ITS Highlights

State of Medical Center Address Captured – On September 8^th the 2009 State of the Medical Center address was streamed to hundreds of faculty and staff across campus. The live streaming, as watched from several locations around campus and off campus. Video and sound quality performed perfectly.  

Vanderbilt Student Government (VSG)  – Less than thirty-six hours before the First-year House Presidents and Upper Class Representative elections were to begin, the on-line student voting system developed significant problems related to security certificate and authentication. ITS technicians worked closely with the Vanderbilt Computer Society representatives to resolve these issues … all by end of that business day. On-line elections proceeded successfully.  

ITS Alert Systems Enhanced – ITS updated its homepage with a new “Alert” link that takes viewers to a new page at http://dashboard.its.vanderbilt.edu/, which shows the status of the major infrastructure services provided by ITS. The dashboard was created in response to the community wanting to have greater visibility into the current status of ITS services. 

VUMC Exchange Front End Server Collapse to Vmail (Exchange 2007) – The front end servers for the legacy VUMC Exchange 2003 environment were collapsed into the new Vmail enterprise Exchange 2007 environment to prepare for the transition of thousands of VUMC email boxes to the new system. This was a very complex operation and because of careful planning and communication the VUMC Help Desk received very few problem reports. 

Federation with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Sprint – The Vanderbilt implementation of Microsoft Office Communicator and Unified Messaging is now federated with ORNL. This success enables significantly enhanced collaboration between researchers at Vanderbilt and ORNL.  In addition, Vanderbilt is now federated with Sprint. This too enables enhance collaboration opportunities with our business partners.  

Email Consolidation Project Podcast Continue – Podcasts featuring ITS staffers continue to be released offering updates on the email consolidation project at Vanderbilt. Check it out on the ITS YouTube Channel.  Podcast Studio – ITS worked with representatives of the Vanderbilt Human Resource (HR) team to create podcast presentations using Articulate Presenter to be used in addition to HR training and orientation settings. This is a new outreach method for HR and is an exciting new way they can reach the community at large.

Server Upgrade Increases Security – In an effort to remove remaining Windows 2000 servers, which have severe security vulnerabilities, off the Vanderbilt network, ITS assisted HR with a much needed server upgrade. An old Windows 2000 server was decommissioned and replaced by a new virtual machine (VM) hosted in the ITS data center.

Assisting Public Affairs – ITS staff swiftly responded to server issues in Creative Services to assure continuous availability of that server to the community it serves. What could have been a big problem resulted in minimal downtime.

Operator Services Stats –   During September 2009, Operator Services received 158,846 calls in the call center with a 98.8% answer rate. The team completed 15,579 pager modifications supporting patient care. A total of 417 conference calls were requested and processed through the call center.

Connecting People with People – Vanderbilt publishes a single telephone number, 343-0473, for outbound caller ID that previously offered only a prerecorded message. To better serve the community, that number now has a caller’s menu with the ability to press 1 and reach a Vanderbilt operator. Callers now have access to a person who can assist them and the system now provides reporting on the amount of calls received at that number. This change was implemented on September 21 and in just nine days more than 5000 calls were answered from this number.

Family Initiated Rapid Response Team  - Quick turnaround from ITS proved to be an important win for the Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. Following a tight timeline directive from The Joint Commission, ITS helped to establish Family Initiated Rapid Response in very short order. We created a new phone number ( 1-1111) as the new number to call for a rapid response or STAT calls. Other specialty programming was also necessary to prevent errors in communication between the old phone number and this new one. This work ensured a safe transition for patients, families and staff and greatly enhanced Vanderbilt’s rapid response to urgent patient care issues. 

Infrastructure Success

• Successful move of Anesthesiology Office to new build out space 4^th floor of TVC 28 MAC’s on 9/24
• Move of Perioperative Service’s 4^th floor TVC 11 MAC’s on 9/25
• Completed order for installation of a point to point T1 circuit for VU Student Media Broadcast Studio.  The studio has broadcasted from a tower transmitter between Vanderbilt and WSMV on Knob Hill.  Over the past few years the signal was blocked due to construction of new high rise buildings. Important success that ITS was able to order this circuit under our newly negotiated NetTn contract with AT&T saving the department more than $100.00 a month.
• Phone installs for new H1N1 Clinic in MCE North Tower total MAC’s 16 on 9/8/09.
• Adult and Children’s Blood Bank moved into one facility on 4^th Floor of TVC. The facilities were originally in three locations and the moved had to be coordinated simultaneously, with no down time.  
• Successful installation of IP Telephony (IPT) service for the new Vanderbilt Sterile Processing facility on Brick Church Pike. Sixteen IP telephones, along with five analog lines for cordless telephone functionality and connection to their over-head paging was seamlessly installed.

ITS Tweets – VUITS Twitter account launched to offer technology news and information. Tweets include security alerts, new services, changes to services, and outage information. Follow us today and receive tweets on your mobile phone if you enable the text messaging feature. 

High Availability LDAP rollout – ITS deployed a new highly available LDAP service in August to replace the older legacy system.  Directory services and authentication through LDAP for VU and VUMC business applications is now redundant with a much higher level of business continuity. It also has a solid presence on the medical center’s network, which was not previously available. 

White Coat Ceremony Captured – On August 14^th in Chapman Courtyard, the Vanderbilt University Medical School convened the White Coat ceremony to welcome the incoming class of 2014 by presenting them with the white coats traditionally worn by MDs in front of family, friends and Medical School faculty.   ITS has been streaming this event to the web since 2005 and for the first time this year, delivered a Flash-based stream for easy cross-platform viewing by a live audience and a Flash archive for later playback. 

Collaboration Technologies Continue Upward Trend – Audio conferences, video conferences, web-based multimedia conferences, and all collaboration activities are on the increase. The Vanderbilt unified communications pilot has also been well received with nearly 500 users and rising. 

ITS Supports United Way – Vanderbilt’s 2009 United Way campaign needed webpage and authentication changes in order to kickoff on time. Coordinators reached out to ITS and we expedited the changes to a successful outcome. Let the campaign begin! 

Antivirus Update – McAfee antivirus software is available to the institution free of charge for installation on both work and home PCs. McAfee software was recently upgrade to the latest version release, which offers even better protection from the latest viruses and malware. The ITS Desktop Support team also completed an intense project to upgrade McAfee on over 1500 PCs in the Division of Administration. 

Server Moves Support SSN Security – On August 14^th, Six co-located servers belonging to the Commodore Card Office and Dining Services were moved from behind the ITS firewall to behind the MIS firewall. This move accomplished two things.  First, it moved these servers from behind the ITS firewall that is due for life cycle replacement in 2010.  Secondly, moving these servers to the MIS network is the final phase of an 8 month project to prepare for removing the SSN as an internal source of identification.  

