Apple is currently working on the next update for OS X Yosemite, expected to be released soon. Overwhelming customer reports of Wi-Fi connectivity issues since Yosemite’s release in mid-October, prompted Apple’s latest patch. Previous updates attempted to remedy the Wi-Fi disconnect issues, but this latest release is expected to resolve the issue.

“Pertaining specifically to our Rice Owls wireless implementation for the campus, we gained some WiFi stability with the introduction of the 10.10.1 update. Previous to that a good portion of the Yosemite clients would drop their WiFi signal on a consistent basis.” said IT Systems Integration Specialist, Fernando Gonzalez. “We’ve been lucky that many of our customers heeded our warning to delay upgrading to Yosemite until it had time to mature.”

For more information, view the article below:

http://bit.ly/1KoUtJw

As part of Rice’s “Ask the Expert” series, Barry Ribbeck, Director of Systems, Architecture, Infrastructure, and Cloud Strategy, and Marc Scarborough, IT Security Officer, presented “Contracting for Cloud Services” on February 4.

If your department is considering cloud services, be sure to consult with the Office of Information Technology (OIT) staff early in the process to assist with technical and security considerations as well as integration issues with other campus systems. The Procurement office and the Office of the General Counsel should also be involved to review contracts and to help with the purchasing process.

Contact OIT through your divisional representative or via the Help Desk (713-348-HELP, help@rice.edu).

Download .pdf of presentation slides.

IT began preparations for the latest upgrade to the university’s network, RiceNet3, in 2014. Twenty years before, a segmented and restricted network was first rolled out to the entire campus.

“In 1994, the campus network was expanded to all buildings on campus,” remembers Tony Gorry, who was Rice University’s Vice President for Information Technology at the time.  “When I got here, the first thing that struck me about Rice was the uneven deployment of computing.  In CS and Engineering, Owlnet was doing well, but if you walked around the campus, you saw really very little penetration of computing into any other areas. So one of the first things I did was to seek to reallocate money to make Owlnet a university-wide network. Science and Engineering faculty were understandably concerned that the shift might diminish support for networking in their areas. But they acknowledged the need for a broader development on the campus. We were thus able to fund labs in the colleges and extend the network to the colleges, where it had not gone before. We also wired all the college rooms. By encompassing all the departments and colleges in a campus-wide network, we took an important step in integrating information technology in education and research at Rice.”

“Measure twice, cut once” is a familiar saying among carpenters, but the adage applies to implementing a new campus network as well.  In 2014, the introduction of a new network has quietly but busily transpired in offices, conference rooms and loading docks – both on campus and at the Primary Data Center.  As the first loads of switches and other hardware components arrived, William Deigaard and other university and industry representatives continued measuring and planning, activities that would transform Rice’s needs, industry best practices, and vendor contracts into usable wired and wireless solutions for a campus community that frequently exceeds available bandwidth capacity on existing wireless networks.

“We want the upgrade to the new network to be as invisible as possible and minimally disruptive to campus activities,” explained Deigaard.  Those are encouraging words for Rice faculty and staff who transitioned to RiceNet2 ten years ago.

The RiceNet2 project,  the second generation university network installed between 2004 and 2007, included non-network changes so significant that IT system specialists had to assist most Rice faculty and staff connect their individual computers to the new network.  In addition to completely rewiring the campus, changing all the network switches, and adding hundreds of wireless access points, RiceNet2 was used to introduce new security protocols and storage solutions.  Community members learned to use NetIDs, Single Sign-On (one central password authentication system that could be used in multiple applications), Clean Access (confirms anti-virus software and ensures only virus-free computers were connecting to the network), and a new storage system.

“We aren’t pulling wires this time,” smiled Deigaard, “but we are working on some revolutionary ways to ensure that Rice traffic is routinely running at the highest possible efficiency level for each individual. ExtraHop is one of the tools we will use to ensure that applications and systems on the network perform properly and consistently.   We’re also revisiting the current RiceNet2 segmentations, also know as affinity groups.  We have found that assigning permission by a single role or affinity (faculty, staff, student, visitor) is not sufficiently granular to efficiently address our needs.  We are working on a RiceNet3 implementation of Cisco’s Identity Services Engine to provide more features and increased agility that can meet our evolving requirements.”

RiceNet3 will be rolled out to a building near you in the next 12 months. Watch for further progress updates in the IT News Blog: itnews.blogs.rice.edu

How does a university plan for a campus-wide network, a relatively new higher education resource that grew from zero demand to constant on-demand in just two decades? William Deigaard, IT Director for Networking, Telecommunications and Data Centers, responds, “with lots of innovation, forward thinking, peer reviews, industry research, calculations and guesses about future demand, and an eye on the bottom line.”

