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August 27, 2004 > News > IT plans $10-$20 million improvements to campus network

IT plans $10-$20 million improvements to campus network

By Katherine Corley | Thresher staff

E-mail will be more reliable, downloads will be faster, and students will be able to store data on the campus computing network. At least, that is the hope of Director of Networking, Telecommunications and Operations William Deigaard, who envisions an improved campus network within the next two years, at a cost of more than $10 million.

“The biggest thing you’ll see [with the new network] is faster performance,” Deigaard said. “Also there will be much greater support for mobility, and remote access will be improved. Getting to your stuff will be faster and easier, regardless of where you are.”

SA President Derrick Matthews said he would like to see campus computing improved.

“I think the major impact of an improved system will be greater stability and a greater capacity to improve services in a logical fashion, not piecemeal like it has been in the past,” Matthews, a Will Rice College senior, said.

Assistant Director for Networking Long Pham said in addition to being faster, the new network may change the way that classes are taught.

“This new technology allows us to do things that we have always wanted to do, like multimedia,” Pham said. “For example, yesterday we talked to the dean of the Shepherd School [of Music]. They have a vision of collaborating with the University of Florida in terms of teaching through the Internet.”

Pham said multimedia opportunities would reach beyond the Shepherd School.

“The requirement for classroom technology has grown a lot,” Pham said. “Now you’ve got PowerPoint presentations — professors no longer use the overhead projector, they need multimedia. Or if they want to conference-in a colleague to do an impromptu lecture, that’s a possibility as well.”

System needs today are much greater than they were 12 years ago when the Rice computer network was first introduced.

“When [the current network] was put in, there just wasn’t that much Internet activity going on,” Deigaard said. “Everything was geared toward the scientific user. The number of people using the network campus-wide was pretty low.”

Hanszen College Computing

Associate Jeremy Bass said knowing the history of the system allows him to understand the network’s current inadequacies.

“The network does a pretty good job on a regular basis, especially if you consider the original design and equipment that was implemented when it was first established,” Bass, a junior, said. “Who would expect a 12-year-old network to be able to give all the students at Rice a fast, reliable Internet connection?”

Because of the rapid increase in Internet use in recent years, Rice now needs a faster network, Deigaard said.

“Now, people are constantly surfing the Web, they’re buying things, they’re researching things, they’re instant-messaging people, they’re writing blogs, and they’re just doing all this stuff constantly,” Deigaard said. “If you drew a chart of Internet growth and a chart of Rice growth in computing, it would look almost exactly the same. But the architecture of the network never changed, we just tweaked it a little bit.”

Deigaard said ideally, the network would be faster and allow for more data storage.

“Most people complain that it’s slow getting to the Internet or that downloading pages takes too long,” Deigaard said. “If you add up all the waiting to download e-mail or other things, that actually costs the university some money. Also, there are a lot of applications we can’t do today — for example, storage. Most people are storing data on their laptops, on their desktop, and almost half the campus has no backups.”

Matthews said he hopes the network can be made more reliable.

“E-mail has to be shut down every now and then, and colleges report outages too frequently,” Matthews said.

In order to gather student input for improvements to the system, the Information Technology Department posted a survey four weeks ago on its home page, http://www.rice.edu/it/. To date, about four percent of undergraduates have responded, along with 52 percent of faculty and staff.

Pham said IT has also hosted forums at the various schools and talked with the CCAs and college presidents about possible improvements.

“We’re trying to cast as wide a net as possible in terms of input and ideas,” Pham said.

Deigaard said the improvements will involve extensive physical renovations.

“This project entails a fairly massive undertaking of replacing all of the wire in the buildings, and more will be added,” Deigaard said. “We’re also going to add single-modem fiber, which is a higher grade, so all of the buildings will have new fiber

connections between them.”

Recent Internet outages at Hanszen and Will Rice raised questions about whether the old system was failing, but an electrical storm and renovations turned out to be the causes, Deigaard said.

“The electronics of the old network are not particularly durable — they’re in a very harsh environment,” Deigaard said. “The Hanszen outage was from the electrical storm. The storm took out a whole stack of electronic equipment, and the same thing happened at the [Graduate Apartments].”

Pham said at Hanszen, the network electronic equipment shares the wiring closet with the laundry facilities, which flooded this past weekend.

“So many systems are now running on simply outdated hardware, and these are the pieces of equipment that are most prone to failure, obviously,” Jackson, a senior, said.

At Will Rice, summer maintenance workers disconnected some electronic equipment, Will Rice CCA KK Yu said.

“We’ve had some summer renovations, and the contractors didn’t hook up everything correctly, so all of [the] old section had troubles for a couple days, but that got fixed pretty promptly,” Yu, a junior, said. “Some people have been unlucky and can’t connect, but the majority of people have been OK.”

Pham said it is necessary to project future needs when planning the new network.

“Technology refreshes itself every three to five years, so we have to have some forethought,” Pham said.

IT is finishing an eight-week consultation with IBM Global

Services and then will discuss specific proposals and funding, estimated to be between $10 and $20 million.

“[IBM] is doing the heavy lifting — helping us with the physical layout, getting all of this drawn and documented and helping us with how this all gets configured,” Deigaard said. “We’re going to work with senior administration to share the proposal for the network, and we’ll have an estimate of the rough cost, so we’ll be receiving funding.”

Pham said once the project receives funding, construction will start.

“If we get the funding we need at the end of the year, then we’re looking at 18-24 months to implement, because with anything longer than three years, technology changes again,” Pham said.

End of article

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