Nagios Upgrade – The Nagios systems monitoring service was updated to new hardware to correct performance issues and to upgrade to the latest version, which greatly enhances the availability of the data Nagios collects. The migration went very smoothly and reliability and availability levels are greatly enhanced. 

Dreamspark Available for Students – Dreamspark is a program offered by Microsoft where students may download Microsoft development software tools at no charge. These tools are very expensive to the general public and include software from OS programming to game development. Offering them as a free service to students offers new ways for students to write and develop software programs that enhance their education and research opportunities. The ITS federated identity management service (Shibboleth / InCommon) enables Vanderbilt students access with their VUnetID.

Windows 2008 Active Directory Testing Underway – In collaboration with NCS, Active Directory Windows 2008 testing environment and efforts were kicked off and made available to the community.  Anyone who interested in testing how their applications will perform after Active Directory is upgraded to Server 2008 is welcome to participate in this effort. 

DHCP Migrations – Migrations of DHCP to the new DNS/DHCP infrastructure over 70% complete. 

Franklin Bone and Joint joins Vanderbilt – ITS staff coordinated the mailbox creation and domain changes for the Franklin Bone and Joint Clinic, which was acquired by Vanderbilt in July 2009.  ITS assisted with over 100 mailbox creations, email address changes, shared mailboxes, and other business needs related to IT infrastructure. 

Email Consolidation Podcasts – ITS posted another podcast about the email consolidation efforts. Check it out on the ITS YouTube Channel. 

ITS Homepage Enhanced – The ITS homepage was updated to include service outages as well as scheduled maintenance. A new link to our Twitter account was also posted on the top menu. 

Phone Moves/Adds/Changes – ITS managed phone migrations and changes for many groups in the month of August:

• The A&S Deans Office Advising Center moved into room 225 in the Commons.
• Dermatology moved from three separate locations to Vanderbilt Health 100 Oaks.
• Undergraduate Physics Lab moved to the 3rd floor Physics Bldg in the Stevenson Science Building.
• Added an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) application to the phones in Peabody Graduate Admissions in order to track the volume of calls received by the office.
• Cohen move-in included 35 phones installed and 114 data activations.

 Operator Services Stats – During August 2009, Operator Services received 155,626 calls in the call center with a 98.9% answer rate. The team completed 15,612 pager modifications supporting patient care. A total of 357 conference calls were requested and processed through the call center.  

Construction Update:

1. Planning continues on the Hill Data Center Construction/Expansion Phase 1 project.  Construction is due to start approximately mid October.  The completion of December 31^st, 2009 is still in reach.  The budget for this project is in line with the initial plans.
2. The Library Archive Annex (now named 21 North) is complete and billing has been finalized.  The network operations there are like the Sharondale location as originally intended.
3. Cohen Memorial Hall project is nearing completion.  Access points for wireless coverage and project charging are being finalized.
4. The Freshman Physics Lab renovations and infrastructure complete.
5. Seven new offices were created for the Freshman Advisors in the Commons Center. This space was originally occupied by the Copy Center.
6. The Army ROTC requested estimates to add voice and data to some classroom areas in the 1114 19^th Ave Building.  A few telephone lines were moved.
7. The Bridgewave technology for redundant network services for 16^th Ave. has been installed and activated.  Testing to be done early in September.
8. Work continues on the Sprint University Building Coverage Project.  A final plan is complete.  The pre construction walk through is planned for September 9^th and 10^th.  This will be a 6 to 9 month rollout.
9. Planning is underway for the Old Gym to be occupied upon completion for Enrollment Management.
10. Planning and development in progress for a grant to improve the Hill Data Center space for more efficient energy usage, as well as, to optimize space and cooling. The deadline for submission is September 17^th, 2009.  The award is expected anytime between early Spring 2010 to Fall 2010 for $10,000,000.
11. A new blue light emergency phone is being deployed at the northeast corner of Cohen Memorial Hall.  This phone will be visible on the promenade.
12. A multi-vendor cellular solution RFP has gone out for the Children’s Way Garage.  Proposals were due back on August 27^th, 2009.

Updated Vanderbilt Web Environment – ITS successfully completed a project to upgrade 9 enterprise web servers to the latest software. The project upgraded the web servers from PHP4 and MySQL4 to PHP5 and MySQL5. The upgrade touched 1015 web directories owned by groups throughout the Vanderbilt Community and now provides web site owners increased web tools and functionality. 

Streaming Services enables Diabetes Research and Education – ITS Streaming Media Services recently completed a summer long series of lecture captures for the Diabetes Center; eighteen sessions in total for rising second-year medical students participating in the Summer Research Training Program.  The Center needed a way to share the lectures given to twenty-seven students working with diabetes researchers at Vanderbilt with nearly two dozen sites across the country.  ITS captured and converted the lectures to Flash video then posted them to the SRTP website for sharing with the other institutions and review by the local audience.  The service was so well-received that we’ve been asked to also capture the program’s capstone lectures being held at Vanderbilt August 5^th & 6^th. 

Streaming Services for Nursing School Pinning Ceremony – The School of Nursing’s annual pinning ceremony moved back to Langford Auditorium for the first time since the facility re-opened earlier this year after two years of extensive renovations.  The volume of family, friends & supporters of this year’s graduates overwhelmed the seating capacity of the auditorium, so ITS was contacted to provide “closed circuit” streaming as in put to the projector in the overflow room in Light Hall, which also turned out to be filled to capacity – our streaming was the only view of the event  for several hundred people.  The test session for this event was so well received that we were also asked to capture the live feed for streaming as a Flash archive. 

Enabled Smooth Transition for Newly Acquired Cardiac Clinic – ITS facilitated the creation of mailboxes and Domain Name Services changes for Cardiac Clinic at Murfreesboro.  Vanderbilt acquired this clinic and thirty plus staff needed VUnetID’s, emailboxes, and changes made to Vanderbilt mail gates to allow the routing of their old domain email addresses.   The mail started routing through Vanderbilt on July 31, 2009. 

LIfeflight Backup and Support – ITS staff facilitated the engineering and quotes for a disaster recovery site for Vanderbilt Lifeflight at One Hundred Oaks.  Preliminary cabling and equipment purchases are in process.  ITS will install the telephones once completed.  This site will give LifeFlight a flight control center should their space at VUMC become unavailable. 

Imaging Sciences Enhanced through new DNS routing – ITS staff worked with Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Sciences to allow email routing through special internal networks.  The new DNS service ITS deployed made this long-requested service a possibility. 

Dermatology at One Hundred Oaks a Success – ITS facilitated the installation and moves of over 130 telephones for the Dermatology clinic at One Hundred Oaks.  The One Hundred Oaks location includes the convergence of several separate Dermatology clinics through-out Vanderbilt.  The clinic opened for business at One Hundred Oaks on August 3. 

