its in bits

A Note From Bill...

First, I’d really like to thank everyone who worked on the IT Open House this year. It was an engaging and very well-attended event. The setting in McCaw was terrific, and it was satisfying to see so many of our clients there.

On a more somber note, I’d like to discuss the recent email from President Hennessy on budget-related issues likely to affect Stanford for the next couple of years. If you haven't already, I suggest you read that email and the Q&A with John Etchemendy in last week's Stanford Report; together, they provide the best explanation I’ve seen on how the economy is affecting higher education, and Stanford in particular.

The net result for IT Services is that we will most likely be asked to take a five to seven percent reduction in our general funds budget for the next fiscal year, and perhaps some additional reductions the following year. General funds account for about one-third of our total funding. Two-thirds of our funding is through revenue we charge directly to clients from our various service centers. However, as our clients will have less money to spend next year, service centers could also have reduced revenue.

Fortunately, we are in a strong position right now—both financially and organizationally. We are well-prepared to think of better ways to deliver our services at a lower cost. I urge each of you to give your directors your suggestions about how we might deliver services in a new and better way, or even deliver brand-new services that would meet our clients’ needs.

At the end of the day, we are trying to save money for Stanford University. So, if you have ideas about services we could provide that would reduce clients’ overall costs, please share them with your directors, executive directors, or me. In times of declining operating funds, IT services and resources are all the more critical to large organizations as they automate and improve their daily workflows and processes. In many corporations, IT actually expands during such times to provide efficiencies for reducing total cost. Let’s all work together to help Stanford out in this time of need.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Cell Phone Payroll Deduction Program

Effective January 1, Stanford University is instituting a new campus-wide policy for employees with University-provided cell phones. The policy requires that employees who use these devices for personal calls and data more than fifteen percent of the time reimburse the University $10 per month.

IT Services is moving from a pilot program of collecting checks of $30 per quarter for personal use of University cell phones and DSL, to a payroll deduction program for cell phones only (DSL is no longer included in the policy). We will be beta testing a web-based approach to this process in November.

IT Services employees with department-provided cell phones will receive an email on November 10 with a link to an online payroll deduction approval form. The form must be submitted by November 17, and participants will see the $30 after-tax payroll deduction on December 7. For new orders, the Department Contact will order the cell phone and a link to the payroll deduction approval form will automatically be sent to the employee.

If the beta program is successful, it will be extended to the campus community in January 2009, and employees will see a $10 per month deduction beginning February 7. The payroll deduction election will remain in place until revoked by the employee and/or until the service has been cancelled.

Note: only cell phones provided by IT Services will be eligible for the payroll deduction program. Employees with cell phones from other service providers will have $10 per month removed from their reimbursement.

Thank you to the Admins, the Pinnacle application team, and DDD (and Form Builder) for helping to launch this program.

- Christine Soldahl
Finance

AFS Quota Increase

AFS is a global shared-file system used at Stanford as the central store for user home directories, for the file system beneath www.stanford.edu, and for software distribution by a variety of groups and departments. Recently, we increased the total AFS user allocation from 200 MB to 1 GB. The increase was made possible as we repurposed the servers and storage used by the Cyrus email system to Zimbra.

Next steps for the AFS team include creating a sponsorship and billing model that will enable users, groups, and departments to purchase additional quota. The Low Cost Central Storage service being offered by the Storage team (which includes storage for AFS) will allow us to offer AFS quota at an affordable price. The team will also be monitoring the anticipated increase in usage to determine whether further quota increases will be possible.

Thanks to Kevin Hall for deploying the new AFS servers and for implementing the quota increase, Dan Stillmaker and the storage team for low cost storage rates and service development, and Xueshan Feng and Huaqing Zheng for their work on the Zimbra project, which freed the servers and storage for this work.

