ITS Highlights

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.