Proposal

The purpose of this tech fee proposal is to fund a high performance storage server and internal network switch to support our expanding eLearning technical courses and upcoming fully online degree program.  The Department of Geosciences currently offers 7-8 undergraduate and 2-3 graduate eLearning courses per semester with a total enrollment approximately 250 students.  Geosciences is also developing a fully online degree program, which we anticipate increase online enrollment notably.  Our technical online courses require students to use department licensed software such as ArcGIS, Erdas Imagine, ENVI, and eCognition which students can only access using our Citrix Cloud application infrastructure.  Students in these courses utilize large vector and raster datasets for assignments and class projects requiring our department to provide from 5 to 100GB of network storage per student (depending on the course).  We currently have an older Dell T710 storage server with 6TB of SATA drive space, but the slow SATA drives and older CPU are not able to satisfactorily support the intensive network storage performance required by our students.

We are requesting funding to purchase a Dell NX3200 storage server that will be outfitted with twelve 600GB 15K SAS drives in RAID 5.  The much faster 15K SAS drives with a total of  twelve combined spindles will be able to provide the network disk access speeds that our students need to work with their data from off-campus using our Citrix cloud apps.  We are also requesting a Dell 24 port 1Gb network switch to improve our backend performance to the storage server.  This switch will NOT be connected directly to the FAU network, but instead used as an internal network and only connected to our Citrix servers on separate NICs from the FAU connected NICs.  Adding this backend switch will remove the storage network activity from the FAU building switches which should improve our performance and alleviate intensive network activity on the building switches.

Finally, by adding this new storage server we can re-purpose our current storage server to become a redundant backup.  As part of creating Emergency Response Plans (ERP) and Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP), our department identified the need to replicate Faculty, Staff and Student computer data files off site in case our facilities at the Boca campus were unavailable or destroyed during an emergency. By relocating our current storage server to our Davie facility, we will be able to maintain backup, replicate data in that location in the even our Boca site is compromised.

Strategic Plan Goal I: Enrich the Educational Experience

In our commitment to continual improvement of the University educational experience we must enhance the quality of undergraduate and graduate academic programs. This proposal seeks to accomplish this by improving the quality of our content delivery and student experience for eLearning courses and a planned fully online degree program.  Our online technical courses require the use of expensive, specialized software not available to students on personal computers.  Geosciences’ has put a tremendous effort in time and costs to create a state of the art hosted application system for eLearning, however, the success of this system has led to increased demand both in student numbers but in the complexity and size of course lab data sets. Additionally, in order to have a superlative academic program, students must learn using the types and sizes of data used in the real world.  Real world data, particularly LiDAR and other remotely sensed data are very large in size and put extreme demands on network based storage. The proposed high performance storage server and backend network switch will make dramatic improvements towards meeting this goal.

Goal IV: Leverage momentum toward achieving FAU’s strategic goals by being good stewards of its human, technological, physical and financial resources.

Geosciences’ has already created a State-of-the-Art Information Technology Environment with its Citrix XenApp server farm.  Matching the performance of this forward looking cloud based “software as a Service” system; we wish to add this high performance backend storage infrastructure to continue to be at the leading edge of cloud based computing for online courses.  In providing this superior technological infrastructure, we also reduce the demands on department and OIT computer labs on campus, reducing direct costs to the University.  Students also benefit from reduced costs for travel and their own personal computing costs for hardware and software that they might otherwise need to purchase.  Finally, by re-purposing our current storage server, we can meet the data backup goals in our ERP and COOP plans.

Purchase hardware by end of Spring 2014, install/test during the summer, production use in Fall 2014

Hardware is anticipated to last 4-5 years for the storage server, 6-8 years for the switch.

The Department of Geosciences already supports the hosted application system for eLearning courses through a Citrix Xenapp server farm at an annual maintenance cost of $5500.  Additionally, the department pays annually $5,250 for Erdas Imagine, $8,200 for ArcGIS and $2,000 for eCognition softwares used in our online courses.