- Jonathan Pilat
UNIX Systems and Applications

Fixed Mobile Conversion (FMC) Pilot

The Fixed Mobile Conversion (FMC) pilot is a joint partnership with AT&T Cellular to evaluate the convergence of their cellular services with the University's enterprise voice and WiFi services on dual-mode cellular phones.

This pilot is sponsored by Mark Miyasaki and will be delivered by Jimmy Hale and his team. Other core members include Kris Lao, Lea Roberts, and Johan van Reijendam from the network team.

The key drivers of this pilot are:

Reduction of cellular phone expenses by leveraging our existing WiFi and telephone infrastructure.
Utilization of Stanford WiFi network to carry cellular traffic where AT&T network coverage is weak.
Most importantly, the ability for a single number to reach both desk phone and cellular phone, and to extend some of the desk phone features and functionality to the cellular phone. This includes 5-digit dialing from cellular phones.

The pilot is scheduled to run from November 2008 through January 2009. It consists of a small group of users from Communications Services, Computer Resource Consulting, Architecture, Business Services and, potentially, clients from Y2E2 (Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy building).

The goal of the pilot is to test the technology, ensure seamless hand-off between the two networks, assess quality of calls, test the extended desk phone features and functionalities to the cellular phones, and validate the operability of this solution on two certified dual-mode cellular phones.

The results of the pilot in January 2009 will determine the next steps. If you have any questions and/or comments, please contact Chai Ho, the project manager.

- Chai Ho
Project Management

New Remedy Application Supports IT Operations Center

The IT Services Application Support Team has been working with the IT Operations Center (ITOC) to replace (and expand) the functionality of a system they formerly termed "Sandbox." ITOC staff monitor hundreds of hosts and provide them with escalation paths and contact information for after-hours support and incident management. A new Remedy application that went live on October 23 replaces the Microsoft Access database used to track this support information.

When considering Remedy as a potential replacement tool for the "Sandbox," we reviewed the requirements and found they were all met with a custom application in Remedy. The features of the new system include:

A multi-user environment for viewing and editing support data
A robust, reliable,and highly available system
Authenticated access and audit
Web access for easy deployment and flexible access
An updated data model to store "support profiles" and "monitored components" separately
Bulk Export and Import capabilities for audit purposes and easy setup of new clients and monitored systems
Ability to integrate with monitoring via a browser launch in context of a monitored component
External view access for select client and ITS workgroup users

Ultimately, we plan to expand the functionality and open it up to IT Services Support Groups to maintain their on-call requirements for servers and services that require ITOC's assistance.

I give very special thanks to Greg Janicki, who coded this application from the ground up with the help of Scott Wildy, Anna Pettinati, and Chris Lundin.

- Anne Pinkowski
Application Support

Internet2 and COmanage

In October, Scotty Logan, Jim Leous from Pennsylvania State University, and I presented at the Fall Internet2 Member Meeting in New Orleans. The topic of our presentation was COmanage, an Internet2/NSF-funded project to enable researchers to collaborate and leverage the information at their home institutions without being trapped by the overhead in an institutional identity management system.

COmanage stands for Collaborative Organization Management. COmanage creates—with the installation of a downloadable virtual machine—an environment where people from different organizations with different authentication spaces, different group policies, and so on, can work together without duplicating potentially sensitive information from each of these organizations.

COmanage is not complete. A beta release is due by December 2008. Even so, there are collaborative organizations out there such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) anxious to use COmanage. LIGO in fact is already working with COmanage and taking it a step further by deploying it into Amazon's EC2 cloud computing space. Another group, the Oceans Observatories Initiative is providing more use cases for how COmanage can be used to enable their collaborative research.

Scotty Logan, Digant Kasundra, and Jon Robertson are all working on the COmanage project, along with people from around the U.S. higher education space. This tool is what so many researchers have been waiting for, and we look forward to giving them their holiday gift this year of the COmanage beta release.

For more information on COmanage, go to middleware.internet2.edu/co.