Dreamspark Services for Students – Dreamspark is a program offered by Microsoft where students may download Microsoft development software tools at no charge. These tools are very expensive to the general public and include software from OS programming to game development. Offering them as a free service to students offers new ways for students to write and develop software programs that enhance their education and research opportunities. The ITS federated identity management service (Shibboleth / InCommon) enables Vanderbilt students access with their VUnetID. 

Enhance Phone Service for VCH – ITS implemented a new phone application for Children’s Hospital Primary Care Clinic during July. This gives the department new statistics on the number of calls they Triage for patients. ITS also programmed a caller’s menu in both English and Spanish that transfers callers to an Interpreter service and back to Vanderbilt  to assist parents in making appointments for a sick child. Previously, this was not possible and was quite challenging to manage during peak times.  

New ePassword infrastructure D/R Testing and go-live – Disaster Recovery testing was carried out on the new e*password infrastructure prior to the cut over on August 2nd, 2009. A full disaster recovery test was performed to simulate the loss of the Hill Data Center and was found to be both successful and a learning experience for all of those involved. The new E*password LDAP service went into production which offers a stable LDAP service on a new geographically-diverse RedHat Linux systems which are load balanced by F5 LTM’s. The new LDAP service is now resilient in the event of a server or site outage.  

Hill Data Center Reconfiguration: The Network Operations Center has been engaged in the shifting of cabinets within the administrative area to adhere to industry accepted best practices for the past nine months. This re-alignment has allowed the data center to more efficiently utilize the cooling systems available and to house up to 47 computing racks versus the previous configuration maximum of 42. In addition to re-alignment of the racks, an effort was undertaken to seal all air leaks in the entire data center and the implement blanking panels to reduce mixing between hot and cold aisles. Positive results have already been seen in the data center through the reduction of temperature alarms, even during preventative maintenance.  

Email Service for New Acquisitions - Email routing and mailboxes have been established for two newly acquired businesses; The CardiacCenter of Murfreesboro, and Franklin Bone and Joint. Each with its own uniqueness’s and built to delivered the requested functionality of these two new entities by the ITS Electronic Messaging team.  

Google Search Appliance – In a joint venture with Public Affairs, ITS Application Hosting has deployed a new Google Search Appliance to replace the old Ultraseek service. The new appliances allows for new levels of search scalability, with customizations through various API’s, which will enrich the search quality throughout the Vanderbilt environment.  

OSIS Upgrade Completed – ITS Application Hosting assisted AMCOM in the upgrade of OSIS from version 4.0.63 to 4.5. The upgrade to the new version of the software allowed for the lifecycle replacement of old equipment and the upgrade of the operating system. For the operators, this upgrade brought enhanced call handling features, improvements in the console, and an improved Smart Web application that provided more flixibility.  

Exchange Consolidation Project – Exchange 2007 met the milestone of over 2000 mailboxes in July. The achievement was mostly possible by partnering with the Law School staff to move all of their available mailboxes from legacy systems to the new platform. The team also began mass migration from VUexchange2003 and is on track to complete migrations from VUexchange2003 in mid-August. 

Enhance Desktop Support – Desktop Support has devised a way to automate Office 2007 installs for its users where they click a link and the install takes place without any prompts.  The install is much faster than before and can be done without oversight of desktop support analysts. Then enables the desktop support team more time to respond to other customer requests. 

Network Equipment Lifecycle – In an effort to maintain availability and serviceability of our network gear, ITS Network Services has begun another year of lifecycling network equipment.  This year consists mostly of residential dorms, but has some academic areas too.  As of July 30th, we completed 191 out of a total of 332 pieces of network gear, or 30 buildings.  This effort began on June 25^th and is targeted to be completed on November 23^rd. 

Update to Student Voice Network – This will allow for more effective utilization of the voice network hardware and provide more efficient call routing. We applied a software patch to the Student Voice Network that will resolve issues with blocking outbound caller ID and ACD auto answer functionality.  This patch was applied to the Student Voice Network in advance of installation in the Admin Voice Network. 

Operator Services Stats—During July 2009, Operator Services received 151,092 calls in the call center with a 98.3% answer rate. The team completed 15,818 pager modifications supporting patient care. A total of 339 conference calls were requested and processed through the call center. 

Construction Update for July 2009

1. We assisted in the phone moves and data activations for the residence of Kirkland Hall.  Move will be completed after the renovation of 2 suites.
2. Work is underway to add signage to the Hill Center Lobby. Signage and seating is planned for this area.
3. Work continues on the Hill Data Center Planning and Design.  Construction is expected to start in September. Hardaway Construction has been hired as the General Contractor. Smith, Seckman, and Reid is working on the mechanical design.
4. Planning is getting underway to renovate the Old Gym.  This renovation will create a training and presentation area.
5. Work on the Freshman Advisor’s Offices in the Commons Center has been in progress.  Their move-in is planned for August 17^th.
6. Cohen Memorial Hall is almost finished.  Data activations, the elevator phone, building control monitoring, and security cameras have been activated for inspections and further work in preparation for move-in. A new Blue Light phone is being added to the southeast corner  of the property around Cohen Hall.
7. One Hundred Oaks has been outfitted with new Sprint cellular equipment to receive the best in cellular coverage.  University building coverage improvements are in the planning stage.
8. Library Archive Annex being called 21 North is operational with IP telephony and data in full operation.

Exchange Consolidation Project - ITS is managing a project to consolidate three email services into one at Vanderbilt. To learn more about the project, check out the podcast, the webpage (must have a VUnetID to view it), the twitter site, or the blog. 

Hill Data Center Expansion and Renovation - Work began on Phase 1 of the Hill Data Center expansion and renovation project.  This phase will consist of additional air handling, more electrical capacity, and enlarging the existing Data Center to prepare for the additional expansion phases required to meet increasing demand for data center space at Vanderbilt. 

Identity Management Improvements – Dan Nanto, Director for Infrastructure Development and Directory Services, explains plans for improvements to the identity management infrastructure at Vanderbilt in his new podcast. He presented this information to several departments across campus and academic IT directors in an effort to describe upcoming improvements and seek feedback. It has been very well received. 

Improved Sprint Coverage – Sprint Cellular Phone coverage in 100 Oaks will be completely operational by 7-3-09.  This is the 1^st phase of the Sprint Cellular University Building Coverage Project. 

Private IP Addressing – Private IP addressing (RFC 1918) capabilities have been deployed in the Vanderbilt campus infrastructure.  This allows for non-routable IP addresses to be used internally to Vanderbilt, with no visibility on the Internet.  It also helps alleviate the shortage of publicly registered IP addresses.  

Network Equipment Lifecycle – In an effort to maintain availability and serviceability of our network gear, ITS Network Services initiated another year of life-cycling network equipment.  This year consists mostly of residential dorms, but has some academic areas too.  As of June 29^th, 25 out of a total of 332 pieces of network gear have been replaced in 7 buildings.  The effort began June 25^th and is targeted for completion by November 23^rd. 

