IFS Stakeholders Meeting Minutes
May 4, 2001


Kevin Rowland opened the session stating the scope of the project was under review based on input from the last meeting. Initially AFS related issues were considered to be beyond the scope of the IFS project. Kevin said he was currently working two separate tracks. The first being a technical, looking at and testing various hardware/software solutions from a variety of manufacturers, the other being the project managements aspect of the project (i.e., Budget issues, project processes). 

Kevin went on to say the technical track is going very well, he's established a team (including non-OIT personnel) to assist with the evaluation of possible architectures and vendor offerings. 

The area he needs assistance in is the project management side, to be successful he needs to know what benchmarks to build to or meet. Starting with the basics, he knows the project is now more then just about file space for PC and MAC platforms. There needs to be a "check sheet" style process to measure solutions against and it should come from the stakeholders. 

Currently he is testing with 100 page word documents, it was recommended he use 20-40MB PowerPoint files (in addition) since that what a lot of faculty use. 

The question was asked  if a "One size fits all" approach was the right strategic for this project. 

Kevin suggested that "Use Case" methodology be used to document user requirements, doing so would address a number of the project management issues he's currently dealing with.

In general, those in attendance felt that AFS worked "OK but slow at times" on Sun workstations and asked who (if anyone) was monitoring AFS performance or if a set of performance benchmarks existed. It was also pointed out that users will use up all available network bandwidth and they feel its OIT role to monitor the environment and set the standards

It was pointed out that Engineering has the need to move "large" blocks of data and currently that's an issue for some.

The group asked what is the current policy for AFS use for PC and Mac users? If it is copy to local disk, work from local copy and archive back to AFS is that the best we can do and whats the impact on the network considering a professor's 20-30MB presentations could be copied across the network 300 plus times depending on the size of the class.

When asked for issues, then general response from the PC and Mac users was the belief that AFS was not always available, accessing it was an issue and once you did access it, it wasn't reliable. More detailed concerns were:

1. AFS isn't fault tolerant, if the server your data is on goes down, you're down.
2. If OIT builds something else for Mac and PC file storage, support for AFS will suffer.
3. Running "properties" on a file in AFS can/does lock the machine for as long as 30 minutes. (known issue)
4. Education is needed so users understand the difference between AFS issues and configuration problems, they both could cause extended log in times and/or reliability problems. Without the education must users assume AFS is the issue.
5. OIT needs to set benchmarks for workstation configurations and then test all the machines, including faculty machines. There needs to be a balance between software offering and w/s performance. Currently, it appears the OIT maintained machines configurations are not optimized. The worst login times seem to be in 101 Debartolo, 5 minutes plus.
6. Some faculty use large (350+ pages, 5MB) PDF files for teaching 
7. There are problems with accessing GLIQ from Macs
8. Make sure the new system supports the current level of file sharing between the HP and AFS based apps. Including grade sheets.
9. WebCT is painfully slow when doing student maintenance. (Vendor acknowledged the issue.)
10. AFS doesn't support the  "file locking" requirement needed for most PC and Mac based applications used in a shared environment. 
11. AFS doesn't support "CD image" based solutions
12. There are documented problems with "metering software" running under AFS. (Citrex, possible work around)
13. Strong restatement for the need of benchmark standards for configuration and performance.

Several members of the group commented they felt the meeting was very productive and they appreciated the opportunity to share their concerns and viewpoints.

The meeting was adjourned without setting a date for the next stakeholders meeting.