Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Erm, about the budget
From an email sent to all points from the U President this afternoon:
This means that it is nearly certain that we will NOT be getting any new hardware for the Novell cluster next summer. We'll have to do it on hardware we already own right now. This means I won't be able to partake of that lovely 64-bit goodness. Drat drat drat.
We're already under-funded for where we need to be, this won't help. Even with the storage arrays we just bought, in terms of total disk-space we've managed to fully commit all of it. There is no excess capacity. What's more, there is no easy way to ADD new capacity since any significant amounts will require purchasing new storage shelves.
In the intermediate term, this means that WWU will now descend into bureaucratic charge-back warfare. As service-providing departments like ours try to find ways to finance the needed growth, we'll start being hard-ass about charging for exceptional services. And they'll do it to us too. So if the College of Arts and Sciences comes to us and asks us for space to host 2TB of, say, NASA data, we'll have to bill them for it. And that cost will be a 'total cost' which will by necessity include the backup costs. In return, if we need 16 ethernet jacks added to the AC datacenter, Telecom may start billing us.
And I get a new boss Thursday. Happily, since there is overlap between outgoing and incoming they've been briefing a lot. This is to prepare the new guy for the challenges he'll face in his first few weeks flying solo. There may even be the odd phone-call for advice, we'll see.
Gonna get real interesting around here.
In the OFM spreadsheets received today, we were stunned to find that targets had been set for higher education. Western, today, is now expected, from the sorts of measures outlined in the August 4 memorandum, to "save" $1,827,000 in the current fiscal year. (This major reduction applies across all budgets, including instructional budgets.)
Add that to the earlier number, and our total budget reduction is NOT the $176,000 representing 1% of non-instructional budgets. It is $2,003,682.
Aaaaaand...
Pardon me whilst I mutter things.Further, we have been advised to expect these reductions to be permanent; that is, to also be a part of our 2009-11 budget.
This means that it is nearly certain that we will NOT be getting any new hardware for the Novell cluster next summer. We'll have to do it on hardware we already own right now. This means I won't be able to partake of that lovely 64-bit goodness. Drat drat drat.
We're already under-funded for where we need to be, this won't help. Even with the storage arrays we just bought, in terms of total disk-space we've managed to fully commit all of it. There is no excess capacity. What's more, there is no easy way to ADD new capacity since any significant amounts will require purchasing new storage shelves.
In the intermediate term, this means that WWU will now descend into bureaucratic charge-back warfare. As service-providing departments like ours try to find ways to finance the needed growth, we'll start being hard-ass about charging for exceptional services. And they'll do it to us too. So if the College of Arts and Sciences comes to us and asks us for space to host 2TB of, say, NASA data, we'll have to bill them for it. And that cost will be a 'total cost' which will by necessity include the backup costs. In return, if we need 16 ethernet jacks added to the AC datacenter, Telecom may start billing us.
And I get a new boss Thursday. Happily, since there is overlap between outgoing and incoming they've been briefing a lot. This is to prepare the new guy for the challenges he'll face in his first few weeks flying solo. There may even be the odd phone-call for advice, we'll see.
Gonna get real interesting around here.
<permalink> posted by riedesg : 10/07/2008 09:24:00 PM
