Max Davis-Johnson, CIO Boise State University, discusses the Office of Information Technology (OIT) infrastructure refresh for summer 2019. At the top of the list for OIT projects this summer are server and network upgrades, classroom technology refreshes, and Student Union meeting room upgrades.
Get details about OIT summer upgrades on the Project Management Office website.
This is Max Davis-Johnson, Boise State University Office of Information Technology. One of the things we tend to focus on every summer is what I would call our infrastructure refresh. We set a large portion of our budget every year to either expand our capacity, or replace equipment that is near the end of its technical life.
And so from a core infrastructure standpoint I’m talking about servers and networking equipment and storage. We are continuing to expand our wireless capacity for students, and expand our network throughput for researchers.
Our investments in servers and storage, coupled with our already existing highly virtualized environments, gives us the ability to utilize not only our Boise State private cloud, but also public clouds like AWS, i.e., Amazon Web Services. It gives us the flexibility and scalability and allows us to best fit our needs as we move forward.
It is an exciting time for core infrastructure, and I mean that in a good way.
A real core area that we invest in every summer is what I call classroom upgrades, classroom replacement. Right now we have over 150 classrooms now here on campus that have a standard set of technology in them anywhere from projectors, speakers, a standard set of software, room controls. And the whole idea here is that it’s a uniform technical experience in all of our main classrooms that we use here on campus.
At the end of the summer we will be at about 70 percent capacity, 70 percent of our classroom projectors will be laser based. It’s a much clearer, longer life, the initial cost is, it’s cost effective, the initial cost is more than our current bulb technology but we don’t have to replace the bulbs. And certainly there’s a visible difference in clarity coming from these.
With the edition of the new fine arts building, we’re going to be very busy over the summer because we’ll be installing approximately 38 plus, classroom-type areas in that building all with new, up-to-date, modern technology.
We’re going to be putting all the meeting rooms in the SUB now will be at the end of the summer will have a similar set of classroom technology.
It’s good to see that the University is investing in this classroom technology all across campus.
At any time if you want to know the active projects that OIT is working on, the current status, what projects are going live in the next 30 days, what projects have gone live in the last 90 days, please go to the PMO project website, it’s part of the OIT website. We update that on a weekly basis and it’s a good way to see what OIT is working on.
Again, thank you for listening. Until next time, bye.
