6In attendance: William Dougherty-NI&S, chair & scribe; Flex Vaughn-CNO/Network Diagnosticians; Karen Herrington-IMS; Jeff Kidd-CNS PR; Kimberley Homer-SETI/QA; Susan Feng-DBAA;Mike Moyer-NI&S/Data Center; Susan Brooker-Gross-IT Management; Mary Dunker-SETI;Bill deWindt-Learning Technologies; Wanda Baber-SS/SMT; Brian Jones-CNS; Richard Quintin-DBAA; Lylah Shelor-Facilities Manager.
CNS via Brian Jones: There are continuing efforts to upgrade the building networks to ready locations for Unified Communications and these announcements are going out to VT-DNET.
I have no further details on the Internet outage during the winter break at this time. It is still tentatively scheduled for the Winter break time frame.
Ongoing Storage Issues: The fiber side issues have improved, but there are still problems with the NetApp NAS. High I/O counts may be responsible and backup processes that take place in the early morning (shortly after midnight) are being investigated. The EMC VNX SAN outages have ceased after changes to isolate the virtual server environment on an IBM Blade Center that was accessing both the SAN and the NAS (Regulus, the log server). Virtualization design has been somewhat responsible as all guests have access to a large pool of storage. NetApp would like to have a case open with Cisco. Lylah Shelor has offered to reschedule the generator maintenance so that the storage maintenance planned for August 19th can begin earlier than originally planned.Hope is that once the NetApp heads are upgraded, the NAS will be able to accommodate the higher I/O load. Additional work is required on the EMC VNX SAN as well during this maintenance window.New time to begin is 7am; servers will likely need to begin shutting down at 6am and window will likely last until 6pm to bring services back online. Everything that was advertized for previous outage will also be affected this time, all on a single day.
Critical Dates and Scheduling Calendar discussion: Susan Feng of DBAA has been working with Kimberley Homer of SETI/QA on developing a needs assessment for the calendaring process. Bedework is in play for the development. A handout was distributed. Nice modular design that allows for ease of use, reporting impacts on multiple services, and providing information to multiple groups. Desire is to provide info to everyone who needs it as directly as possible with more efficiency. Suggestion to collapse all lists into a new one, or to subscribe all existing lists to a new one was made, but other options will be available such as SMS messages, Tweets, Facebook updates, etc. Also in plans is the ability to automatically update the status banner on the computing.vt.edu web page.
An "emergency form" is also planned to allow for quick dissemination. Moyer and Jones suggest ways of updating the calendar to help cover overlapping events and as a way to alert campus in advance for planned events. This will be done automatically. Also desire to disable monitoring for all levels from individual departmental tasks to Big Brother/VTOC monitoring. This project looks like it is moving in exactly the right direction. Subscriber view will be next step to discuss. How best to communicate the details faculty/staff/students will need to make sense of impacts on services?
DBAA has offered to host this application. NI&S Application Management will assist with updating.