While most campus members prepare for their winter holiday, many ITS staffers are planning to use this time to roll up their sleeves and conduct important, on-campus maintenance in anticipation of the spring 2007 semester. Here is just a small sample of the planned work to take place over the next few weeks.
Garry Sitz, Director (interim), University Data Center (UDC), reports the following plans:
- A sizable portion of the raised floor space in the UDC is scheduled to be replaced. This project will involve moving old Power Distribution Units (PDUs), electrical devices used to distribute power, and the painting and re-routing of chilled water pipes. No outages are anticipated during this work, scheduled to take place between December 18 and January 5.
- Maintenance will also be performed on UDC air-conditioning units.
William Green, Assistant Director, Telecommunications and Networking (T&N), specifies December 17, January 7 and January 14 as the dates T&N is planning to conduct maintenance across the campus network. On these days, the following work will commence:
- Equipment will be installed in the wireless routers in preparation for the new wireless system to be deployed in spring/summer 2007.
- Resnet upgrade equipment will be deployed in the residence halls, over 5,000 ports at last count. This change will boost port speeds for on-campus traffic.
- T&N also expects to surpass 2,000 wireless access points over the break, with deployments in various departments across campus. A celebration for those who have worked and continue to work so hard to accomplish this work will follow.
- On December 15, a software upgrade to the phone switch is taking place in preparation for the new Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service to launch later in spring (installation is expected in February). No phone outages are anticipated on this day.
Paul Muscato, Manager, Computer Services, ITS Systems, reports that his group will upgrade the current Pharos printing management system to its the latest version in the Microcomputer Facility (MCF), located in the Flawn Academic Center (FAC). Paul adds that if this upgrade goes as planned, all of the computer labs in the FAC will receive the Pharos upgrade in January.
More maintenance news and updates will be reported on the new ITS Services Status Web page.
UPDATE: Dec. 20, 2006. The December 15, VoIP upgrade has been rescheduled for January 12, 2006.
