August 4th, 2006 by Lyle Wiedeman
NACS Academic Web Technologies combined forces with Academic Personnel and the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, to deliver a series of nine workshops, which concluded recently.
NACS is developing an online tool under the guidance of Academic Personnel to aid in the Senate Faculty search process. Informally referred to as “Recruit,” this tool was originally written for internal use by ICS, and NACS is extending it for use campus-wide.
84 staff attended Recruit training over the past two weeks, representing the School of the Arts, Social Sciences, Social Ecology, the Paul Merage School of Business, Biological Sciences, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Humanities, the Bren School, and Physical Sciences. Workshop attendees were personnel managers, department managers, administrative analysts, and admin assistants, all of whom were invited to learn to use Recruit to manage a Senate Faculty search.
Pat Price (Academic Personnel) and Peggy Munhall (ICS Dean’s Office) led the training. NACS staff were on hand to provide additional support.
August 4th, 2006 by Lyle Wiedeman
Recent announcements by earthquake scientists and the US Geological Survey indicate that Southern California is due for a major earthquake in the next 30 years. That along with other data suggests that there’s as much as a 30-50% chance of major shaking affecting the UCI campus in the next 10 years.
NACS has studied the likely effect of such a quake on central computing systems and data stores in our Engineering Gateway Academic Data Center (ADC). Aside from the obvious scenarios, like computer racks falling over or the raised floor collapsing under the strain of holding two very large UPSes, we discovered that disk drives housing critical campus data (e.g., our campus e-mail services) are susceptible to damage in such an event and possibly in a milder quake.
To mitigate the risk of serious data loss, NACS has followed the lead of the UCSD ADC and purchased and installed ‘Isobase’ rack isolation equipment. This equipment was installed during the June 24th scheduled service outage. Similar to base isolation technology used on modern high rise and freeway overpasses, ‘Isobase’ places computer racks on essentially a shock-absorber surface. Six racks which house NACS’s e-mail, calendaring, EEE, and other critical campus services were installed on this base. We plan to purchase bases for our remaining systems in the ADC as funds become available.
If you have any interest in this equipment or what steps you can take to protect computers and disks from seismic events please contact NACS. NACS also has a service for hosting your equipment in our ADC.
August 4th, 2006 by Lyle Wiedeman
Bruce Cotsonas, NACS Project Coordinator, and Todd Strand, NACS Infrastructure Engineer, co-presented at the 35th annual ACUTA conference and exhibition in San Diego on July 27th. (ACUTA is an association for communications technology professionals in Higher Education.)
In their presentation, “Visual Documentation and the Installation of Communications Infrastructure”, Bruce and Todd demonstrated the use of “visual documentation” (also known as “visual scope of work”) to portray telecommunications infrastructure before and after installation projects on the UCI campus.
Google Earth (TM) satellite photography of UCI building sites and digital photographs of construction details as well as text and other graphics were imported into Power Point presentations. The resulting “visual documentation” helps to reduce ambiguity and clarify the reasons for infrastructure work, solutions to problems, conduit location and excavation, cable pulling/splicing/termination, and the transferring of services.
Bruce Cotsonas coordinates NACS cabling projects with clients, vendors and staff. He is a member of ACUTA, BICSI, CSI and DBIA, and he has over twenty-one years of experience in project management.
Todd Strand designs, plans, and provides cost estimates during communications infrastructure projects. He holds the Registered Communications Distribution Designer, Network Transport Systems Specialist, and Outside Plant Specialist certifications from BICSI.
Bruce and Todd work for Diane Dunn, Manager of NACS’s Communications Planning Group, which plans and manages all campus-wide network and telecommunications infrastructure projects.