New Engineering Building – Provided voice and data connectivity to a new building location for Engineering (ISIS) locate at 1025 16th Ave.  This consisted of a new fiber optic cable connection to the main campus that will carry data and IPT traffic.  A backup connection using wireless technology is currently being installed as well. 

Data Center Hosting and Storage for Emergency Medicine – The department of Emergency Medicine needed additional online storage for software and systems supporting their department. ITS provided 3 units of precious rack space in the Hill Data Center for their raid-array providing professional conditioning and power. The only other option was unconditioned space at Oxford House. 

Leadership IT Service Coordination – Changes in top leadership at VUMC precipitated a series of IT service migrations that had to be executed perfectly. These high profile relocations for  Dr. Balser, Dr. Jacobson, Dr. Stead, Vanderbilt Center for Better Health, and the Curb Center were all completed with no issues. 

Updated Web Environment and Website Migrations:  Vanderbilt’s migration to the new PHP5/MySQL5 Shared Web environment was completed in June.  The project consisted of building, testing and migrating several hundred websites that support departments across campus. Several departments needed this new environment in order to support their web programming needs. The updated environment gives the web community access to newer versions of PHP and MySQL and brings a more robust and secure rule set.   

Web Search Engine Replacement:  New Google search appliances were deployed in June as a replacement to the UltraSeek search engine that is out of contract in July.  The new Google appliances enable Public Affairs the ability to ensure appropriate “spider” settings and allow customization of the user interface.  Testing is scheduled to complete in early July allowing for production availability in mid-July.  

Conference Calls Reach Far and Wide – Operator Services coordinated a total of 456 conference calls in June, which is a new all time high. Audio conference calls are available for 4 to 16 participants from anywhere in the world. Recent calls included participants from Mozambique. 

Operator Services Stats—During June 2009, Operator Services received 187,599 calls in the call center with a 98.7% answer rate. The team completed 18,836 pager modifications supporting patient care.  

Web Streaming Growth—For the first time, both the Undergraduate and Medical School commencement ceremonies were streamed live concurrently and also for the first time, both were delivered in the Flash format to allow for cross-platform compatibility.  These events wrapped up a week of streaming activities that included the final event of the 2008-2009 Thinking Out of the Lunchbox lecture series at the Downtown Public Library, live streaming of Pulitzer Prize-winning Senior Day speaker Doris Kearns Goodwin and archived streaming of all four Senior Day “Study Break” lectures presented by Vanderbilt faculty for parents of this year’s graduates.  These events and others throughout the month helped make this the busiest May for streaming since the launch of Streaming Media Services in 2006.
 
Federated Access to NIH Enables Trusted Collaborations—Vanderbilt now has InCommon federated access with the National Institutes of Health and other institutions thanks to new technology implemented in ITS. InCommon eliminates the need for researchers, students, and educators to maintain multiple passwords and usernames. Identity providers manage the levels of their users' privacy and information exchange. InCommon uses Shibboleth authentication and authorization systems to enable scalable, trusted collaborations among its community of participants.

New Website for ITS—In an effort to utilize a content management system, and after much work, ITS went live with a new website on May 31. The new ITS website features a new format including three prominent new buttons for those who are “New to Vanderbilt”, “Need Help”, or need “Services A to Z.” Other new features include a focused search capability just for the ITS website and Quick Links to top search requests. News items and scheduled outages are also featured along with a new section highlighting ITS podcasts – all with RSS feed capability.

Enterprise Identity Management Expands—The next phase of identity management at Vanderbilt is explained in a new podcast available on the ITS website. The University Registrar and academic IT leaders recently provided additional input to this effort.

New Radiation Database for VEHS—Provided project management and IT infrastructure enabling a new home for the Vanderbilt Environmental Health and Safety (VEHS) radiation database. VEHS is required to track all hazardous material stored on the Vanderbilt campus along with its location and users. The new database now resides on enterprise servers in the ITS data center.

Red Phones for VPD—ITS worked with VPD to test and assess Red Phone coverage in their area. The Red Phone system is designed to ensure that strategic locations have a working phone at all times. Based on the outcome of the assessment, additional Red Phone coverage will be added to 111 28th Ave Headquarters building.

Health Plus and HR Active Directory cleanup—Desktop Support worked to configure PCs in these areas to DOA standard naming convention and cleanup the inventory database.  This reduces Active Directory clutter making it easier to identify the PC’s location and owner, enhancing support.

Timing and Ingenuity—On May 26, Desktop Support was notified by Plant Operations that due to a Kronos (time clock) upgrade, they needed a software update on 91 PCs by June 8.   On May 28, they notified ITS the upgrade was moved up and all updates must be completed by June 1.  ITS staff devised a way to successfully push the updates to all 91 PCs – working into the night to make this happen in the required time frame. This was critical because Plant Operations employees would not have been able to access the time clock on June 1 or after.

Dave Matthews, Meet Dave Mathews—When the Dave Matthews Band recently played at Vanderbilt Stadium, the ITS Network Services team, led by our own Dave Mathews, coordinated additional data connectivity services to support the concert on campus.

Microsoft Service Center Operations Manager Audible Alerts—ITS Windows Administrators deployed MS Service Center Operations Manager (SCOM) clients to the Network Operations Center (NOC) with audible alerts.  This deployment will greatly enhance automated monitoring capability for the Windows environment and alert the NOC staff of critical issues.

Windows 2008 Server Configuration Optimization—Windows Administrators discovered that hibernation is the default on all Windows 2008 Server installations potentially consuming large amounts of disk space depending on the hardware in the server.  By optimizing server configurations 8GB of storage was reclaimed for every Windows 2008 server.

Operator Services Stats—Operators Services received 146,376 calls in the call center with a 98.5% answer rate. The team completed 14,277 pager modifications supporting patient care. A total of 363 conference calls were requested and processed through the call center.

Construction Update:

• The first department of the School of Engineering moved in to 1025 16th Ave.  The Future Combat Systems Group moved in to suite 303.  The Vanderbilt network was extended to the location on 31 poles between the Hill Center and the new building. This is also our first installation of analog IP for analog and single line applications such as conference phones, fax machines, and cordless phones.
• Arts and Science Micro Computing Lab moved in to the Center Building.  This allows for this department to reside in 1 location.  They have occupied a suite not occupied by Vanderbilt staff in the past.
• A final walk through of the university buildings has been completed to determine the design of the Sprint cellular coverage system to be deployed for improve coverage.
• Work started on the Sprint Cellular coverage in 100 Oaks.  This location was part of the Sprint University Building Cellular Coverage Project. The anticipation completion date is July 10th.
• The Vanderbilt Departments at Loews Vanderbilt Plaza have opted not to have backup network connectivity to the main campus.  Office of Investments and General Counsel will try to include in the 2011 fiscal year expenses.

