Recently in budget Category

WWU has delivered its guidance to the Office of Financial Management. You can read it here (pdf). In short, we're looking at a choice between one furlough day, or leaving tenure track faculty positions open for the next 18 months. WWU management like the second option, since furloughs are problematical due to the different ways they'd be handled in the different classes of employees.

Nice to know. I really didn't want to muck with 11 such days.

The Governor signed the furlough bill, which I had been expecting for some time. The only reason she hadn't signed it yet is because she was waiting on analysis from the budget office. As the bill reads, all state agencies have to come up with 10 days in which to either close operations, or find some other way to save an equivalent chunk of salary money.

How does this apply to me? Well, we're not sure. The University President sent a message out to all staff last week describing what this bill would likely mean for WWU. It means we'll have to come up with $1,172,000 in salary savings one way or another, and if we can't do that we'll have to come up with whole days in which we can shut down operations.

I say 'close operations' even though the bill exempts anyone in a direct teaching function, so in theory we could still teach. However, that's teach without any support staff what so ever, Some can do it, others can't, and if things break in any way they'll stay broken until the next day. Suffice it to say, we can't plan on teaching on the furlough days.

Can we even find 10 days to shut down? Our biggest target is the summer/fall intersession where we have four weeks of no teaching, followed by the fall/winter intersession that's three vacation-heavy weeks as it is. Winter/spring, and spring/summer are only single weeks and... we can't afford to take a mandatory day off that week; there is simply too much changeover going on.

However, as the President said, we may not have to find 10 days. Maybe only five. Or if we're lucky, none. Agencies have to come up with a dollar figure cut in personnel expenses, which will come in the form of furloughs if the agency can't find any other way to reach it. Lay-offs are an option. As are leaving positions open through retirement open for longer, eliminating already open positions, and work-hour reductions.

So while there was much complaining in the office this morning about this bill, the exact nature of the impact we perceive to our jobs is solely in the hands of the WWU budget process. And we just don't know what that looks like yet.

The WA legislature finally, finally, got around to passing an amended budget for the second half of the biennium. They had to fill budget holes, and have spent the last three and a half weeks in Special Session arm-wrestling between the House and Senate versions. The main sticking point was over revenue-enhancers (sometimes referred to as 'new taxes'). Anyway, they reached an agreement, and the Governor should sign it real soon now. This means that we (WWU) now know what our budget cut is going to be (5.2%).

WWU's Budget Planning office has a nice chart up describing how our cut has evolved as the legislative session progressed: link.

In a letter to all staff this morning, the President said:

What remain possibilities at this point could affect 39 positions.  Of these, 10 that are currently occupied would either be eliminated or have the FTE reduced.  An additional 7 would be continued but funding sources would be changed.  The remainder, 22, are currently vacant or will become so through retirement. 

I'm safe. Technical Services staff has been told that any one of us will cause grievous pain in the event of a departure, so the cuts would have to be very bad for us to get passed an ax.

On the down side, this does mean that normal expansion-of-business upgrades will be much harder to fund. Exciting times.

Two days ago we got to meet with my great-grand-boss, the Provost for Academic Affairs. She's a fresh transplant from Michigan who has been in public higher-ed for over 20 years. It was a good talk, and I am encouraged.

One of the take-away quotes from that meeting was, "This is one of the most micro-managing legislatures I've ever seen." And then went on into details. One of the things she mentioned is a bill I was aware of but haven't mentioned yet, a plan to force furlough days on state employees such as myself. SB6503 is the bill.

One of the loonier provisions is a list of days to be considered by appropriate institutions for full closure:

For those agencies and institutions of higher education that do not have an approved compensation reduction plan by June 1, 2010, the agency or institution shall be closed on the following dates in addition to the legal holidays specified in RCW 1.16.050:

(a) Monday, June 14, 2010;
(b) Tuesday, July 6, 2010;
(c) Friday, August 6, 2010;
(d) Tuesday, September 7, 2010;
(e) Monday, October 11, 2010;
(f) Friday, November 12, 2010;
(g) Monday, December 27, 2010;
(h) Friday, January 14, 2011;
(i) Friday, February 18, 2011;
(j) Friday, March 11, 2011;
(k) Friday, April 15, 2011;
(l) Friday, May 27, 2011; and
(m) Friday, June 10, 2011.

