Operational IT Committee
3:00-4:00 p.m., April 27, 2016, FAC 228D
I. 3:00 – 3:10 VoIP Cost Savings – Update (William Green)
President Fenves had ask us to break it down to a college-wide level. The
VOIP Project hangout was presented and explained.
Q: It looks like things are shifting a bit in billing security; we need to revisit
this topic soon.
A: Yes, It’s on the agenda for next month.
SITAB said the original version of this handout was too complex so we need
to simplify cost savings. They wanted to see the bill before and what’s
being billed now.
President Fenves’s main question is: Are we gaining efficiency by changing
to VOIP?
Comment: In the future if this is used to assess college budgets, we would
want expenditure by unit to be captured in the spreadsheet. The savings
listed are can easily be misread or misunderstood.
II. 3:10 - 3:30 Network Task Force – Charter (William Green)
A while back, the SITAB committee asked us to establish: Should we
continue to operate the network operations manually? It’s been 7 years.
The investment has been lagging while it has been growing. We’ve gone
from 6,000 network devices to nearly 11,000. We’ve gone from 120,000
users to 300,000 today. Bandwidth is up 469%. Based on metrics with TSC.
Notable trends: increasing security demands are driving complexity and
costs We need to step back and look at it. This task force was formed to
look at those. Next meeting next month we’re hoping to look at cost and
funding models.
If we go to one centralized model, there would be cost savings. The idea
was to benchmark other universities and have a comparative study to see
what that would entail.
We just sent out notices of upgrades. Networking specifies models but the
units need to budget but some units are unable to budget it well. The cost
curve is increasing exponentially and so we’re hoping to bend that cost
curve. One example is to move wire connections to wireless. Security needs
is the problem and not spend it on places that don’t need it (iPhone). We
need to focus security to a few things. Move people to more general
models.
III. 3:30 – 4:00 Research Computing – Brief (Dave Pavkovic, Trice Humpert)
Brad had asked us to look at computing. We took a deeper look at research
computing and took a step back on research computing delivery on
campus. When research computing is delivered effectively it is very
beneficial: advances in sciences, improve lives, increasing competitiveness
for major grants, etc. We also met with many researchers to talk about
their states.
Key recommendation: establish a comprehensive model for research
computing delivery at UT. We need a new type of coordination which
includes CSUs, TACC, OSP, VPR, ITS.
It was suggested we talk to more people for more input from different
perspectives. A follow-up for a future meeting will occur.