OIT Infrastructure & Production News

There was a really nice turnout for the all-staff meeting on Friday, May 10th. Thank you for making time to be there. The agenda included a presentation by Susan Strubel, ACIO, on the governance process and a sneak preview into some of the demand they're hearing from stakeholders this year. An important fact was that the demand input will be factored into plans for the university's fiscal year 2015 which is a year away. Thank you, Susan, for coming and sharing with us!

Managers and service owners also gave short updates on activities during the past quarter and plans for the next. It was really impressive to hear all of the things that have been accomplished by folks in Infrastructure and Production and what's planned for the summer.

Several people who attended the staff meeting also made it to the OHR Q&A session on the job study results. It sounded like the session went well but that there are still some unresolved issues. I encourage you to talk with your manager or me if you have concerns that haven't be answered. The OIT leadership team is sharing our concerns with the people and OHR and are continuing to work closely with them on this important matter.

I attended the CIC Operations and Infrastructure meeting in Chicago on Monday and Tuesday of this week. This group focuses on many of the same areas that we do: storage, servers, data centers, etc. I met many of my peers from other large universities and had a chance to exchange ideas with them and develop contacts for the future. It's no surprise to you that we all have generally the same challenges facing us. Being able to leverage the ideas of other people will be helpful going forward.

Bernie Gulachek and I met with the TIES group, which is a consortium of K12 school districts in Minnesota, to talk about Internet2 and the SEGP program which allows them to connect to Internet2 through the university. They are very interested in hearing more about what's happening in the high performance networking arena. They told us about the resources they are using for their teaching which underscores the importance of this service and the role we play in making it possible. It's really humbling to hear about the good stuff we are doing for others in the state.

Thanks for everything you do for the university!

The OIT Infrastructure & Production all-staff meeting has been rescheduled for May 10th starting at 10:30 a.m. in Nicholson Hall 35. The meeting was delayed in order to provide a forum for job study-related questions. The job study results are still expected on the 8th of May so this should work out well. There will still be reports from the director and managers and a quick update on the governance process from ACIO Susan Strubel.

This past week I attended the Internet2 annual meeting in Washington, DC. It was a good meeting. I had not attended one of these for seven years so it was good to see old acquaintances and to get caught up on what's happening in research/high-performance networking. I also met partners and friends of the university at the meeting and it was very gratifying to hear how highly we are thought of by our Internet2 peers. That is due, in no small way, to the efforts of Dave Farmer who is widely respected in this community.

One of the things that was new is that Internet2 has started a new service they call "Net+" which is a foray into the cloud services arena. There are several well-known companies that are in the process of making their services available via I2. Some of these may be of interest to us. We'll be paying close attention to what develops. If you want to read more about it you can check out the website.

Speaking of cloud services, the IaaS RFP team met last Friday to make final recommendations on responses to the RFP. Stay tuned for an announcement.

Thanks for all your hard work!

A quick reminder that the Infrastructure and Production all-staff meeting is scheduled for this Friday at 11 a.m. in Nicholson 35. In addition to updates from the director and all of the managers, ACIO Susan Stubel will join us for a report on the early themes of the demand study that drives our governance process. There will also be time for questions and (hopefully) answers.

The presentations from the IaaS vendors are complete. The evaluation committee is meeting this coming Friday to make recommendations on which vendors (if any) should be contracted with. Although I was not able to see all of the presentations, I was impressed with a couple of the vendors and am optimistic that we will find at least one that we can work with. There are interesting possibilities for us especially in the DR/BC areas.

The ITL fCoP met with Huron Consulting last week and spent nearly two hours discussing various issues and brainstorming ideas. I also spent an hour with the consultants describing our infrastructure here at the U and answer questions. Both of these are part of their engagement with the U to identify ways to improve IT services and be more efficient. In addition to IT, they are also looking at HR and finance across the institution.

I'm at the Internet2 annual meeting this week and there are a lot of interesting sessions to go to so I'll have a report in my next blog entry. In particular, I'm planning to attend as many of the Net+ sessions as I can to learn more about what's going on in that area. Several companies that we do business with are partners in that effort. Here's a link to more information if you're curious about what Net+ is all about.