Rapid and continual IT evolutions complicate university planning for networks, Internet access and data centers. Solutions are expensive and, at many institutions, typically last only 5-7 years before requiring either replacement or significant upgrades. Part of the relatively short-term lifespan is due to significant changes in individual devices. In 2003, when Rice’s second major campus network (RiceNet2) was being planned,  and wireless mobile devices were considered almost a luxury,  in use by only a small percentage of the community. It was difficult impossible at that time to conceive of a 2013 campus where each of the 13,000 community members would attempt to connect 2-5 wireless devices to the network on a daily basis.  Even though this demand is seems enormous for any organization relatively small university, Deigaard says, “we don’t have the crazy student multiplier quantity of students [that state universities have], so we can provide a higher quality experience. After all, that’s why people should come to Rice.”  As a result, Rice faculty, students, and staff can all have un-metered bandwidth to and from the Internet, and can use it from any number of devices.

 Before the Network

Fifty years ago, when alumnus Dr. Henry Rachford left Humble Oil to become Rice University’s Director for the first Research Computational Laboratory (today’s IT division), no network was required.  There were less than five computers at Rice in 1964, and each was a room-size giant independently crunching through data sets and/or punch cards.  Not until 1986 would Rice consider an internal “backbone” network to link the growing number of departmental computers.

First Network

By 1990, approximately 50 departmental and campus-wide computers were linked with regional and national networks, precursors of today’s Internet and research networks. A campus-wide network did not appear until 1994.  Since Rice’s first connection with an external network in 1990, the daily tasks and tools of faculty, staff and students  have undergone significant transitions. Chalk boards went from black to white to PowerPoint slides, manual  typewriters and adding machines became electric and then desktop computers, slide rules became calculators,  laptop computers, and/or phones.   Compared with the physical expansion of the campus in the 1990s, the first university network was installed before George R. Brown or Alice Pratt Brown Halls were complete (1991), before the founding of the Baker Institute (1993), before the opening of Duncan Hall (1994) or Dell Butcher Hall (1998). Wiessmen still lived in Old Wiess when the first external network connections began, there were no shared serveries,  Martel College had not been proposed.  Duncan and McMurtry Colleges would not open until twofive years after the installation of the second campus-wide network.

Invisible Investment

The academic halls and residential colleges built in the 1990s are much more obvious than the wiring for that first network, but the investments were similar. Unlike the buildings, the network expanded to serve every person at Rice — from an entry level employee clocking in for the day to the President contacting the Board of Trustees.  By 2003, the first network had aged ungracefully and could no longer support the constant (and growing) usage and explosive demand for better IT services.and connection interruptions grew more frequent as old equipment failed, was patched, and failed again.  In a landmark decision for technology investments at Rice, the Board of Trustees approved a new multi-million dollar project encompassing both a new network and a new data center.  When complete, the combination would earn recognition for the university as one of the most technologically advanced universities in the first decade of the twenty first century.  The project also included the added convenience of wireless network availability throughout the campus in the most popular locations on campus – including the library and student center.

Ports of Call for Rice’s Next New Network

If a future-ready network requires as much investment planning as project planning, how do we build or buy a network that will function in a misty future  only 10 years away?  What destinations will faculty, staff, and students be mapping  for their network travel itineraries?  Internet ports of call will include current cloud services like Google and Box, both under contract to Rice.  Local destinations for servers and virtual machines hosted in the university’s data center will also be guaranteed destinations.  Connections to the Rice network from external locations will expand as more Rice students and faculty travel, teach, research, and study abroad.  Undoubtedly, Rice students, faculty, and staff will also connect to servers and services outside of those under Rice’s control or contract.  As Rice’s reputation grows, more legitimate and malicious traffic will flow to the university’s network. The influx of international traffic will increase the number of security attacks on Rice’s resources and data, so the new network must include capacity for automated intrusion detection and prevention services.

Flexible Network Grid Connections, Minimal Disruption

Unlike the 2004 network project, the FY15 network will not require re-wiring the entire campus.  For Ricenet3, the majority of the upgrade work will be focused on routers, switches, backup power systems, and other behind the scenes network equipment rather than re-cabling buildings or pulling new fiber. Here, individual office, lab, and wireless router connections merge into high speed network fibers acting as entrance ramps delivering campus traffic out onto the Internet and into private research networks reaching across the U.S. and around the world. Because the changes will be made in switches and closets during off-hours, Deigaard  says it will be “the network that was installed with minimal disruption.”

The Internet was influencing higher education even before the phrase “age of the Internet” was coined. Faculty research was a driver in the foundation of early national networks like ARPANET in the 1960s. Institutions began transitioning distance education programs to Internet-based learning environments in the 1990s, followed by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in 2012.  Today, Texas universities like Rice University are widening bandwidth on campus for students, faculty and staff.

With more wireless devices being added to the network, and students using the Internet for just about everything (course-related work as well as general communication, social and entertainment activities, etc.), it is hoped that these increases in bandwidth will help alleviate the demand for bandwidth. One way a Texas university can increase bandwidth on its campus is through LEARN, the Lonestar Education and Research Network. LEARN  is a consortium of 39 universities, community colleges, and public schools plus the National Weather Service.  The consortium functions to connect these organizations through high performance network services that support research and education. Through the consortium, these organizations are able to access an extremely high-speed Internet stream, known as Internet2, utilized specifically for research computing.

“We want to make sure our researchers are able to perform their experimentation, move stuff around,” said Vice Provost for Information Technology at Rice, Kamran Khan. “Data is growing at a pretty rapid clip as the storage becomes a lot cheaper…now you’re able to have many, many more lanes on that superhighway.”