Vanderbilt Health One Hundred Oaks – Completed Phase 1 of the initial move to 100 Oaks.  Since this phase began in January, we have moved or installed 1,123 phones.

Wireless Network Expanded – Provided expanded WiFi coverage based on a request from Vanderbilt Student Government (VSG). A total of 8 APs were deployed in Calhoun, Wilson, and Furman Halls. 

10Gbps Network – ACCRE proceeded with further testing of the 10Gbps connection for research networking.  They have been transmitting a steady 1 Gbps rate with peaks up to 5 Gbps.

Sprint Contract Signed – ITS staff worked many hours with Sprint to clarify and outline a new contract that will improve coverage in 81 buildings on campus and 100 Oaks. This effort is an example of the continued cooperation and positive business relationship between Vanderbilt and Sprint.

Special Events – ITS deployed telephones for the Ronald McDonald Telethon at the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital and the Dave Mathews Band concert. There were 439 calls answered during the 3 hour telethon that raised $127,526.00 for the Ronald McDonald House. The concert required ITS to deploy 5 data network connections and 6 voice lines, including work with Ticketmaster to configure their systems for the Vanderbilt wireless network.

DOA Desktop Support – DOA Support completed successful migration of the Printing Services shop floor production application to an upgraded VM environment.  The solution saved Printing Services anywhere from $6,000 to $12,000 for hardware & software upgrades. This included a major upgrade of the production application, and was moved from an out-of-warranty hardware environment to a new Virtual Environment within the ITS Network Operations Center.  Over 120 hours of I.T. labor was provided at no cost to Printing Services. This solution serves the community by removing old inefficient hardware from the Data Center.

ITS Photo Delivery System – ITS worked with Card Office staff to deploy photos to systems that access certain people information databases. Certain VUMC On-Call systems can now display the face of the doctor on call in addition to their name and contact information. This is a much needed enhancement to their systems and processes.

Aid for Financial Aid – Financial aid turned off a physical server located in their office and is now providing file and print services utilizing the ITS provided Network Attached Storage (NAS) and centralized print servers.  Data is now located in the ITS Data Center with all the ancillary services it provides (e.g. cooling, restricted physical access).  Technology Support enrollment Management (TSEM) team, who provides support to Financial Aid,  no longer has to life cycle the server hardware or apply Windows security patches which will lead to less administrative overhead. 

Law School Enhancements – The Law School replaced their two existing SLQ servers with a new SQL Cluster enabling them to provide high availability to all their locally provided services.  ITS provided the additional network ports, storage, and rack space temporarily in order for them to build, test, and migrate existing services to the new environment with very little down time.

Video Conferencing Supports Dissemination of Knowledge – The ITS video conferencing bridge facilitated a Vanderbilt Operating Room (OR) demonstration of surgery using a robotic arm and remote camera.  We enabled connectivity between a Vanderbilt operating room and a facility in Orlando that was responsible for streaming the images to doctors and med students at both US sites and international locations.  The video showed images of what the doctor was seeing through his eyepiece as the surgery was being performed.   Bi-directional audio allowed the surgeon to provide commentary as he was operating, and to hear and answer questions from the remote viewers. 

Improve the Business

School of Medicine Match Day! – ITS Streaming Services coordinated a support effort to help assure successful video-streaming of the Med School’s Match Day event on Thursday 3/19, in which 4^th-yead med school “seniors” learned where they will go to do their residencies after finishing med school.   The streaming event was produced by staff of the Med School Media Center using their MediaSite recorder and the MediaSite server hosted and administered by ITS. 

During the event, various systems were monitored by ITS Streaming Services, ITS Network Security, and VUMC Network Security.   ITS Streaming Services also coordinated with ACCRE to defer some planned network traffic that would have contended for bandwidth at the Med Center security perimeter during the event.The streaming event was a clear success. 

During its 90 minutes from 11:00 to 12:30, 677 different IP addresses connected to the Media Site server to view at least part of the event.  At peak load, there were 362 connections to the server, amounting to 105 Mbps of streams to viewing clients.   Viewership peaked at 11:38 AM.  In addition, in the first hour following the event there were 152 connections made to view all or part of the archive of the event.In pre-event planning, bandwidth contention at the Med Center security perimeter was judged the greatest risk to the streaming. 

At 12:16, traffic through the Med Center firewall and IPS reached 580 Mbps of 600 Mbps available, with 8 ms latency.  (At this point connections to the Media Site server had dropped to about 300, using 82 Mbps of bandwidth.)  This was the greatest contention observed during the event and did not appear to affect the quality of the stream. 

New Mailing List Software – On March 4, ITS completed the transition to a new email list service. This brings Vanderbilt’s email list collaboration ability from a decade and a half old to modern technology adding numerous features, architecture options, and capabilities. ITS migrated 2053 active email distribution lists after deleting more than 650 lists no longer in use. The transition to the new service was coordinated with 674 list owners.

To assist list owners and support providers, three help sessions were held in the first ten days of service along with daily FAQ messages and extensive information on the newly updated listserv website. The new service provides subscribers, moderators and owners with a more functional and well documented web interface. Three types of pre-defined are available: announcement only, moderated discussion, and un-moderated discussion.

The new service has tools to deter spam and maintain subscriber lists. Multiple owners and moderators as well as a dashboard with list usage statistics are also features of the new service.

ACCRE – In collaboration with VUMC Network Computing Services (NCS), the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science (VUIIS), and the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education, ITS worked to enable an extremely large computing backup job to run across the network from VUIIS to ACCRE without traversing security perimeter devices (firewall and IPS), between the VUMC and VU networks where bandwidth is at a premium. Implementation of a new central data server at VUIIS necessitated a new full initial backup of about 12 terabytes of data on the backup service operated by ACCRE.  ITS and NCS built a temporary network path from Hill Center to VUIIS, effectively extending the 129.59 network into the VUIIS facility.  Across this link the backup job was able to run at the extraordinary speed of 70 MB/s or 550 Mb/s, with no impact on the traffic passing between the two networks.

Admin phone upgrade – One month after a major upgrade to the telephone system and all is well. No new issues, new (and old) phones are being deployed without incident, work orders are smoothly being processed, and there is nothing really to report from subscribers.The expanded ability to support IP Telephony will become more and more evident as departments opt for that type of service. Planning is also underway to implement a change to the internal voice network protocol change to NEC's Peer to Peer Fusion technology.

Research Grant Support – Associate Professor Clare McCabe’s DURIP (Defense University Research Instrumentation Program) grant proposal has been approved for funding.  ITS provided a letter of support for this application, as well as other pending research grant proposals by others at Vanderbilt. ITS plans to support this grant by offering space in the data center – an ever shrinking resource. This is a great illustration as to how computational research is thriving at Vanderbilt with constantly increasing data center needs.