See you at the all-staff meeting on Friday.

An all-staff meeting for Infrastructure and Production is scheduled for April 26th at 11 a.m. in Nicholson Hall Room 35. The agenda will include updates from senior managers and service owners and a Q&A session. Please plan on being there!

Mike Coonrod, Mike Langhus, Dave Farmer, and John Grosen are participating in vendor presentations for the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) RFP. Two vendors presented this week and two more will present next week. Vendors are being asked to present solutions to four hypothetical scenarios: torque cluster, media server, backup target, and terminal services. So far, a broker for Amazon's Web Services (AWS) and another company with an OpenStack-based service have presented. The plan is that one or more vendors will be selected by the end of the April for open-ended contracts that OIT and other units can use to meet the especially dynamic requests for CPU and storage services from the research community.

An RFP has been issued for a consultant to work with OIT to develop a new secure email solution for the Academic Health Center. This solution will be based on Microsoft Exchange and will complete the retirement of GopherMail which has been meeting this need up until now. The system will be hosted on-site so the Windows and storage teams will be actively involved in deploying and maintaining the necessary infrastructure for the service. There are approximately 18,000 users expected to be supported by this system.

Friday, April 5th, was Garrett Kuchta's last day with OIT. Thanks, Garrett, for all you did for the U and best wishes for success in your new position! A search is underway for a replacement. If you know of someone who might be interested please direct them to the posting on the U's employment site.

I would like to recognize and congratulate Service Owner Mike Langhus and the storage team on their work in analyzing the performance of the Isilon storage system. Their work led to a recommendation to invest in new equipment which was supported by a cost/benefit analysis done by Mr. Langhus. CIO Scott Studham referred to the analysis as "a shining example of a data driven analysis. Good job." ACIO Susan Strubel is working with Mike to finalize the purchase of the equipment which we hope to have on-site in the next three to four weeks. This equipment (and reconfiguration of the existing equipment) will resolve our recent performance problems, give us additional capacity to handle continued growth, facilitate a new target for our backup system, and provide research data archival services. Well done, folks!

Many of you have heard from your manager about the timeline for the job study being conducted by the university's HR department. Unfortunately, there have been new issues that have come up that are pushing the timeline back by a few weeks. At this point, we are waiting for the HR department to release their proposed salary ranges for each ladder within the various IT job families as well as their proposed ladder assignment for everyone in IT. Your managers and I will do our best to keep you up-to-date with any new developments.

Patton Fast, Louis Hammond, Dave Farmer, and Mike LeVoir met with the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute to discuss 100 Gb network connectivity in support of the MSI's pending grant application for a new national Big Data research infrastructure. If funded, this project could result in the creation of a new "Research DMZ" for the Twin Cities campus that would aggregate high speed networking connections from the MSI and other data-intensive research facilities.

Mike Coonrod, Louis Hammond, Mike Le Voir, and John Miller presented an analysis of the data center network and the need for 10 Gb connectivity to support our growing virtual server hosting service to ACIO Susan Strubel. The hosting team is currently limiting the memory footprint for new virtuals because of this problem so it is already affecting our service which will have a negative impact on one of the institution's highest IT priorities for this year: server consolidation.

All of the IT formal Communities of Practice are now up and running. If you aren't already participating in one of these please consider doing so (discuss with your manager first!). Several of the CoP's need more help and OIT's participation is important! You can see a list of CoP's here.

UMN HR has released IT job family and ladder level descriptions along with a timeline for implementation. Note this is not the final job assignments for the HR study. It is just the basic information that will replace the current IT job classifications in the near future. Senior managers have the information and will be happy to share it with you, answer questions, etc.

The standard Change Advisory Board (CAB) meeting on February 13th was replaced with a special meeting at which service owners brought guests with them. Patton Fast, EA, gave an overview of the change process in OIT. Then the week's change requests were reviewed to give guests a chance to understand the process and to give input. One of the results of the meeting is that other units that provide enterprise services (University Services, the library, etc.) may begin to use Service Now for their change process and share them with OIT so we have insight into their plans as part of our process.

