Project Updates
PeopleSoft SA Upgrade Completed Ahead of Schedule
OPUS provides students with a lot of new online abilities.
The PeopleSoft Student Administration (PS SA) system upgrade, Online Pathway to University Students (OPUS), was recently completed three days early and under-budget. Functionally, the upgrade focused on improving the end user's productivity through improved usability enhancements and page performance. Technically, the project upgraded the PS-SA toolset, database and infrastructure, and set up an initial Collaboration environment.
The upgrade also realized Brett's vision of using the PMO as a change agent. It delivered UTS's first signed Operational Level Agreement (OLA) and a Control (Ctrl)-M startup/shutdown process that is ready for production deployment. The OLA is an agreement among UTS support staff from the Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Services Infrastructure, and Integration directorates that defines the services to be provided and the responsibilities of all parties. Once Ctrl-M is fully implemented, UTS will gain efficiencies— the data center will be the first line of support (Tier 1), instead of on-call database administrators, PS administrators, and systems resources. Additionally, the startup/shutdown process will be much faster.
Beth Broyles, the Manager of Student Information Systems, has supported several previous releases. She commented, "...this upgrade was an exceptionally smooth and exceedingly well done project due to the hard work and dedication of a great group of talented Emory employees."
- Trisha Wilson, Project Manager, PMO
NDB 200 Renovations Nearly Complete
NDB200 artist rendering, but wait'll you see the real thing!
After a year of planning and renovation, the new office and conference room space in NDB 200 is finished, except for a few loose ends. The PMO and UTS Design Group now have an effective space with which they can coordinate and collaborate with the entire division.
This second-floor space was vacated by the Career Center about a year ago and the renovation project, managed by Billy Tice (PMO), required several design reviews before settling on a suitable design.
The new renovations include:
- A lobby with reception desk and four lounge chairs: either for meeting/greeting or for actually using the Mac Mini carefully hidden behind the display monitor in a cupboard on the other side of the wall
- Replacement (bigger) conference rooms for Enterprise and Kennesaw
- The addition of a SMART/Bridgit-enabled conference room that comfortably seats 10 (just a tad smaller than Savannah)
- The addition of a "dumb" room with just whiteboards, (similar to Blue Ridge up on the 5th floor)
- The addition of non-Exchange-schedulable spaces: "The Point" has a large SMART/Bridgit-enabled board (like those in Sweetwater) with 5 lounge chairs, 5 ottomans, all on wheels. This is meant to be a post- and pre-meeting collaboration space
- Whiteboards (WallTalker™ wallpaper boards) on lots of walls for more spontaneous pre- and post-meetings
- Office space (doubles and singles) for the PMO and Design Group
Only a few odds and ends, including the reception desk, remain to be completed. Rich Mendola (CIO) has already been giving tours in NDB200 and he has moved his ITPC meeting into the new High Falls conference room. The Council of Deans recently met in the Springer room.
There are four new conference rooms that we may now begin to schedule for meetings:
- NDB 201 Springer: laptop connection only to a ceiling-mounted hi-def projector and a large screen (non-SMART); seats 20-ish with tables
- NDB 202 High Falls: same electronic/technology setup as Springer; it seats 25-ish with tables
- NDB 205 Skidaway: like Savannah, this is a dual-screen Bridgit set-up with an in-place Dell workstation
- NDB 207 Tugaloo: a "dumb" room with whiteboards and seating for 4-6
If you've any questions about the schedules, rooms, technology available, etc., please email me. Thanks for your patience during the renovation. We are excited about the prospects for using this new area. The space is not only usable because of its physical layout and technology but also because of the finishes, fixtures, and furniture that were chosen to evoke calmness and professionalism.
- Marisa Benson, Director, PMO
Field Service Reviews of Field Use of iPads
The iPad is a fun device but will it succeed in the field?
The iPad has taken the world of portable computing by storm, with approximately 40 million units sold since Apple introduced the device in 2010. The challenge now is to find useful business applications for the iPad.
In that regard, Field Services recently did a preliminary test on the use of iPads for field service work. They rolled out two iPads to technicians Jimmy Davis and Marcus Moore (both of Enterprise Services) for testing.
The two main areas the team was looking for were:
- Would we be able to access and close trouble tickets and work orders within MySoft and ServiceNow and was there sufficient coverage inside and outside of the buildings?
