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Needs for Central Campus IT Services

Position paper

Memo

Re: Position paper on needs for Central Campus IT Services

Draft: Kitch DeGolyer

From: CCC

Date: October 6, 1998

This is a Draft proposal to attempt to define some roles for central academic services. If the CCC could define these bullet points by area of priority, and then consider additional services we can help to create a central unit which would serve the needs of the local academic Units:

1) Tie together the Purchasing power of Academic Units, Student Store and general campus Purchasing to recognize volume benefits and co-ordination in the following areas:

Hardware vendors for support contracts: Central services as a Provider of Central repair facility: Someone suggested that campus could play a significant role in the straight repair of equipment. It was noted I think to my surprise that ASUCLA provides a full service repair site for DELL computers, as well as Macintosh computers. This service doesn’t seem widely publicized — could they meet demand? Should this role be formally expanded? Supported?

Point of contact for vendors: There was recognition that many vendors are often frustrated because the shear size of UCLA effectively prevents them from effectively marketing. They cannot meet with each individual group and cannot provide equipment to each group. So the Central service should provide a point of co-ordination. With a strong concern from the group that such an agency could all too easily become too cozy with specific vendors. The danger is that we tend to be comfortable with technologies that we know and so we only recommend one vendor to the detriment of others. Perhaps specific demonstration units and expertise should be farmed out to different technical groups on campus with the condition that those groups are responsible for demonstrating the software to other groups on campus. There needs to be a system for checks and balances and for the open discussion of adopting vendors and various standards for campus. We are looking for a central point of contact along the lines of the old MIC. The question was asked what was it that made the MIC work? The answer was unanimously Don Worth — Kudos to Don. Our main concern, if such a service were re-instated could anybody do it as well?

Software Licensing and distribution: Campus could provide volume purchase agreements.

Training: Consolidation of Central training resources. Training of users and training of the technical community on campus should be a strong central service. The current availability of Training is lacking and represents a huge role for improvement of central services

Premium Software technical help contracts: UCLA as a campus should have some very high level of software contracts with dedicated support technicians and support contracts that would be specified and available to local C.S.C. We might suggest using the model of the General Networks contract for help with Novell support.

2) Consulting: Identify areas and define the Scope:

As an example Anderson now has to support both HP UX and Suns OS. But, he doesn’t need to add another full time staff person. Neil mentioned that there might be methods that each department could informally collaborate or that Central may act as a clearing-house for providing services. He mentioned a project in which the medical school is developing significant expertise in the management of images and suggested that expertise and facility might be leveraged to other units. Later in our meeting we discussed campus as having the ability to provide temporary systems people and programmers. In essence central would act as a pool for temporary-help and trained personal who are widely familiar with campus systems.

We are at a specific turning point right now in that some of our central units have a great deal of depth and many years of experience in very specific technical disciplines. Something that in today’s market is very rare and should be put to optimal use. If these units are let to slide then the university stands to loose some significant "Intellectual capital". One example of this might be high-end Unix administration.

Unix system administration

NT Enterprise Networking

Novell systems administration

Network consulting & troubleshooting

Loan pool for devices like sniffers:

Statistical Consulting: It was generally felt that this might be of some use — but there was not a lot of enthusiasm. Some of us make use of this service currently and it is useful to have the statisticians come on to our local sites and help people with their projects. It was a concern that the statisticians should be trained to use and feel comfortable with local statistical tools rather than redirecting every project to the mainframe.

G.I.S. Graphical Information Systems: In the group it looked like this might not be very useful outside of perhaps public.

?

3) Undergraduate Computer access - ( CLICC & COMMONS ) :

?

Find out our seat ratio to undergraduates and see what the campus has for their undergraduate ratio. Discover the seat ratio and push for Campus to pick up seat ratio for departments which cannot support individual labs:

Departments need allocation and Campus model for support for Labs which would be available to provide both central and distributed services.

?Alternative: Portable Programs : Financial Aid = requires a different central model providing data storage and drive mapping.

5) Disability Computing:

6) Mass. Storage: Role of Central services as a Data repository and Backup Site:

The use of the campus archivist for archival and retrieval of backup media and other digital media both as long term storage and short-term retrievable storage.

