Use of PUF

From AgriLife WIki

County Cost Share Support. The cost share has assisted with the purchase of computers (desktop and notebook), high end printers, and video projectors. This has been a highly successful program to advance the acquisition and use of information technology items in county Extension offices. Even though computers are widely available, there are quite a number of counties who would find it difficult to purchase quality, high performing equipment, opting instead for the cheap newspaper bargain. The cost share provides about the only means available through which we can assure that counties have high quality computers, printers, and projectors available to them.

The business case for Cost Share Support: A key consideration must be the total cost of ownership on IT resources such as computers, higher quality printers and projectors. It is possible to purchase these items from a wide variety of sources, with different warranty and support plans and quality of equipment. However, the full cost of these resources includes:

1. Time spent shopping, comparing purchases, seeking pricing and vendors is considerable. Centralizing this function and offering a simple purchase path is a time saver for county offices.
2. Warranty and service contracting. The current program allows the use of educational contracts with computer vendors. These contracts include full 3 year warranty support, including on-site replacement of failed parts. A county office purchasing on its own is not eligable for these contracts and would spend between $199 and $299 extra to purchase these warranty contracts.
3. Software acquistion. By centralizing the purchase of software applications, Microsoft Office, Corel Office Suite, Adobe Acrobat and Novell products like GroupWise, we can take advantage of Educational pricing and "license only" options. County governments are not eligible for these educational contracts. To get software at these prices, county Extension offices will still need to funnel these purchases back through their District offices or Extension Headquarters.
4. Internal support. Currently we provide direct support for hardware and common software to county offices. This is greatly facilitated by having relatively standard hardware and software, acquired through the cost share mechanism statewide. In county offices where purchases are made locally, we often can not provide complete support, and the agents and staff must spend additional time to seek help from vendors or local IT companies, or hire support services.
5. Replacement schedules. Periodic computer and printer replacement schedules are vital to maintaining a productive workforce. Older computers and printers are the source of most down time, are more expensive to repair or update, and take longer to get back in operation. Three years is a standard replacement schedule for computers; often printers are replaced more often. The cost share program currently provides reminders and twice yearly opportunities, to economically replace aging hardware.

Periodic Core Server Replacements and Server Room Support Items. Mission critical servers and related equipment are housed in the TAES Annex. These servers perform/support primary email functions, Internet email gateways, TCE Bookstore, reporting systems, county website system, County Agents email systems and file servers used by Texas A&M Agriculture administrative offices. In support of these servers are network switches, battery backup systems, air conditioning systems and backup systems.

There is currently no scheduled replacement in place for these systems. They are updated based on an "crash maintenance" schedule. Along with simple replacement is the need to ensure we have sufficient server capacity to consolidate additional GW Post Offices and other server functions where applicable. Such consolidations result in cost savings, reducing the number of servers in the agencies and the time needed to support them.

An average server costs $3,000 to $5,000 and replacing 5 servers per year would allow for a 3-year rotation of mission critical server equipment possible. However, because these servers support Texas A&M Agriculture and not just Texas Cooperative Extension, some sharing of this expense by TAES and COALS would be appropriate. Currently, TAES and TCE each provide $17,500 per year in PUF to replace AREC servers. Something similar would be desireable for our central set of servers, as well.

An added benefit to this program would be the creation of a "server farm" that could be used for development of new services and as a disaster recovery center. This would be accomplished by recycling the most recent replacements to make the farm possible.

Other server room support items would include adding drives to the existing Network Storage box used to support nightly backups. This box can hold up to 6 addtional hard drives. Cost depends on size of the drives purchased and would be $650 to $1200.

Storage Area Network. An identified need across the agency is data storage for backup and the ability to recover in case of a large scale failure. The events of the last hurricane season coupled with audit findings have reinforced a need to improve our ability to continue business in any circumstance.

A means to provide this capability will require large amounts of on-line storage: a "Storage Area Network" combined with a sound backup strategy and backed up with large capacity tape drive facilities. Such a system can provide a daily backup copy of data to an off-site location as well as a periodic archive copy to tape. Such systems cost $25,000 to $40,000 to implement. In addition, staff time and periodic replacements are required to maintain the system. The system, as well, would be a joint resource with TAES and COALS, and would deserve joint funding.