- Heather Flanagan
System Administration

IT Open House Attendees Appreciate Meeting Real People

The annual IT Open House, held for the second year in Arrillaga Alumni Center, again drew an impressive crowd. Online evaluations, received from almost a quarter of the estimated 800 attendees, indicate that despite the popularity of online social networking, people really appreciate face-to-face contact. Comment after comment cited the value of actually meeting and talking with the friendly, helpful people who staffed the exhibits at the Open House. Also mentioned was the satisfaction of matching faces with names and of having the opportunity to talk with colleagues.

Attendees were impressed with the variety of presenters together under one roof. They noted the wealth of information available from IT Services staff, other campus resource providers, and vendors. Many mentioned learning about new services, technologies, and tools that they'd not known of before. And the information flowed in both directions. Exhibitors were happy to talk to so many people who asked good questions. In addition to receiving answers to those questions, attendees said they liked the giveaways and prizes that were offered—although none of their comments matched the sheer joy of the lucky Med School research assistant who won the Lenovo laptop in the lunchtime raffle.

This year's theme, Getting to Green: Pathways to Sustainable IT, struck a chord with many. The Sustainability Contest drew over 50 responses and engaged the community in creative discussion in advance of—and hopefully well beyond—the announcement of the contest winners at the Open House. The Speaker Series featured excellent talks by campus experts on various aspects of sustainability. Unfortunately, the talks weren't as well attended as we would have liked, but they'll soon be available online to share with a wider audience. We hope they will set the framework for ongoing activity in the area of sustainable IT for years to come.

The IT Open House web site will remain live all year as a resource for those seeking information about exhibitors, services, and products. If you haven't already done so, the IT Open House co-sponsors (IT Services, Campus Wide Agreement and the Sustainable IT Group) encourage you to go to the site.

Thanks to all the exhibitors from IT Services, the larger Stanford community, and vendors. Special thanks to the IT Open House Core Planning Team: Crystal Ayala, Debbi Barley, Joyce Dickerson, Ken Flauding, Nuriya Janss, Jim Knox, Jane Marcus, Kathy Rariden, Kevin Stephens, and Carlos Zertuche, as well as valued adjuncts Dave Ream, Marco Wise, and Brian Young. Thanks also to Karen Zack, who took photos.

- Jane Marcus
Service Management

IE&C Rollout To Staff/Faculty Begins

The Stanford Email and Calendar project reached another big milestone; email migration for faculty and staff began October 29. The project team was also able to accommodate several requests to move to the front of the line from folks eager to get started with the new tool before it reaches the rest of the staff in their area. Overall, enthusiasm has been high.

At last month's IT Open House, Jo-Ann and I distributed over 100 copies of our handouts to interested staff. Questions ranged from end-user concerns about syncing to mobile devices, to what desktop email program to use, on up to more technical issues surrounding CalDAV support.

In general, everywhere we go, there's a strong interest in the new Stanford Email and Calendar. At the Internet2 conference last month, Scotty Logan met with colleagues from various universities who are also transitioning to Zimbra and other universities who are also considering Zimbra. Zimbra appears to be making strong inroads in the higher-ed community.

- Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness

Party On, Garth!

Hopefully everyone has marked their calendar for Thursday, December 17th (or noticed the invite via Stanford Calendar) from 5-9pm for our annual holiday celebration. I am the happy coordinator of the party this year and look forward to seeing all of you! We are just finalizing a committee to help with the details of this event—and we’d like to include folks who haven’t helped plan it in the past so we can spread the joy across our collective teams. Please let me know if you are interested! We will be going green this year, so instead of a paper invitation, look for more info about the party in its and bits and your email.

- Suzanne Schiessler
Order Management

October Town Hall Now on the Web

Information from the IT Services October 2008 Town Hall session is now available on the web. You can find the FY09 Three Year Strategic Plan Roadmap and the WebEx archive of the session itself, as well as the presentation materials, on the IT Services internal web site.

- Nancy Ware
Strategic Planning