Critical Upgrade to University Police Department Computer Systems General Account/Department ITS Academic Technology Created Mon 3/5/18 5:08 PM Dates/Times Resources Not Available None known. Divisional VP Doug Dawes - Administrative Affairs Estimated initial costs $0 Estimated on-going costs $0 Explanation of evidence of impact. 1. Student Success A safe, positive, welcoming campus environment is important to the health, well-being, and success of HSU students and UPD plays a vital role in creating and maintaining that environment here at HSU. UPD needs reliable, well-performing computer systems to facilitate the performance of their critical duties. Numerous studies have demonstrated that students who do not feel safe at school do not perform as well academically. Other studies discuss the dramatic effect that episodes of violence have on the long term success of students. While the correlation between faster, more reliable computers and a safer campus is indirect, the UPD computer systems are a very important part of the work that UPD does. Furthermore, the improved system performance provided for by the move to VMH will allow officers to complete paperwork and research more quickly and thus provide them with more time to spend in the field. 2. Efficiency
The servers currently utilized by UPD in the Student Business Services (SBS) building are more than 8 years old. Moving to the newer and faster infrastructure in VMH will allow UPD s computer applications to run significantly faster. ITS will benchmark system performance on the existing systems and then will measure, monitor, and compare the performance on the VMH hardware and software. If UPD s systems are down, a number of computerized business processes must be done manually and require substantially more of UPD staff time. Funding Availability? Fully Funded - includes initial and on-going costs Need to Know Cade Webb, Donn Peterson, Melissa Hansen, Angelica Preciado, Tim Kohberger, Josh Callahan. Portfolio Type Infrastructure & InfoSec: Activities involving the admin, operation and maint. of campus IT sys. Portfolio Type Alignment We selected Infrastructure & InfoSec because the project involves computer servers, software, and networking that are part of the HSU IT infrastructure. However, the computer systems addressed by this project support the important student services provided by UPD. Requestor name Cade Webb Project Champion Cade Webb Primary Customer(s) Campus-wide What problem are you looking to solve? Humboldt State University s Police Department (UPD) currently runs their critical computer systems on hardware and software that is end-of-life and is also not configured with the redundancy and highavailability required for such mission critical operations. The servers that UPD depends on for their day-to-day operations and for their ability to effectively respond to larger scale emergencies are more than 8 years old. The improvements required to the UPD systems were well summarized in the 2017 HSU ITS Risk Assessment Summary 08/18/2017 report prepared by the HSU Information Security Team. The report ranked the modifications to systems in UPD as the #2 priority on all of campus for ITS to address. The report recommended to Address hardware in the University Police Department inventory. Several of
those services ranked high due to single points of failure on older hardware, in addition to water based fire suppression. Which departments or processes are affected? All of campus. While the work will be done for the University Police Department (UPD), all of campus (students, faculty, staff, and visitors) and even the surrounding community are all potentially affected if there is an outage with the UPD computer systems at a critical time. In addition to providing redundancy and improved reliability, the move of UPD systems to the VMH data center will be a move to a newer and faster hardware/software infrastructure. This will allow UPD users to perform their work more quickly. What is the consequence of not doing this project? 1. The computer systems on which UPD depends for its operations will be much more likely to experience a significant system outage. 2. Important UPD business processes will run more slowly. 3. UPD s Level 1 data will potentially be more vulnerable. 4. Substantially more ITS staff time will be required to support UPD. What would a successful solution look like? The UPD virtual servers would be running on redundant, highly available, and contemporary hardware and software in the Van Matre Hall (VMH) data center. As a result of this, the critical UPD systems would be much less likely to fail. The UPD computer-based business processes would be running more quickly. How else might you solve this problem? UPD s existing servers could upgraded and clustered in SBS in order to provide more reliable services. However, this approach is substantially more expensive and the resulting solution would be significantly less robust and reliable. UPD uses PeopleSoft for some functions, however, PeopleSoft is not capable of providing all of the law enforcement services that they require. What resources will this project require? Skills: Project Management, System Administration, Desktop Support, TNS. Individuals: Josh Callahan, Tim Kohberger, Breck Robinson, David Peters. We have discussed the project with these individuals and have developed a clear understanding of the tasks involved in moving UPD systems to the VMH datacenter. There will be little to no effort required of customers and functional users to learn how to use the new solution. From a customer perspective, the systems will work just as they currently do.
And is your deadline a hard deadline? No Why must the project be completed by this date? Until the system improvements that are incorporated in this project proposal are made, the critical UPD systems are at an elevated level of risk for an outage. Because of this risk, we would like to implement the redundancy and high-availability accomplished by the move to the VMH data center as soon as possible. Explanation of annual estimates The UPD virtual servers will be moved to an existing cluster in the main HSU data center in Van Matre Hall (VMH). There will be no new hardware, software, or maintenance agreements because only existing systems are to be used. The alternative solution to provide the system improvements required by UPD is to upgrade the systems currently used by UPD in the SBS building. Upgrading the systems in SBS will require a one time expenditure of about $22,000 and ongoing costs of about $10,000 per year. Note: The Department of Justice (DOJ) will need to review the scope of the planned move to VMH. They may have requirements that change the costs associated with the move. Type Upgrade Affected or Related Systems/Modules CLETS (CA Law Enforcement Telecommunications Sys) Other Affected or Related Systems/Modules RIMS (Integrated Public Safety Software), OnQueue Evidence System, Keywatcher, Stancil, CCTV (for backup). Considerations / dependencies None. Information Technology (IT) Feasibility Statement ITS strongly supports moving the UPD servers to the VMH data center. The systems currently used by UPD are inadequate and it is a critical University need for them to be upgraded. The systems are an important part of the mission critical operations of UPD. These systems also contain significant amounts of Level 1 data, so it is important that they are run on contemporary, fully-patched hardware and software systems. An additional advantage of moving the systems to VMH is the fact that ITS has performed this type of move successfully many, many times. Furthermore, since the infrastructure in VMH supports most of the servers on campus, our System Administrators are intimately familiar with it. And finally, the extra level
of attention that the VMH systems receive from System Administrators (including extensive monitoring), make it much more likely that potential problems are discovered before they impact the UPD systems. A final important factor supporting the move of UPD systems to VMH, is that significantly less time will be required from ITS staff to provide technical support to UPD. The time savings will be spread between System Administrators, Desktop Support, Client Technology, and TNS. In summary, the move of the UPD servers to VMH will provide a much improved platform for UPD, will reduce costs overall, and the support of the UPD systems in VMH will require significantly less time from ITS staff. The man components or EPICS are as follows: 1. Dept. of Justice (DOJ) Change Request. 2. Create New Virtual Server Environment for UPD Services. 3. TEST New Virtual Server Environment. 4. MOVE TO PRODUCTION (One service at a time approach). 5. UPD End-User Production Validation. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION See attached list of reference articles and studies referred to in the "Evidence of Impact on Student Success or Efficiency Guidance" section above.