Penn DC Task Force: Problem Statement
A critical problem facing Penn's academic and administrative departments is the need to manage a growing number of increasingly powerful and complex computer systems without a corresponding increase in technical staff and support resources. Current disjointed efforts fail to provide economies of scale or specialization or to leverage one another's efforts, and leave the University at risk of not being able to provide either a competitive academic computing environment or a cost-effective administrative infrastructure.
Moreover, as recent security breaches on campus and across the Internet have demonstrated, we also face a serious threat to the integrity of our networked computer systems and the messages and data they exchange. The inherent risks of network computing are compounded by our lack of a "single sign-on" network authentication system, such as Kerberos. This is particularly alarming as we work to deploy more and more of the University's business functions using client/server, network-based information systems.
We also need to take advantage of more advanced file sharing protocols, such as AFS, DFS or IFS, to better support and manage Unix platforms across campus in both academic and administrative settings. These protocols provide dramatically better performance than currently network file systems, usually while reducing their load on the network ten-fold. These protocols also have the potential to greatly improve the highly variable quality of administration currently found on many systems managed by novices, whether full-time staff or graduate students.
