ACCS-VA 2022

Dell APEX reduces the time and complexity of acquiring, managing, maintaining and servicing physical IT infrastructure. Customers can scale IT as needed to launch new applications, kickstart new projects, and address the changing needs of their organizations – all managed by Dell and accessed through a single console. With the industry’s leading IT portfolio, decades of data center services experience and an unmatched global supply chain and partner network, no other as-a-Service portfolio comes close to our capabilities.

Prior to this year, our students and employees were on separate Office365 tenants. As more services were made available, we found that having multiple tenants hindered the collaboration. While not feasible previously, we set out to merge our students and employees into one tenant. We'll describe the process we went through and the functionality we have gained with this new configuration.

This presentation is an interactive discussion about the management of some of the latest innovations in classroom technology and the challenges each innovation presents. Some of the innovations discussed are One-Touch Zoom rooms, Cloud Printing, Auto-tracking Cameras and Attendance Check in devices. Before these innovations become the technological standards, training, policy, and procedures including creating a sustainable Service Level Agreement are necessary. The expectations discussed are the impact the innovation has on the client, the budget and pedagogy. Other topics covered include Change Management, ROI, Sustainability, Remote Management, Skill requirements, Subject Matter Experts, and workload balancing.

Understanding a better way to provision, manage, and maintain multiple databases from one platform, utilizing less storage and higher performance in and out of the cloud without refactoring apps and virtual machines.

Join the HP and industry experts in an in-depth panel discussion on how HP's latest technology and solutions are helping data scientists work faster, smarter, and maximize the extraordinary potential of machine learning with the future of data science.

Over the past decade enterprise, campus, and data center networks have become more complex, making them difficult to manage and hard to secure. This session is all about exploring ways we can leverage simplified designs with reduced complexity to improve service delivery and enhance security.

We want to make this session as interactive as possible. With that in mind, we encourage you to think of a pain point in your environment that might be caused by an overly complex technology design. As a group we will explore these pain points and discuss possible ways to improve and or address them.

Please join us in discussing a recent experience with the mass deployment of Ransomware at Virginia Tech.
We will cover the inciting incident, preventative measures you can take, disaster recovery tips, and other lessons learned.

During COVID, use of communications technologies such as soft phones, team collaboration, and web meetings increased greatly. This Birds of a Feather is to discuss next generation calling solutions and how institutions are moving those solutions into a fully supported model.

Ask any organization how many endpoints they have today, and they'll typically respond with a range vs. a finite number. Ask for the specifics of what's running on each endpoint and they say they'll have to get back to you.
Why? Because they do not have the "at that moment" information at their disposal. This information gap and uncertainty exposes organizations on multiple fronts.
Higher Education organizations across Virginia have been pivoting to hybrid learning options for their students and faculty. Pre-COVID, it was a best guess effort to track assets, keep current purchased software license counts and be nimble enough to make changes to current technology. When COVID sent employees, faculty and students home, visibility further decreased and most efforts became reactionary.

Visibility and control is THE foundation for Cyber Hygiene. Therefore, building a mature endpoint management and security practice is critical and a must for all Higher Education organizations.

Join us to learn how to gain complete visibility of/into, as well as control of all the devices in your environment - to greatly reduce breaches and attacks, ensure a higher level of security, allow for seamless hybrid learning and most importantly, help to improve educational outcomes.

Many higher education institutions are developing teaching curriculums for Data Science and AI/ML degrees. With more classes being held every semester, the need for computing environments that provide a positive student experience for hands-on exercises, workshops and assignments is in higher demand. There is also a steady and ever-growing demand for GPU resources by the larger research community at these same institutions.
Cambridge Computer's HPC/AI team has partnered with several technology companies and higher education customers to deliver a shared resource that leverages new GPU sharing, scheduling technologies and disaggregated composable solutions that allow better utilization of new and existing GPU resources. These solutions will not only reduce cost by better utilizing existing GPU assets, but will also provide a solution that delivers flexibility and state of the art AI/ML infrastructure solutions for research computing.
Agenda:
* Introduction to new GPU scheduling and sharing technologies -- Run:AI
* Delivery methods in both native Kubernetes scheduler as well as more traditional schedulers
* Multi Tenancy for research and teaching
* GPU sharing with native Nvidia tools and new dynamic options
* Some sample use cases and deployed designs for compute, interconnect, storage, and software options
* Conclude Q&A - 15 min

In 2014 we moved our IT operations into a new data center; a large, beautiful data center! Wall to wall glass windows, hundreds of blinking, Dell-blue lights, and "state of the art" blade servers--a showcase for every high-profile visitor group arriving on campus. At least, until one of those visitor groups was the APA. They made some mention of glass walls, frequent visitor tours, ease of access, and a lack of physical security. In hindsight, that was a relatively easy problem to fix. The next APA visit "observation" was much more formidable.
It became a multi-year, multi-departmental, multi-process, and multi-vendor challenge.

Our INTERNAL information security was nearly flawless, but our EXTERNAL information security—in this new CLOUD data space was immature. In many respects, the changes we made toward the cloud were almost unnoticed. In three to four years, we had quietly transitioned nearly 25% of our internal data services to third party cloud hosts. We had made assumptions about 3rd party vendor security, but rarely "pressed to test."

This presentation is our story about changing our own internal processes and pressing cloud-based data service vendors to PROVE they care about our data as much as we do.

We hear from faculty over and over, "they can't learn if they aren't in the class!". Over the last 2 years we have focused on developing and deploying an Attendance Management system that automates large portions of the data collection and management required for faculty to document whether students are in class or not, and provides them options for how to use that data from both F2F and Online Zoom sessions. The system is now deployed using over 200 devices in over 150 locations around the campus and is capable of collecting information from scheduled academic classes or other events on campus. We will present the initial design concepts, how it has morphed over time due to the pandemic, along with how it is currently being used by faculty. We'll show you the pitfalls and triumphs we experienced along the way.

At CDW we believe than an organization really can't be confident in their cybersecurity without having good physical security. This session will focus on how the CDW Physical Security Solutions practice designs and orchestrates solutions with the goal of protecting people, property, and premises. We'll discuss how physical security is increasingly being thrust into the domain of IT, and how today's physical security solutions add value not only to the hardening of your physical and safety infrastructure but can add additional value to the overall effectiveness of your organization.

With campus Wi-Fi networks supporting more devices than ever, colleges and universities need to optimize their wireless infrastructures to effectively support digital learning and business operations. This session will provide attendees a blueprint for building a multi-faceted Wi-Fi network that not only equips their organizations with the capacity required to run hundreds of digital programs and streaming platforms simultaneously but also keeps students and staff safe with built-in features such as contact tracing. Attendees will also discover how they can leverage a managed service partner to gain the Wi-Fi engineering expertise and assistance they need while freeing up their busy IT staff to focus on more critical projects.

A web portal for customers to request virtual machines with automatic delivery. A ServiceNow frontend with Jenkins, Terraform, and Python in the backend. We'll cover the project goals, design, technical implementation details, lessons learned, and our roadmap for additional features.