In the immortal words of Bill Cosby, "Riiiiight." As it happens certain parts of higher ed are exempted from this, not affected by this is, "classroom instruction, operations not funded from state funds or tuition, campus police and security, emergency  management and response, and student health care." So I would be furloughed, but not the teaching staff. And woe unto the faculty member with a problem logging in to Blackboard that day, for they will be alone and all the staff pointedly ignoring their phones that day.

As it happens, this is perhaps the stick to get people to develop an 'approved compensation reduction plan.' This would allow WWU to create its own ways of reducing payroll, be it through head-count reduction, hours reduction, or interspersed furlough days arranged so as to minimally impact function of the University.

What's a furlough? "voluntary and mandatory temporary layoffs," according to this bill. So if I'm on a furlough day, you can guarantee I'm pretending I'm unemployed and will not be responding to anything work-related. The one thing that could keep me in the money during such a 'shutdown' is clause S under the exemptions: "The minimal use of state employees on the specified closure dates as necessary to protect public  assets, information technology systems, and maintain public safety." Right now that's unworkably vague in meaning, but it could mean that a small selection of tech staff could be present to help the teaching function work.

This is another bill we're keeping a close eye on.

It has been a week plus since we spent a lot of money and the question has been raised, what are we doing with that storage? Exactly?

It isn't fancy storage. In fact, it is the cheapest performant storage we could budget for. It's not SATA, but it is 7.2K RPM SAS. And there are 35TB of it. It's a server, with direct attached storage. Not a dedicated storage unit. Not fibre channel. An off the shelf server, a high quality RAID card, a bunch of storage shelves, and a pair of network ports.

A final decision hasn't been made yet for how we're presenting this storage to consumers, but iSCSI of some kind is the 90% likely choice. Whether that's Linux (a.k.a. the free option) or something else (a.k.a. the pay option) remains to be seen. The whole point of this storage is to be cheap per GB.

We're also adding a pair of Fibre Channel Drive enclosures to our EVA4400 to provide true high-speed low-latency service at a much reduced cost versus the EVA6100. Yes FC drives are EOL in a very short while, but the EVA4400 doesn't support SAS (yet). This is where our ESX cluster is likely to expand into when the time comes, that kind of stuff.

And a new tape library. It's an HP StorageWorks MSL4048. It is LTO4, fibre-attached, and has lots of slots. The native capacity of this guy is 37.5TB which is a whole lot larger than the 7.9TB of our current SDLT320 unit. It only has two drives for now which will limit flexibility somewhat, but it is upgradeable to four drives later when the money tree starts producing again. If we really need to, we can stack another MSL4048 on top of it for even more storage. Because it is drive-limited, we kind of have to stage all backups to disk and then copy from disk to tape; we won't be doing any backups directly to tape.

When it'll get here is anyone's guess. Purchasing is currently digging out of an avalanche of last-minute orders just like ours, so they're w-a-y backed up down there.

Today we spent more money in one day than I've ever seen done here. Why? Well substantiated rumor had it that the Governor had a spending freeze directive on her desk. Unlike last year's freeze, this one would be the sort passed down during the 2001-02 recession; nothing gets spent without OFM approval. Veterans of that era noted that such approval took a really long time, and only sometimes came. Office scuttle-butt was mum on whether or not consumable purchases like backup tapes would be covered.

We cut purchase orders today and rushed them through Purchasing. A Purchasing who was immensely snowed under, as can be well expected. I think final signatures get signed tomorrow.

What are we getting? Three big things:

1. A new LTO4 tape library. I try not to gush lovingly at the thought, but keep in mind I've been dealing with SDLT320 and old tapes. I'm trying not to let all that space go to my head. 2 drives, 40-50 slots, fibre attached. Made of love. No gushing, no gushing...
   
2. Fast, cheap storage. Our EVA6100 is just too expensive to keep feeding. So we're getting 8TB of 15K fast storage. We needs it, precious.
   
3. Really cheap storage. Since the storage area networking options all came in above our stated price-point, we're ending up with direct-attached. Depending on how we slice it, between 30-35TB of it. Probably software ISCSI and all the faults inherent in the setup. We still need to dicker over software.

But... that's all we're getting for the next 15 months at least. Now when vendors cold call me I can say quite truthfully, "No money, talk to me in July 2011."

The last thing we have is an email archiving system. We already know what we want, but we're waiting on determination of whether or not we can spend that already ear-marked money.

Unfortunately, I'll be finding out a week from Monday. I'll be out of the office all next week. Bad timing for it, but can't be avoided.

