Weekly Update 2008-04-25

This week’s topics include: Internet 2 conference notes; extension of Gigabit network service off campus with the Burlington regional fiber ring; EPSCoR RFI distributed; Windows PC vendor evaluation progress.


Good Morning, All,
I spent Monday through Wednesday of this last week at the Internet 2 conference in Arlington, VA. The PDF of my trip report is available at http://sharepoint.uvm.edu/sites/cio/ , under the link “Trip Reports”.
Actually, I spent a good deal of time doing email and in a 2-hr conference call with my Associate VP colleagues (our regular weekly meeting), so it’s surprising that I had 6 pages of meeting notes.
At our ETS directors’ meeting on Thursday, we discussed the evolving situation following VP Gower’s resignation. We don’t anticipate major changes in direction in the near term and so continue to pay attention to business.
On that note, congratulations to the Networking & Telecom staff on a major new success. They’ve connected 106 Highpoint (the other side of Libby’s from Extension/EAS/Procurement/Audit’s office at 19 Roosevelt) into the fiber loop around Burlington, so they now have 1Gb/sec Ethernet service. That building also uses VoIP phones rather than traditional digital phones. It turned out to be less expensive to install the fiber and those phones than to purchase, install, and operate a traditional remote PBX unit.
The side benefit is that 19 Roosevelt will be connected into the fiber loop later this week at 1Gb/sec, too, thus eliminating another leased-line cost.
The Tech Park facility continues to attract interest both on and off campus as clients from various departments and schools on campus and parties from elsewhere in the state consider ways to reduce their equipment management load while still providing services customized to departmental needs. More as other clients “sign up”. This week, we finally finished converting the CoM storage backup system to use the campus enterprise tape backup system.
I continued to work on the EPSCoR RFI this week, circulating it to Legal Counsel, Procurement, and various partners within the state (VT CIO, VSC CIO, St. Michael’s CIO, Vermont Telecom Authority chair, etc.), and on Friday the EPSCoR office shipped the RFI to the 8 or so carriers we’re inviting to submit ideas for providing Gigabit connectivity among the participating schools. We have a vendor conference Wednesday evening. You can get a copy of the RFI at http://sharepoint/uvm.edu/sites/cio if you’d like to see the details.
The Vermont EPSCoR staff held their first video conference with national EPSCoR staff in DC on their own Polycom video teleconference equipment on Wednesday. There will be four units distributed on campus for use by EPSCoR staff and researchers in support of science research. Thanks to the Network and Telecom staff, again, for providing the high-speed connections and isolating VLAN to support that initiative. (And yes, I tested their equipment from DC using XMeeting on my Mac Powerbook G4. Worked very nicely from my hotel room in Arlington.)
We’re nearing the completion of the evaluation of the proposals for Windows-based PCs (desktop, laptop, tablets), and the team of clients who have been working through that process with Depot staff are completing their analyses. We expect a recommendation within a week or so and expect to have new contracts in place by June.
Short update this week, but if you would like to know a bit more about what I was doing, take a look at the docs on the sharepoint site. Should be available to anyone with UVM netid.
Have a great week, all!

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