WML Tech Updates

A message from Jason Reusch, Associate Director of Owen ITS:

For several months, with the support of the dean’s office, we have been collaborating with Vanderbilt University Central Information Technology Services to enhance the reliability, availability, performance, and disaster recovery readiness of Owen’s IT services.

As part of this effort, we will be relocating the twenty-eight servers that provide all Owen IT services, including email, blackboard, admissions, external web presence, and OCNS.

We are planning to complete the majority of the move during the week following graduation, May 13-19, 2007. Although we will try to minimize the inconvenience, there will be service interruptions during this time. As we nail down specific dates and times we will publish them to the community and provide as much advance notice as possible.

We will be moving our systems to the recently expanded and renovated data center at the Hill Center on the Peabody Campus. This data center offers facilities and services to the University that are unattainable at our scale.

The move to brings several immediate and future benefits.

• 24×7x365 on site monitoring by a university employee
• Redundant power, networking, and climate control systems
• A more robust backup infrastructure including weekly full backup of all systems taken off-site to a secure location
• A three-year hardware life cycle replacement plan to ensure consistent, reliable performance and manufacturer warranty and support
• Storage Area Network (SAN) data storage to improve backup and recovery time
• A shared-storage VMWare environment, which provides high availability for individual server level failure. All but four of our systems will live as virtual machines in the VMWare environment.

If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please send them to Jason.

Barry Dombro, Director of Information Systems in Owen, sent out this important message today in response to the recent news about a hacker gaining access to social security numbers and other personal identity information impacting 800,000 people at UCLA:

At Owen, we have been working hard over the past several years to prevent a similar incident from impacting our community. In addition to strengthening our security measures we have met with Owen’s CMC, Admissions, EMBA and Accounting offices to remove social security and credit card numbers from all Owen servers, laptop and desktops.

Stephan Wininger has worked with individual offices to develop necessary business processes to protect this data. In rare situations where we need to maintain social security numbers and credit card numbers in electronic format they are being moved onto encrypted and non-networked storage devices.

If you are aware of any social security numbers or credit card numbers remaining on Owen servers, laptops or desktops please contact Stephan Wininger and myself and we will work with you to protect this personal identity information.

Thanks,
Barry