Mike Langhus convened his Storage Advisory Board for the first time. The group will give Mike advice on his service, help plan enhancements, etc.

There have been some new discussions with the library on OIT's role with their digital preservation project which will require a sophisticated, hierarchical storage system on the backend. In addition, the library is being forced to vacate their data center in the Wilson library on the west bank and is asking for space in WBOB to relocate their equipment.

The Linux team said "so long" to Jon Sulman who left the university to join General Mills as a Linux systems administrator. We wish Jon the best of luck in his new job and hope that our paths may cross again one day.

Discussions with the IT auditor's office have begun in preparation for an upcoming database audit. Brian Dahlin and Patton Fast are assisting in these discussions.

Several managers from I&P attended the ITL CoP meeting on Friday, February 22nd. Charters were written and prospective interim leads for five new CoP's were developed. VP Scott Studham announced that the Data Reporting CoP will not start right away in order to give the Enterprise Data Management and Reporting (EDMR) group a chance to address the issues instead. If this was a CoP you were interested in you are encouraged to seek out the EDMR organizers and offer them a hand instead. Everyone in I&P is encouraged to find a CoP that interests you and get involved.There will be a total of 12 CoP's operating this next year. You can find out more on the IT@UMN web site.

See you at the IT@UMN Community event on Wednesday, February 27th!

Andy Hill, ESUP program manager, announced to OIT Service Owners and Line Managers last week that the new PeopleSoft applications will be hosted on-site. There are two options currently under consideration: Oracle's Exalogic and our existing VMware virtual hosting solution.

Oracle presented their Exalogic application platform to a group of OIT and ESUP staff recently. The Exalogic is part of Oracle's "Engineered" solutions line which includes the Exadata that you are undoubtedly already familiar with.

Infrastructure & Production staff will be working with Tim Gagnier and Mark Powell of the program team to recommend a hosting platform. The latest we've heard is that the program is hoping to make a decision by February 15th.

At the January 17th Infrastructure and Production Quarterly meeting, Patton Fast officially introduced me as the senior director. He gave me the "Key to Infrastructure and Production" which I am including a picture of for those of you who were not able to make the event.

I had an opportunity to make a few remarks after Patton's introduction and I thought I would highlight them in this article because several people from infrastructure and production were not able to be there. In the future, I will use this blog to provide you with updates on significant happenings within OIT infrastructure and production and elsewhere.

I want to answer two questions that I'm sure are on everyone's mind: who is this guy and what are his plans? For the first question, I will give you a quick overview of me professionally and personally.

My Professional Background

I have had two successful careers so far. The first started while I was an undergrad here at the U where I was an on-air personality for WMMR, the student radio station. This led to a short stint in commercial radio as a DJ followed by sales, sales management, and, finally, general management. I worked at stations in Fargo - Moorhead (KQWB AM/FM, KVOX AM/FM) and also in Duluth (WEBC AM/ WAVC FM) during the late 70's and 80's.

Towards the end of my radio career I got my own personal computer (a Kaypro 2x) which I used to write letters, keep budget spreadsheets, etc.). It wasn't too long after that I became more interested in how the computer worked than I was in using it for my work. At the same time, I was becoming disillusioned with commercial radio because stations were becoming hot investment properties leading to frequent ownership changes. So I decided to pursue my new interest in computers and entered graduate school at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, in the fall of 1990 and got a Master of Science degree in computer science in 1993.

My first job in IT was at North Dakota State University where I was hired by a group of researchers to build a computational facility to support their research. I worked every day as a Unix server and network administrator but spent most of my time working one-on-one with the researchers and their post-doctoral students to find solutions to their technical problems. This was probably my best job ever in IT and it really sold me on the land grant mission and higher education.

When the research money ran out, I was hired by the university's central IT organization as a Unix system administrator. That led to managing the systems administration staff, followed by a director's position with responsibility for NDSU's infrastructure (very similar to my role here at the University).