Cellular Coverage at Vanderbilt – Over the last few years and months, efforts have been made by three cellular vendors to improve coverage on campus and within various buildings. Future work is planned as well.

Over the last few years, continuing through very recent upgrades, Sprint enhanced and expanded coverage in VCH, VUH, MCN, TVC, MCE North and South Towers, among others. Enhancements to coverage at Vanderbilt Health 100 Oaks are also in the works.

In 2007 Verizon Wireless completed enhancements within VCH adding in-building coverage to ensuring phone service on all floors. Verizon continues to survey VCH to identify areas for improvement. Verizon is also coordinating the deployment of a macro cell site scheduled for installation on the rooftop of the Institute of Imaging and Science Building. Once complete, they plan to conduct a study to identify additional coverage requirements at MCN, VUH, TVC, VICC, Preston Research, MCE, and MRB IV. Their commitment is that within 2 years from completion of the macro cell site, they will provide coverage for over 90% of the areas identified provided standard installation is required. Any unusual construction requirements requiring substantial additional investment will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Verizon also conducted a site survey at Vanderbilt Health 100 Oaks, and found that coverage was acceptable. Verizon representatives stated their company is committed to make the investments need to our network to maintain our highest standards of operations.

AT&T has been working since last year with infrastructure departments at Vanderbilt, identifying coverage gaps as well as possible locations for their equipment. They’ve walked through VUMC areas and developed implementation plans to improve and expand coverage. They are about 80% of the way through their internal processes to approve these enhancements to their coverage at VUMC.

Security Presentation – End User Services and Network Security provided a security presentation for Procurement and Disbursements Services.  The goal was to raise awareness and educate users about how to stay safe on the internet by highlighting malware, phishing, and basic security for the desktop.  EUS plans to offer the presentation to other departments in the Division of Administration with expansion to other departments and divisions as requested.

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Voice Network Upgrade – The last weekend in February was marked with a major milestone and accomplishment for the Vanderbilt voice network. The hardware and software for the voice network were successfully upgraded with very minimal downtime. IP telephony services are fully available across all parts of the network; out-of-lifecycle hardware was replaced; and the software was advanced 8 versions ahead of where it had been. This accomplishment was the result of months of planning and hard work by the ITS project implementation team, with a great deal of coordination between ITS teams, Vanderbilt departments and the vendor. Vanderbilt now has the largest NEC SV8500 network in the world.

Video Vanderbilt – Video streaming services have become a key component to capturing knowledge dissemination, creative experimentation of ideas, and outreach as they occur in support of teaching, research, and patient care at Vanderbilt. New streams are captured and posted weekly in locations such as myVU, VUcast, and other online locations across Vanderbilt. February included a stream of the State of the Medical Center Address (with 565 online viewers), a Flannery O’Connor series of events, several lectures events, the Asian New Year Festival, and Lifeflight Safety Day in Smyrna to name a few.

Enhance Calling for the Office of Investments – ITS established new features on the caller’s menu for the Office of Investments enabling callers so they may type in the number of the person to whom they wish to speak or listen to the menu options. This additional feature enhances the customer experience when they need to reach our Investments staff immediately.

A Partnership in Leadership – ITS leaders have partnered with Dr. Pearl Sims, Lecturer in Education and Director of the Leadership Development Center, to enhance her course on Learning Organizations & Technology. Classes are held in the high tech conference room in ITS, which leverages technologies already in place, and includes partnership in instruction with IT directors who contribute to the instruction and projects throughout the course. It continues to be a terrific partnership enabling students to learn both in the classroom and from real experiences by using these technologies.

Google This! – ITS and Public Affairs coordinated the “Google Bus”, which made a stop at Vanderbilt last fall on its road trip across the nation. Check out the video Google placed on YouTube of the stop at Vanderbilt.

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myVU and Other Websites Receive Infrastructure Update – ITS, in concert with Public Affairs, spent numerous hours in January and February improving Sitemason performance.  The legacy architecture suffered errors often rendering the site unresponsive shortly after the bi-weekly releases of myVU to the community.  The new architecture added (2) load balancing servers, (6) Front End Virtual Machines, (6) DB Proxy services on those machines, and Network Attached Storage (NAS), with the legacy Back End Database Server remaining in place.  This new architecture has increased performance and stability during high utilization windows and increased the maximum concurrent connections approximately eight-fold.

Research Storage Titan Head Replaced – ITS implemented the new BlueArc Titan 3200 into our environment.  This replaces the Titan 1 which entered end-of-life (unsupportable) at the end of February.  The BlueArc solution is used by the research community at large including Structural Biology and ACCRE to house research data.

Vanderbilt Health One Hundred Oaks – In support of the VUMC move to the new location at One Hundred Oaks, ITS enabled telephone infrastructure and call systems for the clinics that moved in February. The Center for Women’s Health (formerly OB/GYN), the Center for Women’s Imaging, and University Pediatrics all moved on February 20 and began accepting patients on February 23. Planning and work continue for more clinic moves, which are expected in March and April. Patient Accounting and Patient Reps also moved successfully.

Exchange 2007 Deployment Proceeding – ITS conducted a disaster recovery test of the new Exchange 2007 environment.  The test was performed with as little preparation as possible to simulate “real world” scenarios.  The team kept a timeline of events to assist in lessons learned and several areas for improvement were identified.  ITS plans to perform additional tests in March and early April to fine tune processes and ensure that all system administrators are prepared.The Exchange 2007 environment became fully functional in February, with the addition of load balancing for the mail transport layer and the client access servers.  The environment currently provides production mail service to thirty individuals with growth expected to reach 100 by the end of March.  

Mailing List Service Migration – In preparation for the March 1 mailing list migration to a new list management service, and to better manage system utilization and capacity, ITS staff worked with list owners across Vanderbilt to clean up the number of lists that use this service. As a result of the cleanup efforts, a total of 619 lists were deleted, leaving a total of 2053 lists to be migrated. More than 30 VUnet Services Administrators were also trained on the new tools for list creation – with very positive feedback.

Video Streaming Request Enhancements – In order to better serve the Vanderbilt Community the ITS video streaming service implemented new and improved streaming request processes. More detailed intake forms for event capture, storage requests, and media conversion should streamline these service processes.

HR Kiosks for Job Applicants Improved – The ITS Desktop Support team developed a new method for trimming problems on kiosks for job applicants at HR Express and it also enabled the kiosks to have Internet access for the new job application system. After researching and testing several options, the ITS Desktop Support team developed a way to lock down the system and still enable Internet access. The software restarts each kiosk automatically every night then restores it to the original configuration.

Digital Signs – A Sign of the Times – With the successful implementation of green technologies like digital signs around campus, ITS coordinated participants in a Campus Technology Webinar with NEC and Samantha Brandenburg, Assistant Director of Sarratt Student Center, which highlighted the successful use of this technology at Vanderbilt. Other universities participated in the webinar to learn more and ask questions. It was very successful.