House Bill 3178 (read it here) was submitted Monday and sent to committee. My boss has been asked to provide opinion on some amendments the committee is considering, so we know this bill is under active consideration. This is something of a big deal. And this is why...

(4) For the 2009-2011 biennium, the following limitations are established upon information technology procurement:
(a) State agencies are not permitted to purchase or implement new information technology projects without securing prior authorization from the office of financial management. The office of financial management may only approve information technology projects that contribute towards an enterprise strategy or meet a critical, localized need of the requesting agency.
(b) State agencies are not permitted to purchase servers, virtualization, data storage, or related software through their operational funds or through a separate information technology budget item without securing prior authorization from the office of financial management. The office of financial management shall grant approval only if the purchase is consistent with the state's overall migration strategy to the state data center and critical to the operation of the agency.
(c) State agencies are not permitted to upgrade existing software without securing prior approval from the office of financial management. In reviewing requests from state agencies to upgrade software, the office of financial management shall grant approval only if the agency can demonstrate that upgrade of the software is critical to the operation of the agency.

In case your eyes glazed over at that, here are the bullet points:

• No software upgrades without approval from Olympia (what about service-packs? Is that an 'upgrade'?).
• No server or storage purchases without approval from Olympia.
• The State will be greatly incentivising (stick-style) usage of the State's central storage services.

Holy kill-joy, Batman! If everything we here in Technical Services has to spend has to be approved by Office of Financial Management in Olympia, things'll get real slow. But there is more. Several new sections too big to quote here go into detail about other things:

• A centralized State PC Replacement process with, "at a minimum, a replacement cycle of at least five years," with a master contract containing no more than three providers of PCs with no more than four models on each contract. Which means no more than 12 PC models available at any given time.
• All mobile phone contracts are to be centralized in OFM. Presumably this includes things like Blackberry Enterprise Server, though that's not stated in the bill yet.
• The State shall develop a comprehensive data retention policy. That's OK, we probably need one anyway.
• Establish a centralized tiered storage service for use by State agencies, and all storage purchases have to be approved by OFM.
• Establish technology project standards for all K-12 school districts, mandated and overseen by OFM.
  

Apparently the plan is to centralize everything in order to leverage scale for cost savings. Or something. What is not yet clear is just how permissive OFM will be on those items that require approval from OFM.

We will be keeping a close eye on this bill, yes sir.

Washington State has a $2.6 Billion deficit for this year. In fact, the finance people point out that if something isn't done the WA treasury will run dry some time in September and we'll have to rely on short-term loans. As this is not good, the Legislature is attempting to come up with some way to fill the hole.

As far as WWU is concerned, we know we'll be passed some kind of cut. We don't know the size, nor do we know what other strings may be attached to the money we do get. So we're planning for various sizes of cuts.

One thing that is definitely getting bandied about is the idea of 'sweeping' unused funds at end-of-year in order to reduce the deficits. As anyone who has ever worked in a department subject to a budget knows, the idea of having your money taken away from you for being good with your money runs counter to every bureaucratic instinct. I have yet to meet the IT department that considers themselves fully funded. My old job did that; our Fiscal year ended 12/15, which meant that we bought a lot of stuff in October and November with the funds we'd otherwise have to give back (a.k.a. "Christmas in October"). Since WWU's fiscal year starts 7/1, this means that April and May will become 'use it or lose it' time.

Sweeping funds is a great way to reduce fiscal efficiency.

In the end, what this means is that the money tree is actually producing at the moment. We have a couple of crying needs that may actually get addressed this year. It's enough to completely fix our backup environment, OR do some other things. We still have to dicker over what exactly we'll fix. The backup environment needs to be made better at least somewhat, that much I know. We have a raft of servers that fall off of cheap maintenance in May (i.e. they turn 5). We have a need for storage that costs under $5/GB but is still fast enough for 'online' storage (i.e. not SATA). As always, the needs are many, and the resources few.

At least we HAVE resources at the moment. It's a bad sign when you have to commiserate with your end-users over not being able to do cool stuff, or tell researchers they can't do that particular research since we have no where to store their data. Baaaaaad. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but we can see it from where we are.

Want evidence?

The 2008 calendar you see on that wall is a gorgeous 4 color CMYK print. It is put out by Western's Imaging and Graphic Services department as a form of internal advertisement.

The 2009 calendar you see on that wall is a fairly simple 2-color process. 2-color requires less resources to produce. You get your budget savings wherever you can.