Kudos & Congratulations

Congratulations to Tom Warnick and Tyler Sauer (Network & Communications Infrastructure) for winning the August 2017 prize drawing!

UIT staff recognized for their excellent work

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Kudos to Rick Titus, Dominic Mathison, and Tyler Sauer.

I want to thank the three of you. When you realized the seriousness of the malfunctioning demark switch in the hospital, you didn’t hesitate to go into action. Rick, you went up there and assessed the situation, met with the customer and reseated the card. Dominic, you didn’t hesitate to take a replacement card up to Rick. Tyler, you stuck to your workstation, assessed the actions as they occurred, and became “command central” for this issue. No whining, no fuss, just a professional “go get it done” attitude. I am impressed. 

Your concerted actions resolved a very serious situation with minimal disruption and restored services very quickly. It so easily could have gone the other way.

Thank you!

~ Bryan Morris, Network & Communications Infrastructure

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The Network Team is working towards software defined networking (SDN) in the data center and one of the big tasks to get the project to meet its deadlines is cabling in the data center. Four of my NOC desk employees stepped up to the challenge to assist the University Data Center Team with cable pulls, backpulls, labeling, tracing, and other various tasks to ensure that this project continues to keep its deadlines. Thank you so much to Chadd Barney, Josh DeGraw, Joel Oliva, and Henry Mitch Steinman. You all are amazing!

Additionally, a HUGE shout out to Chadd Barney and Josh DeGraw who toiled away at gathering data for a couple of days straight for the Avigilon Architecture Project! Thanks so much you two! This was a lot of work and we much appreciate your efforts! There is NO WAY that I would have been able to get this thing done without the assistance of these two! You two are ROCK STARS!

~ Tyler Sauer, Network & Communications Infrastructure

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Kudos to Robert Lake for doing an amazing job and doing the work of two people in his efforts to ensure the PeopleSoft security is set up and ran the way it is supposed to be.

~ David Lake, University Support Services

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Keith Hughes - Thank you so much for your continuous productivity throughout the security camera migration project. Keith worked through the long Labor Day weekend in order to get servers ready for the vendor. Keith, thank you for being available to our vendor and customers in Facilities, working late, troubleshooting, and no matter what you have been cool, calm, and collected the entire time, which is a great quality to have, especially during these types of projects. You've been a great asset to work with. Keep up the good work! Thank you!

Chris Livingston - Thank you for jumping into the security camera migration project. Your communication, troubleshooting, and willingness to help the team and vendor any time is much appreciated. You've helped work through some pretty sticky issues and have kept yourself level-headed no matter the pressure. Thank you for all you do! 

~ Jayci Minjares, Project Management Office

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We were really fortunate to be able to borrow Peter Monson for a day to help with a tabling event at the Marriott Library. The purpose of the event was to talk to users and gather their feedback about the new CIS, and Peter was a HUGE help. In addition to having a great attitude, Peter was particularly good at engaging people as they were walking by and getting them to open up about their thoughts. This is actually more challenging than one would expect, so anyone who does it well is incredibly valuable to us. We had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people and it was in large part thanks to Peter’s efforts in luring people to the table with his outgoing personality and charm.

Also, a huge thanks to Mike Ekstrom for letting us borrow Peter for the day. We would really love to use him again in the future!

~ Barb Iannucci, University Support Services

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A big THANK YOU to Jody Sluder for her project management work and support she has provided Software Platform Services. She has been key in the successful completion of our ULogin and Systems Retirement Phase 1 projects. She continues to prove how invaluable she is with new projects she has taken on with our group. We are excited to have her as a part of our Web Hosting Platform projects!

Kudos to Keith Hughes (UIT – Facilities IT Systems Engineer) for all his hard work and dedication on configuring the new Facilities camera servers. Thank you to Chris Livingston for all your networking support!

~ Kim Tanner, UIT Software Platform Services

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I have had the opportunity to work with Ken Kizer on several network related items recently. I am constantly impressed at how willing he is to help and accommodate requests for his time. Even though Ken is extremely busy with several high level organizational initiatives, he is always willing to go the extra mile to make sure that I receive the attention I need to keep my department's initiatives on track. I have truly appreciated Ken's assistance and friendly disposition as we have worked together. If I could rate Ken on Yelp, I would give him 5 stars.

~ Josh Grey, Network & Communications Infrastructure

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CHPC would like to give kudos to Joe Breen. Joe is known to many across campus and is an effective bridge between various entities on campus. Joe’s expertise in advanced networking is acknowledged not just at the campus level, but he is also a player in this arena nationwide. One of his most recent accomplishments is the award of a 3.2 Million dollar grant, “CIF21 DIBBs: EI: SLATE and the Mobility of Capability,” on which he is a Co-Principle Investigator. The University of Utah is a sub-contractor on this grant through the University of Chicago. So, Joe not only continues to bring his expertise to campus, but he now is also bringing in money! Thank you, Joe for all that you do, not just for CHPC, but for the entire campus.

Aaron Pabst and Crystal Young are part of the student program run by Elliot Fenech. These students are mentored by Joe Breen and are learning much about networking including such topics as TCP/IP, UDP, Python, Geni, Lynda, JSDN and SDN tracing. A recent project is the development of a Science Workflow Robot with Embedded Software. One scenario that illustrates the idea is that during an emergency where networking infrastructure is degraded or non-existent, you might need to deploy a robot into an area dangerous to humans. Doing this would require spinning up a self-contained environment that could serve several scenarios, such as an attack (terrorist bombing with simultaneous DDoS attack against local networks, a natural disaster (with disrupted networks and jammed networks due to attempted civilian communications), or a disease epidemic (with jammed networks due to attempted community communications).  In each scenario, the requirement exists for rapid deployment of a temporary wireless infrastructure and establishment of dedicated, secure control and data path communications between remote devices, human controllers, compute and storage resources. Aaron and Crystal are developing a prototype of such a system. Kudos to Aaron and Crystal!

~ Julia Harrison, Center for High Performance Computing

 

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