Security Enhancements for Domain Name Service – ITS disabled external recursion to VU domain name servers greatly enhancing the security standing of our DNS environment.  The security standing is enhanced by preventing extraneous requests, disallowing participation in potential DNS amplification attacks, and limits the potential of cache poisoning (an exploit).

Building Control Security – ITS implemented additional firewall security in support of the Chestnut Street building control network. This tightens security access to all building controls in that segment of Vanderbilt’s extended campus in keeping with all other facilities under management.

Enhance Security Access for Plant Operations – ITS worked with Plant Operations management staff to enhance access to their secure system management consoles enabling more staff to better monitor the plant network processes and connectivity.

Firewall Bandwidth Optimization – ITS resolved a major bandwidth issue stemming from antivirus updates.  Traffic generated by clients downloading large updates greatly impacted firewall performance when ever new signature files were released.  The technical staff limited the number of connections allowed for file transfer access versus an ‘unlimited’ configuration previously allowed.  Web protocol access has also been reconfigured to monitor and limit bandwidth use.  Total bandwidth for all related traffic to roughly the speed of most home networks and large files will be limited to roughly the speed of most home DSL connections.

Construction and Expansion– Infrastructure service demands for construction, renovations, and expansions for the month of February included work for: 1817 Patterson Street Day Care, A&S Microcomputer Labs in the Centre Building, 1025 16^th Ave. South for the Engineering School, backup connectivity for offices at Loews, and the Children’s Way Garage.

Data Center Optimization – After a data center optimization assessment, ITS developed a new model for understanding cost drivers for co-located servers. This enables ITS to better manage the finite data center resources, which enables better understanding of current and future options for application hosting – primarily around the need for using more efficient virtual machines as much as possible.

Software Store Automation Save Resources – With the new implementation of Online Software Store, over half a terabyte (TB) of storage has been recouped from the shared storage area in VUspace for use elsewhere. In addition to regaining local storage, the online store also gives ITS the ability to better ensure compliance with our contracts for software distribution.

Operator Services Stats – During February 2009, Operators Services received 162,368 calls in the call center with a 99.1% answer rate. The team completed 14,691 pager modifications supporting patient care. A total of 274 conference calls were requested and processed through the call center, representing a 7.5% increase over January.

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10 G Circuit — Now 100% of Vanderbilt commercial internet and research traffic is routed on the new 10 Gigabit-per-second circuit activated Dec. 1. Limits of the circuit will be tested next. See the November posting for more information.

Promoting Science — The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is a program the National Science Foundation (NSF) hopes will promote scientific progress nationwide.

ITS assisted Peter Cummings, professor in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department, in developing the Vanderbilt components of a NSF EPSCoR grant proposal.

EPSCoR grants combine science with the expansion of computing infrastructure. Grants are weighted toward states currently receiving disproportionately small amounts of NSF funding. 

In this grant, Vanderbilt is joined in Tennessee by UT-Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The state of Tennessee is joined in the grant proposal by South Carolina, with Clemson and USC participating there.  Vanderbilt’s share of the proposal focuses on accelerating the upgrade of the Vanderbilt network core to 10Gbps capacity, allowing faster access to on-campus resources by off-campus partners.

Who Do That ooVoo — Campus Planning was looking for an alternative to in-person meetings because of the time, gas, and parking issues they presented. They were referred to the ITS Product Manager for Collaboration.

After a needs analysis determined they were looking for something free or very inexpensive that could accommodate up to 6 persons, ITS introduced them to ooVoo, an instant messaging client. With a webcam and microphone, it enables inexpensive computer video conferencing. The base version is free for up to 3 participants, the super version is just $10 per month (after a 30-day free trial). It allows for 6 participants, and requires only a webcam and audio/mic capabilities on each computer. 

A Campus Planning employee who is a self-described technical neophyte, is so happy with a solution he called the “wave of the future,” that he has invited 259 of his 450 contacts to begin using it.

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Sitemason Updates — ITS staff redesigned and deployed a brand new hardware architecture for the Sitemaon content management service. This new architecture has vastly improved the usability of the websites that use this technology.

100 Oaks Phones — New elevator phones were installed at One Hundred Oaks in time to meet the inspection date deadline.

LifeFlight Digits — ITS accommodated a request by LifeFlight Command Center to provide a number (2-RIDE) for their upcoming new transport service for coordinating ambulance discharge.

The number was previously “owned” by Vanderbilt Police Department but no longer used. They were more than happy to give the number to LifeFlight.

Role Away the Rolls — The “Class Rolls” system was retired.

BOINC — Vanderbilt ITS formed a team to demonstrate collective power of unused computing capabilities for research. Grid computing harnesses unused computing power on participants’ computers to further research. As part of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), the participants can contribute toward any number of research projects.

ITS continues to work with the Vanderbilt research community with the hope of finding a project that can make this service.

Peabody Secure Workstations — After consulting with the ITS security staff, Peabody College IT staff implemented a plan to improve security on more than 1000 workstations. The plan ensures local computers administrative accounts are created more securely in an organized, restrictive manner.

100 Oaks Phones — The first phase of 100 Oaks phone installation was completed. Thirteen Internet Protocol (IP) phones were installed and 12 analog lines.

Student Phones — The Student Voice Network was upgraded. CPUs were replaced, and software and firmware were upgraded. System updates encompassed 6,648 phones, including all student residence hall phones and administrative red phones.

Exchange 2007 - The Foundation is in Place! — ITS deployed the three primary Exchange 2007 roles into the production Exchange environment. The roles are the HUB Transport (transports mail to mailstores), the Client Access Server (provides client access through applications, the web, and mobile devices using activesync) and the Mailstore (stores all mailboxes). Testing to validate design features and capabilities in the production environment continues.

Mailgate Master Replacement — Vanderbilt’s production ProofPoint master mailgate was replaced. This enables ITS to leverage key features in the current software. It also reduces design complexity, allowing for additional consolidation of physical hardware into virtual platforms.

Lifecycle Management — ITS management reviewed the status of aging infrastructure with an eye toward strategically aligning activities to current economic constraints. Candidates for virtual infrastructure have already been identified to continue consolidating data center space and conserving precious resources.

Backup Service Efficiency — Backup of co-located systems via a private network was successfully tested. The tests showed a 400% performance improvement as the setup streamlined connectivity between customer data and the backup server.

Additional testing to evaluate scale and private network support will be conducted.

100 Oaks Firewall — The firewall for Vanderbilt Police Department’s 100 Oaks precinct was deployed along with network gear.

Monitoring and Assistance — An ITS staffer wrote a rule which alerts the monitoring center to excessive unsuccessful bad login attempts within a 5-minute period.

After one such episode, the staffer contacted the user, who had been having problems with the affected application but was not sure why. The staffer was able to pinpoint the problem to an expired service account tied to the application. After learning this, the user is requesting that the account be re-enabled.