Rice, along with a small group of other universities, is expanding its Internet2 bandwidth here in Houston, with the help of a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. While the local consortium currently accesses bandwiths up to 10 gigabits, the expansion to 100 gigabits will occur within the next four months.  Read further details in the Houston Chronicle or eCampusNews story.

“We help you find information that you can’t access anywhere else.” With these words, Linda Humphreys launches into an explanation of data analytics that is accessible – meaning friendly, in this case – to everyone at Rice. Humphreys is a Data Systems Manager in the division of Information Technology (IT). “Maybe the information you want to review is in multiple areas of Banner, or is spread out over multiple systems like Banner, an external system, and several individual Excel workbooks. We use dimensional modeling to link the data sources and create a new data system that is accessible and understandable to the end user.”

End users of data analytics usually want information they can use to make recommendations or decisions for their department, or they want to show trends and/or forecasts about their area for a presentation. Development and Alumni Relations, Corporate Relations, the Office of Technology Transfer, the Office of Sponsored Research, the Center for Career Development, the Jones School and their Career Management Center, and external partner Chevron all collaborated to share data for a report used in a December presentation to the Board of Trustees.

Ann McAdam Griffin, Associate Director for Corporate Relations, said, “Companies engage with Rice across a spectrum of activity including recruiting our students, licensing inventions, sponsoring research, sponsoring employees for executive education and MBAs, sponsoring events, joining consortia, etc. Currently, the financial and descriptive data capturing that engagement are maintained in Banner, Millennium, spreadsheets and people’s heads. We worked with Linda Humphreys to gather and load all that data from the disparate sources into Cognos. Cognos allowed us to develop a dashboard to give us a high level picture of a company’s engagement on campus that includes all the financial pieces along with recruiting and engagement status. We also were able to create drill down capabilities to look more closely at where on campus a company is investing its money for a five year period, along with deeper dives in recruiting activity. Using Cognos gave us the ability to seamlessly analyze a company’s activities at Rice, in a way that we didn’t previously have.”

The Cognos report was based on specific point-in-time data. If the collaborators decide to continue tracking the data, phase two of the project would require attaching links to either the original sources or to spreadsheets that are regularly updated with new data. For slow moving real time data (data that changes very little or slowly over time), Cognos can create snapshots of data for historical review and comparison.

With so many fingers in the pie, how can data stewards be confident that no one is corrupting their sensitive information or systems? Real time views of the data in Mozilla’s Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers work like one-way mirrors. They reflect out views or images of the data that is housed in secure locations, without providing access to the actual data through the image. Even though the original data is secure and untouched, opening an interactive report full of confidential data still requires a NetID password as well as specific Cognos permissions.

Cognos does much more than return diagrams and charts, even though these graphic representations of data are what most Rice community members visualize when they hear about the system. Sometimes, a department just needs a more understandable way of finding and reviewing data. Susannah Mira, the Faculty Data Steward in the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs said,”We are using Cognos to collate and present complex faculty appointment information, including historical records, in a way that is easy to display, search, and report on. With Cognos we can pull data from an assortment of Banner tables into a single report, whereas in the past this was only possible through multiple Banner downloads that then had to be consolidated for a complete view of a particular faculty member or group. Finally, we can now save Cognos reports to be run again with fresh data anytime and share them with other offices.”

For more information about using Cognos for data analytics, contact the IT Help Desk at 713.348.4357 or helpdesk@rice.edu.

Rice University faculty and staff began asking for backup services several years ago, when various incidents revealed the need for additional, external copies of data routinely saved on Rice-owned computers. A stolen laptop or a system damaged by an unanticipated water leak results in lost data and interrupted productivity. Implementing a practice of routinely saving the entire contents – or selected folders – from a computer to a backup service can help ensure productivity continues even if the local computer fails or goes missing.

Crashplan is the service IT has vetted with thorough testing and an initial pilot phase, and it is now ready for Rice faculty and staff to use. Rice faculty and staff have been anxious to begin using the backup service, as our enterprise storage solutions may not easily fit their usage pattern or habits. For example: when traveling, access to the Rice network is not always possible or convenient.

“We know it works,” said Al Grazis, IT Assistant Director for Client Services. “During an early pilot phase, one of the IT staff members had his laptop stolen.” For security reasons, the stolen laptop was remotely disabled. Grazis continued, “Because the stolen laptop had been backed up on Crashplan, we were able to restore all the data as soon as his replacement laptop arrived.”

Each employee who contracts with Crashplan can back-up four Rice-owned laptops or desktop computers. Mobile devices are not currently covered under the Crashplan service. The annual cost of the service is less than $85 per year, billed once each year, and is payable with a Rice fund and org code. Crashplan works with Windows, Apple, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the amount of storage space for each account is unlimited.

“The first time you back up a device, it seems to take a long time,” cautioned Grazis. “But the daily backups only record new or revised data and files, so they go much faster once the base copy has been established.” To get started with Crashplan, contact your IT Divisional Representative or the IT Help Desk: 713.348.4357 or helpdesk@rice.edu.