The number of DMCA complaints at UCSB continues to be small; a total of 57 complaints for the entire academic year have been received as of mid-April. As we dicussed in our previous report to the ITLC in February, the cause of this is likely to be our draconian policy for the first offense.

 

The campus is on the point of joining the Sakai Project as an educational partner. Current discussions are concerned with developing a strategic plan for the development process, and identifying a reliable funding stream.

 

The campus, via Communications Services, has entered into an agreement with a reseller of cellular phone services to provide improved cell phone services to students, faculty, and staff. Research on the topic suggests that students often arrive on campus with a bare-bones plan, and seek to upgrade them. The reseller will create an aggressive marketing campaign to sell enhanced services, and the campus will be compensated on a tiered system depending on sales volume. This service will go into full operation in Fall Quarter 2004.

 

CNSI is in the process of purchasing a large scale (128 node) computing cluster for the replacement of the previous SGI campus wide supercomputer system. This system, while funded through the NSF, and administered by CNSI, will be available to all researchers on campus, giving local access to large scale computing power. Additional expansions to this facility are planned for this summer as well.

 

Work orders have been issued for the upgrade of our computing facility with modern power conditioning, standby generation capability, and power distribution equipment. There will be up to 300KVA of capacity available. The facility is maintained by IS&C and hosts the OIT, computer center, and other IS&C customers.

 

As previously reported, we are converting our largest server to a newer z800 platform. In addition to the traditional z/OS workload, we are implementing a SUSE Linux partition with the initial software application being a Websphere Application Server for our Java based applications. This has been motivated by anticipated workloads of perhaps 1000+ user peaks.

 

Conversion off the current OS/390 platform was delayed due to one of our software vendors - Levi, Ray, Shoup informing us they would charge $21,000 more for the identical functionality on the new machine. We chose to explore our alternatives, and determined that the IBM Infoprint product delivered greater functionality at a lower cost than the VPS product. We have moved forward with the conversion to Infoprint and will be back on track by the first week in May.

 

We are continuing to work with Oblix in the design and specification of a blueprint for Identity Management and authorization across a wide footprint of services that go well beyond web enablement. In parallel, our internal application developers will be rolling out an initial common logon front end prior to the end of June. Most of the work involved is not in new design, but rather the refitting of prior designs with new methods.