The staffer did an excellent job pinpointing the problem and the rule will help alert ITS to similar problems in the future.

Operator Services Stats—During January 2009, Operators Services received 161,587 calls in the call center with a 98.9% answer rate. The team completed 14,261 pager modifications supporting patient care. A total of 255 conference calls were requested and processed through the call center, representing an 18% increase over December.

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Business Continuity — ITS established an off-site web presence which provides a third level of assurance of a continued Vanderbilt web presence during a catastrophic failure or disaster. Even if both on-campus web servers fail, the offsite server ensures a continued Vanderbilt web presence and will provide an additional communications mechanism in future.

A Vision for the Future — The first draft of the “Identity Vision for Vanderbilt University” was crafted by a collaboration among representatives of MIS, ITS, Informatics, and the office of the Chief Information Security Officer. This vision has been in development for three years and along with a roadmap for implementation, it also defines future identity projects for Vanderbilt.

Bandwidth Increase — Internet 1 bandwidth was increased from 622 Mbps to 1 Gbps, a better than 50% increase. This increase was completed in conjunction with the “Blazing Research” 10 Gbps bandwidth increase for Internet2 reported in last month’s report.

Enhanced 911 — A 911 failover process has been implemented for the Vanderbilt Police Department (VPD). If the VPD phone switch is disabled in any way, the ITS Network Operation Center automatically redirects calls to another number within the Vanderbilt phone system. This greatly adds to the integrity of Vanderbilt’s emergency communications.

Process Improvement — ITS developed “Rich Web Monitoring” using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor web access and Activesync for Exchange email. With this system synthetic transactions to appropriate servers ensure the environment is working. These transactions log directly into a mailbox, simulating actual usage. This is an improvement over earlier monitoring methods.

Live Flash — ITS Streaming Media Services has added Live Flash, providing the capability to stream live video to a cross-platform application (Flash). This augments the existing Windows Media and Real capabilities.

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Streaming Media Demands Increase — Streaming Media Services recorded a three-day Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) short course held at Vanderbilt December 16-18. The course was titled Introduction to Nuclear Chemistry and Fuel Cycle Separations. Four other events were streamed in the typically light month of December as well as the day long Turkey Toss!

Software Store Enhancements — Following the ITS Software Store’s December 1 rollout of its online storefront, the previous software image library on VUspace was discontinued.

The new online storefront enables Vanderbilt community members, including departments, to purchase and download software. Using the storefront instead of processing orders manually saves the equivalent of 495 employee days per year. Online ordering instead of processing 1180 forms saves an estimated 10 pounds of paper each month. 

New Light Imaging — ITS planned and coordinated moving the New Light Imaging.com domain to Vanderbilt. New Light imaging is a joint venture with VUMC. Vanderbilt hosts and owns the domain name and all records associated with it. This was a complex initiative requiring coordination between many ITS staffers to ensure mail receipt and delivery, VUnetID feeds, Proofpoint tables, and domain name ownership.

Going Virtual? — ITS set up two virtual machines so the Library can evaluate virtual technologies. The Library currently co-locates 20 servers in the ITS Data Center. If the Library migrates some of those servers to virtual machines (where several “virtual” servers can exist on one physical machine), the consolidation would save space and energy costs.

Dyer Observatory — The Dyer Observatory’s phone system limited them to a few voice mailboxes with little storage and few options. They wanted to expand it and add directions, staff directory, and information on upcoming events.After an ITS review determined the current system could not meet their needs, ITS staff set up two caller’s menus, two transfer boxes, 5 information boxes, and 5 personal mailboxes for their staff. To ensure proper handoff of calls, AT&T was contacted and call forwarding was set up on two lines.

Now Dyer retains their 322-DYER lead number and has a new caller’s menu that enables callers to be transferred to the University or VUMC switchboard, receive directions, information on upcoming events, hours of operation, rental information, information on scheduled field trips, and a staff directory. They can also leave messages requesting more information.

VPD Headphones — The Vanderbilt Police Department sent a note thanking ITS for two headphones given to the VPD Communications Unit. They were surplus headphones from the ITS Operator Services group. They wrote “our department appreciates you giving us more resources that will ultimately provide better customer service to our community.”

Cooper Collaborates — Representative Jim Cooper from the State of TN participated via video conference in the Southern California Innovation Project (SCIP) at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Representative Cooper has been a guest lecturer in the Vanderbilt Law School. ITS facilitated his participation in this conference by offering it’s video conferencing equipment and assistance to Representative Cooper to make his portion of the conference successful.

Vanderbilt Health 100 Oaks — ITS responded to a need from the Vanderbilt Medical Center to provide smaller 6-button Internet Protocol (IP) D-term phones for certain areas at 100 Oaks. The phones are a cost-effective alternative to running additional cables to departments in areas with minimal cabling was installed. The phones have the functionality of 32-button D-term phones except for multiple line capacity and speed dial. With a lower price point than a typical D-term phone, these units offer operational cost savings to those departments.

Reclaiming Resources — The voice mail reclamation project has concluded after reclaiming 453 voicemail boxes no longer in use. This enables ITS to continue meeting the voice mail needs of the community on a service that is nearing capacity.

New SLAs — ITS completed and posted Service Level Agreements for the Domain Name Service (DNS) and for the VUmailguard email security product.Service Level Agreements help bridge the gap between perceptions of expected service and actual service and delivery. Developing these expectations enable ITS to align its services with the demands of the vast and varied Vanderbilt community.

Virtual Environment  — ITS upgraded the virtual environment production servers (ESX hosts) to the latest software version. This enables us to leverage Storage VMotion to consolidate storage and provides additional insights into ESX server health – all to better support shared infrastructure services and those for departments who use this service.Additional large ESX hosts were also deployed to enable consolidation and lifecycle activities in the virtual environment. Plans call for consolidation of the current 16 production ESX hosts to 12 by mid-summer, 2009.

Modem Decrease — With demand for the dial-in modem pool decreasing, ITS removed an unnecessary T1 line, better managing capacity for a service that is less needed.

Antivirus Upgrade — VirusScan v. 8.7, the latest version from McAfee, is posted on the ITS website for download by the Vanderbilt community. This Vanderbilt site license is an important foundation for securing information at Vanderbilt.

Poison Control Goes Digital — ITS converted the Poison Control Center from an analog call recording device to a digital device. The installation date was coordinated so the equipment vendor was onsite during the cutover.The new equipment increases reporting capabilities. The Director of the Poison Control Center expressed great pleasure that reports can be created from multiple locations, including his desk. Previously, reports could only be generated from the server. Having this up-to-date information available when he needs it empowers better business decisions and operations management.

Operator Services Stats—During December, Operators Services received 180,127 calls in the call center with a 99% answer rate. The team completed 17,377 pager modifications supporting patient care. A total of 217 conference calls were requested and processed through the call center.