USB External Drive Backup of Storage Area Network. Along with the identified need across the agency to provide data storage for backup and the ability to recover in case of a large scale failure. There is a need to upgrade or supplement our current backup of these backup servers with easy to use solutions.

Not only does this solution need to be reliable but it must also satisfy the requirement for off-site backed thus further improving our ability to continue business in any circumstance. One component of a sound backup strategy is the addition of two large capacity USB external drives. Such a USB backup solution can provide a daily backup copy of all data on the Storage Area Network Backup Server and can be rotated with the second drive to an off-site location. Such a solution will cost between $400 and $750 to implement depending on the size of external drives needed to produce a complete backup of the server. This solution, as well, would be a joint resource with TAES and COALS, and would deserve joint funding.

Content Management System Servers and System Software. Depending on the outcome of the negotiations to purchase the LSU Ag Center content management system for the Texas A&M Agriculture web presence, servers and base system software will need to be purchased. This system will require a staging server, an applications server and a database server along with requisite backup capability. The hardware will cost approximately $10,000.

Network Infrastructure Upgrade at ARECs. The Research and Extension Centers are in various states of wired and wireless network infrastructure. Telephone, video and computer network technologies have merged to the point where these can share a single wiring infrastructure. Many of our centers need to be re-wired completely; most need replacement switches, routers and additional wireless equipment to provide high quality connections for faculty and staff. Recent experience at the Corpus Christi AREC indicates a cost of approximately $125 per network connection for such rewiring, with an average of two connections per faculty office and one per support staff location, in addition to those required for various networked servers, printers, etc.

Other items needed at the Centers are upgraded Uniterruptable Power Supply units (UPS). The existing ones have been recycled through several server replacements and are undersized and outdated, having no network interface for control and monitoring. New replacement units with network management cards will cost approximately $1500 per center.

Emergency Power Generation. At the current time, the servers in the TAES Annex Building are protected from power generation fluctuations or outages solely through the use of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). These are essentially batteries that have sufficient stored capacity to keep a server running just long enough to gracefully turn off all applications running on them, and then shut down. Emergency power generation equipment, which turns on as soon as an electrical outage is experienced, would be helpful in keeping the server equipment fully operational during such outages. We do not have a cost estimate at this time, as this would require an electrical engineer to appropriately size the equipment for the demand we have.

Mobile Tachyon Units. We could purchase four more of these units for approximately $20,000 each, placing one with each Regional Information Technologist, bringing us to a total of six. These units would also incur a connection charge of approximately $150 per month for each unit. Further, each unit should be outfitted with its own remote power generation capability. Since we shipped our two original units to Louisiana for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, we have now received two replacements. That being said, even while we had the two original units in full operation, the demand for them was rather sporadic. It is questionable whether having four more available will actually increase the use of this technology. Certainly, shipping these units across the state has been a obstacle to their actual deployment, but requests for them have been rather sparse as well. Nevertheless, they are certainly valuable assets to leverage Extension education, and have a tremendous role to play in emergency situations.

Upgrade Client Computers for Vista. There are certain requirements for running Microsoft's Next Windows version called Vista that hardly any of our county cost share computers and probably few of the departmental computers meet. Having just come from a briefing by Microsoft and AMD about Vista, they recommend a minimum main memory size of 1 Gigabyte although published minimum memory specifications say 512 Megabytes. I believe that none of our cost share computers have more than 512 Megabytes of memory.

Microsoft admitted in their briefing that previous versions of windows did not check nor take advantage of advanced video card capabilities. Vista, however, will only run the "aeroglass 3d graphics" version of the operating system with a video card that has 128 Megabytes on board and is compatable with DirectX 9. Our Spring 2006 cost share computers have what appears to be a viable video card for Vista, but the 512 Megabytes of main memory, according to Microsoft, will not really run the Vista system very well.

Many of our cost share computers and other systems on campus and off, could run Vista with some fairly low-cost additions of memory and a video card. A video card capable of running Vista only costs about $40 and a 512 Megabyte stick of memory only costs about $40. You can currently get a beta version of Vista for free that seems pretty stable and usable and actually kind of cool. Although running beta software is not usually a good idea, the reports about Vista seem pretty positive and since some of our users want to be on the cutting edge of technology, I believe we should assist and even encourage users to make the change.