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IT Services - A Few Things We've Been Up to Lately

Check out a few of the projects IT Services has been working on...

Norstar Option 81 Telephone System Decommissioning

On Wednesday, October 10, 2018, IT Services decommissioned the Norstar Option 81 telephone system which provided telephone service for the Undergraduate Residential Halls. The system had been in service since 2006 and had 6,000 active telephone lines.

Over the last few lines, IT Services replaced the legacy analog phone system with current Voice Gateway technology. The replacement from an analog system to Voice Gateway significantly reduced the system communication room footprint and utilities, leveraged IT Services unified communications platform, and eliminated operational monthly vendor maintenance costs and staff time.

The staff was proud to decommission the legacy system and support unified communications.

Anderson School Succesful Copper Cutover

Over Presidents’ Day weekend in Feb 2019, IT Services Infrastructure Services successfully completed the Anderson School planned fiber and copper outage and cutover. A major fiber optic and copper cables that feeds most of the North and Central campus around the new Anderson Graduate School of Management Tower construction site had to be rerouted, as well as the existing three fiber optic cables (Cables D, E and F) which provided 2,500 active fiber circuits and ran directly through the construction site.

Over the three-day weekend, working from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. each night, the three fiber cables were cut, rerouted, and respliced from the existing infrastructure to the newly built infrastructure. All 2,500 active circuits were operational without incident. Additionally, 3,600 pairs of copper cables were successfully cut over without any incident. The combination of the fiber and copper plant in terms of breadth, depth and cable quantities marks the largest planned outage and cutover at UCLA for many years to come.

The Green IT Task force: "GrITT"

The Green IT Task force, "GrITT," is part of the UCLA Sustainability Committee and chaired by Brendan Bellina from IT Services. GrITT’s mission is the identification and promotion of sustainability practices regarding the use of information technology resources and equipment at UCLA. The task force is actively looking for IT-related solutions and/or process improvements that can be applied campuswide, so if you have an idea, please reach out!

Recently, the taskforce sponsored a PDP team to survey campus IT departments on IT equipment acquisition, usage, and recycling and are talking with vendors about IT consumables including batteries and printer supplies. The PDP team’s survey will be completed this quarter.

The current Green IT Task Force members are:

  • Brendan Bellina, IT Services
  • Eugene Acosta, IT Services
  • Erin Fabris, Housing & Hospitality Services
  • Cindy Kimmick, UCLA Library
  • Annelie Rugg, Humanities
  • Ravi Shah, School of Medicine
  • Rey Soto, School of Public Health
  • Joseph Twu, Housing & Hospitality Services IT
  • Kikei Wong, Zero Waste Coordinator, Facilities

To learn more or submit your ideas to GrITT, please visit their site, or find them at UCLA’s Earth Day events this April.

Related Information

Bonus: Check the number of requests IT Services handled throughout 2018 – over 108,000!

IT Services Requests 2018