The first line of defense for users is to contact their departmental Technical Contact. If the departmental Technical Contact is either unavailable or unable to handle the problem he or she should contact the network support team. The network support line is 3-3741 and is monitored Monday-Friday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. If prompted, leave a message and a support team member will be paged via radio. If the problem is found to be a problem with the college's networking hardware, there will be no charges associated with support team assistance, otherwise there may be charges depending on the nature of the problem.
Support personnel implement the College’s core computing initiatives, focusing on the mission of providing faculty and staff 24/7 access to critical academic and administrative computing resources. Those services currently deemed critical include access to email and information on both central and distributed servers. Redundant and geographically dispersed servers that have realtime replication and are backed up nightly ensure both business continuity and disaster tolerance.
In support of the "green" initiative and the realization that electricity rates in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are expected to skyrocket within the next 1–2 years, a project was developed to virtualize all College/Departmental administrative servers. In addition, Departments are encouraged to participate in a program to reduce both initial system and continuing operational costs. In October 2008, over 40 standalone servers were virtualized into 6 servers. These servers were parsed into two groups of 3 servers, with each group having 30TB of active storage and 30TB of replicated storage from its counterpart core. The nature of the structure of the servers is such that either one of the essentially mirrored system banks can rapidly assume the load in the event of loss of backbone connectivity or disaster.
A few years ago, the College’s faculty Academic Computing Committee identified the need for a general-purpose Engineering high performance computing facility for use by faculty in teaching graduate and undergraduate courses. Currently, faculty may register student accounts for basic research accounts. Although the College HPC is modest in its size, it continues to meet many of the College’s academic computing needs, incorporating:
Another set of critical Support Services' functions include systems’ management for updates through release of OS patches, virus definitions, and critical business applications. While services include update subscription “push” services available to all College faculty and staff, user level general computing support is generally serviced by a network of IT personnel generally referred to as the College’s network of “Technical Contacts”. The 13 academic departments and various other operational units have between 1 - 6 IT staff that are dedicated to local desktop, student laboratories, and research facilities. While these individuals are not directly in ECS’ reporting chain, they do constitute a professional IT committee that works closely with ECS, performing an integral and important role in daily computing operations, providing recommendations for future directions in the College’s computing environment, and mitigating computing security events.
As with any enterprise, focused policies, procedures, and best practice information are important to ensuring that individuals are able to effectively and efficiently perform important business related communications and computing activities that are essential to meeting an organizations’ mission. Computer Support personnel assume the responsibilities of preparing and vetting College of Engineering computing policies and procedures. To accomplish this task, personnel work closely with individuals in the University's central IT and members of ECS’ Networking Services. Current College policies augment existing University policies by focusing on specific enhancements that clarify or strengthen published documents. Both University and College policies are regularly reviewed and revised to account for increases in hacker activities and sophistication of the threat environment.
Finally, please note the following information regarding our computing architectural environment:
Gerald CiolkoszAssociate Director |
Office: 153D Hammond Building Phone: 814-863-3856 Click here to email |
Joseph LanagerSystems Analyst |
Office: 153F Hammond Building Phone: 814-863-4541 Click here to email |
Holly BenscoterSystems Analyst |
Office: 153E Hammond Building Phone: 814-863-6122 Click here to email |
Main Office |
Phone: 814-865-1444 Fax:814-863-7582 |
ECS is designing for the future.