Information Technology Committee – ITC October 16, 2015 Meeting Minutes Page 1
Information Technology Committee (ITC)
Monthly Meeting Minutes
October 16, 2015
Welcome and Minute Review (Rafi Lazimy)
Minutes of September 18, 2015 motioned to be approved as presented.
Re-outlining three goals for ITC for the year of 2015-16:
o Focusing on strategic IT initiatives and projects, with special attention to IT infrastructure initiatives as they relate to research computing, teaching and learning, and administrative support.
o The determination of an effective balance between IT services that are best done centrally and those that are best done locally (at the college/school level: distributed IT services).
o Developing recommendations for campus leaders.
Recent comments by the Chancellor about security and data center consolidation, as well as the network and power outages, reinforce the need to assess the IT infrastructure. John Krogman will make recommendations to the Chancellor on the Data Center Consolidation. John would like to form sub groups from MTAG and ITC leaders to help make recommendations to update the data center.
Shared governance should play a major role in considering issues relating to the campus IT infrastructure and the balance between central and distributed IT Services.
In particular, the ITC can play an important role in advising the Chancellor, central and distributed IT leaders, and other campus leaders as IT infrastructure solutions are considered.
The faculty, staff, and students represent a good cross section of campus. The Madison Technical Advisory Group (MTAG) assembles IT professionals from schools, colleges and administrative unites on campus. Together the two groups collected wisdom and experiences, which can be leveraged to help solve IT issues facing the campus.
After consolation with the CIO, COO, and the chair of MTAG (Meloney Linder) the following motion was presented to the ITC regarding the Data Center Aggregation (DCA) project:
“The group of experts at DoIT that have studied the DCA issue in the last several years will prepare a report that outline the various options for the Data Center Aggregation project. These options will then be discussed by a joint ITC-MTAG sub-group and recommendations will be presented to the ITC. After discussing these recommendations in the ITC, they will be presented to the Chancellor and Provost.”
CIO Updates/COO Updates (Bruce Maas/ John Krogman) COO Updates –
o Data Center Power Outage
. The Chancellor is looking to John to supply options for updating the Data Center and the pros and cons to each option.
A group of IT Leaders who have been working on the Data Center Aggregation Initiative for the last 4-5years will come up with options and recommendations that focus on Data Center Aggregation, Facilities, Security, and liability.
Once recommendations are made, they will be presented to a conjoined group of ITC and MTAG members to get governance approval.
Once all options are reviewed, the recommendations will then be presented to the Chancellor.
. John is working with the vendor to create a more proficient response from the vendor on how to handle issues on the emergency aspect.
. FP&M are working to provide more communication on the Data Center Outages.
FP&M have hired a new Safety Director.
o Looking to tie together communications on campus.
Better communications are needed in incidences like the Data Center Power Outages
. No data was lost from the Data Center Power Outages because of the Bucky-Backup Data. Also, there were very few system failures.
. With the Data Center Power Outages, there were equipment failures.
o A pilot is in place in unifying a phone system with Centrex.
. There has been positive feedback and will make recommendations for leadership to move forward with the project because of price increase.
. Contact Eric Alborn if interested in participating in the Centrex Pilot
CCI Updates (Steve Krogull)
Handout of the highlight from the Chancellor on the Campus Computing Infrastructure Reports Presentation
o 2014 Campus Computing Infrastructure design report was accepted by the Chancellor
o Focusing on the aggregation of campus server system.
o Before, there was no structure that focused on creating shared drives, balancing shared drives, looking at the infrastructure of shared storage, or leveraging a lot of visualization infrastructure.
o The Campus Computing Infrastructure prices are comparative to other colleges.
o There are templates being created for simple database environments with similar backgrounds.
o As these templates are sent out, the next step is for CCI to help in setting up services and creating a security baseline which will hold individuals at fault for not following guidelines. Information Technology Committee – ITC October 16, 2015 Meeting Minutes Page 3
. Faculty will be in charge of running their servers and CCI provides a shared infrastructure that individuals can have add-ons if needed. Unless faculty is managing restrictive data, their data should not be placed in a shared server.
There will be training for faculty and staff that they will need to go through to understand the rules and regulations in place for handling restrictive data
o This will hold individuals accountable for their servers.
CIC Security Updates (Bruce Maas)
CIC is the academic group made up of the Big 10 universities and University of Chicago, and is led by the Provosts of those institutions. Provosts created a CIO committee with meets four times a year.
o Security is a significant issue now with research universities being targeted by nation states.
. Rutgers, Maryland and Penn State are three CIC universities that have recently experienced major security issues.
. CIO’s recently pulled together a first of its kind meetings with the FBI and Chief Information Security Officers to discuss how we can work together and share information more effectively. The case in point is that information was not shared in an optimal timely manner that allowed other CIC institutions to address their own risks more quickly. This was discussed as an opportunity for better communication between CIO’s, FBI, and CISO’s about appropriate levels of sharing.
. UW Madison is currently engaged in some pilot scanning and monitoring of the UW network, with advice from other CIC institutions, and in partnership with two private companies. This is an example of how we can help each other.
. The CIC is positioning to take a national leadership role in this area.
. The FBI has committed to working with us in partnership as plans progress.
ACI Updates (Lauren Michael)
Learning how to support Researchers
o Conducting a study, as part of the NSF-funded ACI-REF project, in finding what types of people are needed in place to support researchers.
o Communication is very important when working with researchers and understanding their project on some level
o Pairing researchers with the right facilitator. A facilitator is:
. Someone who has excellent communication skills.
. Someone who will advocate for the needs of their researcher.
. Someone who will make time for the researcher, since researchers of often times are very busy.
. Focusing on helping researchers with their computing.
. Working with other facilitators to find the best practice. . Someone who has diplomacy skills
. Making sure researchers understand what their computing options are.
o Facilitators use pathways to get to researchers by email, 1x1mtg, and office hours.
o Show researchers the researching computing pay-offs
o Creating communities with researchers to share best practices
CHTC is now Serving as a Research Computing Center
o All standard services are free to researchers.
o There has been an increase of researchers’ hours logged, and in the number of research groups reached.
o Researchers with work that can be run with High Computing methods can get up to 30yrs of computing in one day for an individual researcher.
HTC focuses on helping researchers with computing.
Key components of executing HTC work are breaking up workloads and handling a large number of files.
The UW-Madison is taking a lead role in focusing on the human connection around Research computing. Information Technology Committee – ITC October 16, 2015 Meeting Minutes Page 5
Attendance:
Faculty
Ellen Zweibel, Astronomy; Physical Science
Rafael Lazimy (Chair), Business
Joe Salmans, L&S; German, Arts and Humanities
Linsey Steege, Nursing, Social Science
Robert Nowak, Engineering Physics
Academic Staff
Mike Pitterle, Pharmacy
Michael Pflieger, L&S
Non-Voting Members EX Officio
Bruce Mass, CIO and Vice Provost for Information Technology
John Krogman, Deputy CIO and Chief Operation Office of DoIT
Provost Appointments
Nick Tincher, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education
Clare Huhn, Representative of the Provost
Bobby Burrow, Genneral Services, Rep VC for Administration
Mark Sweet, Rep VC for Administration
Campus Liaison, Group
Antonella Caloro, WSB
Alan Silver, Chemistry, Network Advisory Group
Other Attendees
Jason Fishbain, CIO Office
Brian Rust, DoIT Rob Kohlhopp, College of Engineering
Bruno Browning, L&S
Steve Krogull, DoIT
Rick Konopacki, SMPH
Amy Gee, CIO Office