CSG - Centralized-decentralized support
Princeton - Dan Oberst
Central Exchange service
- In Aug 2001, 5 depts request that OIT run a central Exchange
- Evaluated costs
- funding model to recover staff costs
- "value added service" @ $7.50/mailbox/month
- huge success
- OIT gained credibility
- broader support for win2k/active dir conversion
- fewer domains or separate forests
- fees seen as reasonable
- users get integrated calendar features
- support costs are higher than IMAP
- Current usage ~700 users
- hired Exchange admin (staff are happy)
- new services (e.g. blackberry @ $10/mo)
- Issues - outages; MS Support costs (looking at $30-40k/yr)
- WIN-WIN
- Depts didn't want to roll their own
- OIT didn't want to have to bail them out
- math works out to $90k year. IMAP works out to be about 1/2 to 1/3 the cost per user as Exchange.
Princeton - Steven Sather -
SCAD - Support for Computing in Academic Departments
Distributed Computing Support
Started in 1997 - provost sponsored
Pilot included one tech staff supporting fourr departments
support staff are members of sponsored departments, not central IT
provost subsidy is 50% of dept'l cost up to $14k (per dept, so encourages shared folks)
5% of salary cost per individual is given back to OIT
parallel program (DCS) for admin depts in 1999
Currently 48 depts with 38 staff in SCAD, 30 depts, 42 staff for DCS.
One full-time OIT staff member dedicated to the program
$30k in food
over $50k in training, not including training provided by OIT.
Value
Value for dept - OIT does: - needs assessment, position description, recruiting / initial interviewing (OIT does most of the recruitment, then the department typically wants to talk to the top candidates), technical assessment, responsible for training, ongoing (technical) performance feedback.
Value for tech staff - Monthly meeting of all SCAD/DCS folks plus a growing number of central computing folks, Monthly tech breakfast - no agenda, just come and eat and discuss issues, very active support list (general, not just SCAD/DCS staff),
Proofs that it works -
DCS - self-funded, plus depts pay OIT $2k/ yr to join the program.
Program has brought some of the hard-to-win depts closer to the central organization (EE, Astro)
OIT has (and pays for) two DCS staff
An offshoot is the OIT cluster image - OIT has about half of the public lab machines. For a very low cost, OIT makes their lab image available to other depts - about 2/3 of non-OIT lab machines now run that image.
Things that need thought:
- sharing is hard - hard to give up control - who can administer what?
- too large
- meetings become too general
- tech focus too narrow
Win-Win
- now a sense of community of IT support
- significantly better communication
- less "us" vs "them"
- depts feel in control
- central IT viewed as supportive and flexible
Chuck Powell - Yale
Centralized(ing) Services
- Network (incl DHCP); Credentials (netid); Centralized authentication (kerb, windows forest, cas); Directory; Email; Web serving
Central IT gets a lot of business when non-centrally maintained services collapse or bad things happen with security.
Faculty Support Program in Arts and Sciences (www.yale.edu/fsp)
- program is run at dept level and tailored to each dept
- program attempts to account for HW, SW, general desktop support and instructional needs.
- strong preference to place a local support person or connect person into central system
- annual formal conversations offer opportunity for adjustment and further customization
- central IT offers dept money in return for an inventory of what's in the dept, and a plan for how to spend the money (which is spent through central IT).
- program is the gateway to all central IT services.
Central/Distributed services at Michigan - Kitty Bridges
3 schools running their exchange infrastructure togetherle