Telecom strategically placed 1,152 strands of single mode fiber in the tunnel system for future backbone data deployment The single mode fiber will support our migration to 1 gigabit Ethernet and well beyond 40-gigabit systems being tested in labs today The bandwidth capability of the single mode fiber will support our data backbone for over 30 years in the future

 Telecom is completing a Data ThinNet Upgrade project in over 24 buildings The TRF funded project began in 2002 and was budgeted at 1.2 million dollars This wiring

replaced legacy ThinNet infrastructures with ANSI/TIA/EIA compliant category 6

horizontal cable and Laser Optimized 50 micron fiber optics This Campus standard will support 1 gigabit Ethernet to the desktop and 10 gigabit Ethernet on the backbone The project installed 4,851 category 6 data ports and over 5,000 feet of 50 micron, Laser Optimized Multi-Mode Fiber (LOMMF) fiber

 The behind the scenes work to maintain our infrastructure and the dedication to

automate many of the systems has allowed our Inter-institutional Network Operations Center (iNOC) to provide the most enhanced level of remote support for each of the campus’ in the Oregon University System This team has developed fault and

performance monitoring software that processes alarm receipt from all OUS phone systems and phone adjuncts and they provide the first line of support for alarm

resolution They have created call detail recording software that captures all call detail and accurately bills each call They have created the mini-meet-me bridging system which enhances audio conferencing capabilities for all of OUS This service fits nicely within the expanded video conferencing capabilities of the video bridge which serves all administrative video conferencing needs for all of OUS

 Telecommunication Services tracks over 50,000 cable pairs with sufficient detail to make disaster recovery possible An on-line inventory system allows parts to be added

to a work order, all staff time can be tracked per work order and all costs associated with the work order can be posted in the Telemanagement System for billing Members of the iNOC team have also created a WEB based billing system when coupled with their Telecommunications Management System (TcMS) allows each campus to enter and track all aspects of billing one-time and recurring charges associated with station

equipment and call detail Through the utilization of document imaging, we now have images of thousands of pages of work orders on-line for immediate referral if there are any billing questions

Open Source Lab

 According to research completed by OVP Venture Partners, a Venture Capital firm located in and focused on the Pacific Northwest, the Open Source Lab is one of three leading Open Source research and development centers in the world

 The Open Source Lab’s rate of return to Oregon State University is over 400%, saving the University almost $2 million in net value costs on an operating investment of

$475,000

 The Open Source Lab has become a center for knowledge in Open Source

technologies With our help, other IT units, research departments, the OSU library system, and state agencies are able to control their IT more effectively and at a much lower cost