NDSU had responsibility for university system-wide academic technology services which included things like email, Unix shell-access, help desk, as well as managing the state's wide area networking in collaboration with state government and the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

Some of the neat things that I did while I was at NDSU include:

• converting all mainframe-based services to Unix (Sun Sparc/Solaris, IBM RS6000's/AIX, Compaq Alpha's) and retiring the mainframe and, later, to Linux (I think we were one of the first higher ed institutions to do this).


• help to write an NSF grant that funded the creation of NDSU's high performance computing service. My staff designed and implemented the systems funded by this grant.


• developed an identity and service management system (Hurderos) based on Kerberos and LDAP including a developer's API. This system included the ability to differentially authorize access to services at the individual level and was used for all 30,0000+ university system accounts we managed (I still claim Microsoft stole this idea from us for Active Directory! Even now, AD doesn't include the service management piece.)

In 2006 my wife was offered her dream job working in economic development for the City of Minneapolis. We decided to make the move and I quit my job at NDSU without having a job in the Twin Cities. Fortunately, I knew Steve Cawley here at the university and he was very helpful in getting me introduced to the community which led to an opportunity to interview for an IT director's position in the newly formed College of Design. I was offered the position and started there on July 1st, 2006.

During my tenure at the college I had the opportunity to start an IT organization from scratch including developing position descriptions, budgets, services, etc. In addition, I also become active in the IT leadership community at the university and participated in leadership training and a number of joint initiatives with OIT (server consolidation, security policy development, infrastructure planning, and the IT services inventory).

After many years in central IT, the experience of being "on the outside looking in" was tremendously valuable. The relationships I have with the collegiate and administrative directors here at the university are very valuable to me in my new role in OIT and I hope to be able leverage that for our common benefit.

Personal Information

I am married and have two grown children and two grandkids. We all live in the metro area so I get to see the grandkids (and my kids) regularly. As I mentioned earlier, my wife, Beth, works for the City of Minneapolis in economic development and project management. Among many projects, she represented the city during the construction of the Twins ballpark.

I am a private pilot and a member of a flying club where I have served on the board of directors. I am studying the martial arts (Southern-style Praying Mantis kung fu). I am addicted to golf. I read a lot and am also known to smoke a good cigar once in a while.

What Are My Plans?

It's only natural to wonder what the new guy has in mind. In this case, thanks to Patton's leadership and your efforts, the infrastructure and production group seems to be working very well. Everyone in OIT infrastructure and production should be proud of the scalable, reliable systems and services you provide.

My short term agenda is to meet with the senior managers, managers, and service owners in the infrastructure area in order to understand how we organized, what services and functions we provide, what the current projects are, etc. Of course, I'll also be asking to be introduced to everyone else in infrastructure as part of that process.

I'm also planning to meet with the other directors and their managers and service owners to ask how well we are meeting their needs and what their future plans are. This will help inform our own plans for the future and, if necessary, tell us how to fine-tune ourselves to better meet their needs.

In addition to getting to know OIT and the staff, I am also thinking about some other things together with the rest of the leadership team:

• What is the future of infrastructure services in light of the advent of IaaS and other cloud-based services? I know this is something that we are all probably tired of hearing about but it can't be ignored and we have to be thinking about how we are providing value to the rest of OIT and the university now and in the future.


• We also need to think about alignment per VPCIO Studham and President Kahler. We all know about the efforts to get academic and administrative units to align with us. I also think we need to think about how we are going to align with them and, perhaps less obvious, how we align within OIT. Are their instances of duplication of effort that we can identify and eliminate that will bring us more into alignment as an organization?


• We all should be aware of the institutional priorities for IT and how we in the infrastructure and production units can contribute. Certainly we should all identify a Community of Practice to get involved with (with your supervisor's approval, of course).


• We can also think about the services we support and talking with the service owners to ask what we can do to improve them by lowering costs, improving the quality of the service, etc.

Thank you, again, for making me feel so welcome and I am looking forward to working with you over the weeks and months ahead. Please feel free to send me a note or stop by and say hello any time.

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John