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March 2009

March 18, 2009

Projects Recently Submitted for Approval

Approval History

No projects were brought forward for review this month. The background on projects previously reviewed by the UTC can be found here.


Emerging Policy Issues

System Reliability with Adrian Sannier

Since January 1st, ASU has experienced five major system interruptions:

  • Incident 1: On the afternoon of January 21/22, DARS degree audits and course catalog searches were unusually and inconveniently slow.
  • Incident 2: From the evening of Feb. 1st to the morning of Feb 3rd, Internet access from ASU was unreliable.
  • Incident 3: On February 5th, wireless access in a portion of the Tempe campus was unavailable. There was also a one hour interruption to My ASU and Citrix.
  • Incident 4: For two hours on the morning of February 16th, Internet access from ASU was unreliable.
  • Incident 5: On February 25th, many of ASU’s Web services were inaccessible for most of the day.

The proximate causes for these five incidents have been determined as follows:

  • Incident 1 arose from an unusually large demand for DARS and Catalog services, a demand far greater than in prior terms.
  • Incident 2 was caused by a latent defect in our border firewall, which a rogue server exploited successfully overloaded the ASU network. Working with CISCO engineers, our team worked around the clock to identify and successfully correct the problem, but only after many hours of interruption.
  • Incident 3 was the result of a flood in BAC.
  • Incident 4 was caused by a mistake made by ASU’s Internet service provider that affected all of its clients.
  • Incident 5 was caused by a failure in the UPS backup system that protects the systems in the University data centers in the event of power outages. The resulting hard reset of the systems in the data center made service restoration complex — it took more than 8 hours to rebuild the systems and restore services.

Over the long run, ASU's overall systems performance is between 2 and 3 “nines.”

That means they are available a little more than 99% of the time. Increasing this reliability to 99.9 will take additional investment. ASU’s primary data centers are more than 25 years old, and while they have served the University well, they were built for a day when IT was a luxury, not a necessity. We’ve helped the situation over the years, with some strategic investments and by working with strategic partners like Google and CedarCrestone. Because data services are our partners’ core business and they operate at scales much greater than ours, they’ve helped us increase our levels of reliability. We’ve also migrated some of the services we run ourselves from our older data centers to some of ASU’s newer facilities. But in doing so we’ve had to be conservative in our spending, moving gradually over time as hardware ages, to consolidate servers and storage and simplify their delivery.
 
The president has challenged UTO to quickly put a plan together to get us a couple more “nines” of reliability. We are hard at work on that plan now. It will suggest accelerating migration out of the oldest data centers, moving additional services to strategic partners, improving power redundancy and backup. And obviously, it will be constrained by the realities of our fiscal situation. But I’m confident we will get the support we need to make things better for our community. 

Change Management & Outage Notifications with Leema Lallmamode

This week ASU will release the first version of a new system to manage the Change Management Process for Technology Systems at Arizona State University. The process, which was  described in the document previously shared with the UTC at the November 2008 meeting, was the result of the work of the UTC Communications Subcommittee. Members will recall that the goal of the Change Management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all Changes in order to minimize the impact of Change-related Incidents upon quality of service and consequently to improve the day-to-day operations of the University. This is done through a formal process of recording, assessing, authorizing, scheduling and effectively communicating changes to ASU’s technology systems.

Leema Lallmamode will demonstrate the new system and describe its various notification mechanisms, including:  

  • Creating a more robust and highly available System Health page to keep the ASU community informed of the progress towards resolving unplanned outages.
  • Using the new E2Campus (ASU Alert) service to push announcements of unplanned outages to members of the ASU Community who wish to receive such information.
  • Announcing all planned outages through the new Change Management System (CMS) and soliciting feedback about certain, high impact changes.
  • Enhancing our notifications so that our messages are clearer, more concise, and more useful to those who are reading them.

You can also read about the Change Management System in UTO Labs.

Dashboards with John Rome

John Rome will give an update on ASU Dashboards and reporting tools.

Narrow Casting with Leah Lommel

Leah Lommel will report on ASU's new narrow casting capability. Narrow casting allows academic and administrative units from around the University to send specialized and targeted messages to identified groups within the University as banner ads incorporated within My ASU, the system login screen and other heavily trafficked locations. The mechanism allows a unit to display an individualized message to a specific group of users and allows those users to click through the message to reach an actionable location.

Preview of Upcoming My ASU Features with Leah Lommel

My ASU is ASU's information portal for students, faculty, and staff. My ASU is the second most popular in the ASU universe with more than 150,000 hits per day and provides users with access to resources needed. Details on the current revision, My ASU 2.5, can be found here.  Leah Lommel will discuss some of the goals and drivers for My ASU 2.5 and provide a preview of upcoming features, including Student Grades, Changes to Ads, Announcements and News as well as a new faculty My Classes box. 

Network RFP with Bob Nelson

In June 2008 ASU released an RFP seeking a network partner. The scope of the service requested included providing the University with all network communications services management and operations personnel, technical support, training, equipment, supplies, materials, systems, and effort necessary to perform the contracted network services at a level of quality that consistently meets or exceeds the University's expectations. In November 2008 Qwest's application to bid was accepted and negotiations began to identify risk, define value, analyze past performance, and create a viable financial model.
 
Bob Nelson will provide the UTC with an update on where this process stands and a timeline for its completion.   

Academic Technology with Adrian Sannier

UTO is seeking input from the UTC in developing a service catalog for academic support services provided at the university level and most appropriately delivered by the UTO. To that end, we will discuss what services are currently being delivered well and poorly by the UTO, what services are currently being delivered at a departmental level both well and poorly, and what new services might be proposed. The UTO is seeking volunteers to form a sub-committee to discuss and recommend.


Strategic Technology Initiatives

ASU on Facebook with Leah Lommel

In collaboration with Inigral, Inc., ASU is launching ASU on Facebook, a Facebook application available to the ASU Community. Students can use the application to connect with other students in their classes, find students from their same hometown, or interact with instructors and/or members of clubs and organizations.


Status on All UTO Projects

The status on all UTO projects can be found in UTO LABS.