The use of HSM both on a campus level and on a local unit level

The OAC backup project — anyone know the status?

7) Grant development:

Super-computing resources (NSF): who and how much is this used ?

Members of the group that it is very important to provide centralized super-computing. SP2 now provides inexpensive super-computing which is very important to scientific endeavors. State of the art supercomputing is also very important in attracting research staff. It was noted that the evolution and therefore obsolescence of supercomputer facilities is very rapid. It was noted that with improved networking and the work that is currently being done on massively parallel projects - essentially ganging together a large number of personal computers to form a one large distributed processing system is an approach which is under some use at other institutions. It seemed to be widely recognized among the group those different types of computers and computer resources need to be supported and have a role in the full computing infrastructure at UCLA. Neil then asked the question: perhaps all super computing should be located at a Central University of California site — Perhaps we just built a large pipe down to San Diego and rely on a UC resource rather than have each campus run duplicative services.

Clustering - ( NT and Linux ):

Scientific Visualization:

8) Internet technologies: Mail and News Services to local Academic Units: Central campus services should be staffed to provide basic internet services. Central campus services should provide prompt and rapid turn-around problem resolution to local units.

9) Central Services should provide a coordinating role with UCOP . We need to have a campus unit with a role to co-ordinate technical decision making with other UCOP campus's. In return UCOP should provide:

1. Consultative role in co-ordinating technical efforts of each campus
2. Standards and support for internetworking all of the UC campus — there seems to be a huge need to have communications and similar standards between all campus’s in the UC system. This at least to us seems to be a largely un-coordinated effort.
3. Central authentication services
4. Discussed providing a central Hot-site: Standby disaster recovery for units such as the hospitals who need to be back on-line quickly in the event of a disaster.

10) Role of central services as a clearing house for IS Legal Issues:

I think for all of this the Legal issues involved in Information Systems expand well beyond the narrow issues of copyright. It would be ideal to have a central point of contact or a central person — perhaps in the campus councils’ office that is a point person on I.S. issues.

11) Role of central services as an information Resource Center:

If you have information — how do you share it ?

Conclusion:

It seems in our discussion that we are concerned with which central services are offered by campus, but we are more concerned about the nature and principle of those services.

We want services that are competitive with outside services and or better cost. if campus provides central services it should be do so using a competitive model.

We would like to see services with flexibility to meet the variety of needs on campus. Central services should be flexible and able to provide different levels of service to different units.

Local units should have the flexibility to go to outside service providers if we desire better service or a lower cost service.

We would like to see units that have a well-defined program and high levels of communication as they need to rapidly change programs to meet changing technology and changing campus needs. All central services should be guaranteed infrequently changes and should allow local distribution. If there are to be changes then central units must put a premium on communicating those changes to the CSC and general user population.

Local units would like more of a partnership approach with the central units. The following three statements during the meeting might provide guidelines to this effect:

We would like to see central units well supported, we would like to make sure that people who come to campus to provide expertise are well compensated and that there is a commitment from campus to involve and keep these people at UCLA.

Things that should not be done centrally:

Decisions should not be pushed down without significant input from local centers. Local units want to have more of a partnership role with centralized units.

Central units should not have one model that is just pushed down on everybody there should be some flexibility in service levels. Central services should be services that local users can change.

Additional thoughts and conclusion:

When we centrally build systems, should local units be responsible for the population of data? Or should that be done from a central level, Or should that be done from a user level? Specifically we are concerned about future implementations of things like directory services.

There was also concern about all of the student listings. Shouldn’t someone on campus provide a list of students who are enrolled in each class electronically? There was also mention that once a student is accepted they now get a BOL ID immediately so that we can use these ID to immediately distribute information.

Notes for future discussions; CTS & administrative Infrastructure services:

Bruin on line - Where is it going -

Central Services as a Network Provider — It makes sense that campus should aggregate all local campus services onto things like a large T-3 and higher bandwidth. It seems to make sense that campus should provide a service such as CTS that can provide backbone services. The second important condition we wanted from central services is that central services should be flexible and able to provide different levels of service to different units. As an example for all of the people at the table, we all handle our own routing and infrastructure yet there are units on campus which need internet connectivity provided down to the port level. CTS should be able to have both staffing and a service model that is able to meet different campus needs.

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