- Would we be able to utilize the iPad as a primary device, since Field Services is up for technology refresh?
The overall findings were mixed. The positives were portability, as the device easily fit into the technicians' bags, the instant-on feature versus booting up a laptop, and being able to research and quickly close some of the tickets.
The cons, however, involved tickets and work orders that required a lot of administrative documentation. We are trying to reduce the amount of administration time that we spend in the MySoft database on the back end of our work. We can install a phone quickly, but the paperwork to close the work order can take longer than the installation itself. Part of the problem in documentation on the iPad was the use of the keyboard. The typing interface was a little difficult and perhaps a portable keyboard would assist this problem in the future, either by using BlueTooth technology or an actual portable docked keyboard.
Another drawback to the iPad was that some of the applications that Field Services needs to access require Adobe Flash, which the Apple OS on the iPads will not run. Excel spreadsheets were also not fully supported on the iPad. And, there was difficulty in accessing the shared printers in the cloud. However, the technicians did like accessing the work orders in a paperless fashion. Technicians also missed the dual-screen capability of a laptop. On the iPad, you can only open one window at a time.
Therefore, the cons currently outweigh the pros in terms of having the iPad as a primary device. In the future, we are going to continue to look at the iPad to see if subsequent improvements to the device make it easier to use in the field. Additionally, it could become easier to justify the use of the iPad as a secondary accessory if the pricing of the device continues to drop.
- Lamar Kelley, Manager, Enterprise Services
Exciting Purchases in Storage
Emory now has 4,200 terabytes? That's a LOT of storage!
Storage is exciting! Especially when our organization is taking steps to ensure that Emory's computer storage infrastructure is on the leading edge of capacity and robustness.
David Hauenstein (Infrastructure) is manager of the UTS Storage Team, which maintains the IT storage for both Healthcare and the University, including University researchers. This past year, his team incorporated significantly increased storage capacity and improved design as part of an aggressive tech refresh plan.
The bulk of Emory's storage is in the third floor of the NDB, as well as a network attached storage (NAS) unit in the 1599 Building. The Storage Team also manages storage at White Street, Emory's backup facility. White Street is slowly growing to be a disaster recovery (DR) site. The ultimate goal has been to mirror storage growth in the NDB at White Street, and utiliyze its capacity using best practice data storage standards.
In the new storage environment, the Storage Team manages 4.2 petabytes of storage, 1.5 petabytes of which is the new Exchange environment. And they are expanding email for the addition of St. Josephs and other acquisitions. Not long ago, a reasonable-sized bank was in the 4 or 5 petabyte range and a 4.2 petabyte environment that Emory now utilizes is comparable to many companies that don't even run as much data. On the University side, PS and Exchange are the most performance sensitive environments. Healthcare's medical records system alone is 4.2 terabytes.
In managing the old DMX3 environment, it became more cost effective to buy something new rather than pay maintenance on something older. The $400,000 a year in maintenance of DMX3 in NDB had become cost prohibitive. The Storage Team wrote a compelling business case that it made sense to do a refresh.
In their new approach, Emory data storage is going from a tiered model, which used to be the industry standard with high performance and low performance modules, to a methodology where we buy separate arrays for each tier, which are more cost effective, especially from a power distribution perspective.
Today, the implementation is three tiered:
- VMAX: the top of the line performance array and highest tier (used for PeopleSoft) which is replacing DMX3, one of which is at White Street.
- VNX: the mid-term array, which performs file sand block-based storage, one of which is at White Street.
- Isilon: the low-end, two 600-terabyte storage arrays. Isilon is the industry leader for genetic research storage, since each gene-sequence generates two-terabytes of data and some of our researchers are generating 100-terabytes of data a month. We already have one at White Street.
The team's goal is to truly create a mirrored environment, and to create a true datacenter in which they actively use the data from day-to-day. They already have good performance between the datacenters. The ultimate goal is to make White Street a complete mirror of NDB. The Storage Team is also planning towards next generation datacenter infrastructure storage, which is defined as not having separate connectivity for IP and fiber channel storage.
These next generation, yet cost-effective solutions will provide Emory with the proper storage it needs to perform the research that is so vital to our expanding research mission.