Committee meeting - September 6, 2018

Present: 

Andrew McAlorum (Acting Secretary), Steve Bourque (Chair), Andrea Chappell, Erick Engelke, Dave Gawley, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers, Keith McGowen, Paul Miskovsky, Adam Savage, Jason Testart

Guests:

Don Duff-McCracken (for Marko Dumancic)

Regrets:

Trevor Bain, Daryl Dore, Marko Dumancic, Omar Nafees, Greg Smith

Agenda

Chair’s Remarks (Steven Bourque)

  • Thanks to Andrew for chairing
  • Consider minutes from last meeting approved.
  • Power to campus is back on.
    • Some work ongoing in Math
    • IST has plans to turn on second power supply on Monday
    • One issue where watercooler in Physics failed, caused the firewall to go offline
      • Down for an hour and a half
  • Bruce is back from summer holidays
  • The new VPN is up in testing
    • Vpn-outside.uwaterloo.ca off campus
    • Vpn-inside.uwaterloo.ca on campus
    • Issue with safari browser, which is being investigated with the vendor

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The previous meetings minutes were accepted as distributed.

Other Business

Jason

  • Tri-Council funding agencies have a draft policy out on research data management
  • Storage for research output is well established, although through various means
    • Public research repositories online, NetApp, cloud storage, storage provided by faculty, etc.
  • Research in progress is another matter, and would potentially require more storage
    • This is where the majority of the discussion is taking place
  • Researcher needs to have a lifecycle plan for how they will manage the research
  • OR and Library mainly leading this for the University
  • Consensus among faculties that researchers in their areas are asking for a variety of storage solutions
    • Connectivity to be able to move data to/from SHARCNET and ComputeCanada quickly
    • Cloud storage
    • Enable researchers to augment with their own solution
  • Requesting that IT Directors provide feedback on what the researchers in their areas are asking for
    • Paul - Science Computing has migrated all their research to local storage
    • TIS is now investigating a solution for a 'high storage, low cost' needs as opposed to the current NetApp solution, which is often more than what researchers require.
    • Some groups just want basic archival storage solutions
    • Inter-institutional sharing of data is the most problematic; most use Dropbox or other cloud storage solutions outside the university
  • New WatIAM roll-out
    • Things going well, had some issues with the power outage
    • More integrations in the future - creating exchange accounts, more integration with library, LEARN, Grouper for group management, 2FA with Duo

Roundtable Reporting

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Potentially doing a future Friday morning seminar on lessons learned from the power outage

  • Math had to modify their accounts management software to deal with the new possibility of a registered student who has not yet accepted his or her WatIAM userid, so Extract data has an entry for a person who has no userid

Portfolio Management (Dave Kibble)

  • Back to regularly assigned duties after acting CIO for the summer

Environment (Don Duff-McCracken)

  • Mac integration with SCCM, working with IST folks

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • Evaluate moving to Math infrastructure, load balancer, databases
  • Outline is a new application SciComp is working on
    • Online syllabus system
  • Issues with HR doing staff reclassifications

Instructional Technologies and Media Services (Andrea Chappell)

  • Teaching and Learning spaces committee under Beth Jewkes, who is now on sabbatical. Andrea and CTE Director will co-chair
  • Currently working on a 5 year plan
  • 2 AL lecture theatres are the high targets, and were ranked as our worst classrooms

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on September 20, 2018 at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.