Overview

The Athena Computing Environment desktop infrastructure is purchased in a 4-year cycle. One quarter of the Athena desktops deployed to general use clusters and IS&T staff reach the end of their planned 4 year lifespan and are replaced each year.

This process involves choosing the new hardware, deploying it to the general use clusters and staff desktops as well as providing appropriate assistance to departments, labs, centers and individuals in dealing with their Athena systems reaching end of life in the current year.

Status

Public Cluster and Quickstation Renewal for FY09 are complete as of 31 Oct 2008

There should probably be outreach to IS&T and to Departments, Labs, and Centers
to encourage them to retire their old hardware with the current offering. The Hotline
team, not ISDA, owns this.

Deliverables / Activities

  • Hardware Recommendation A recommendation embodying choice of vendor, and desktop configuration.
  • Friendly Testers Athena Consultants, Developmental Test clusters, SIPB, and other particular friendly testers get IS&T supplied Athena desktops renewing 4 year old systems each year at the beginning of the renewal effort.
  • Web page Updates Updates to web pages providing recommendations and help on process for buying systems.
  • Development Such development work as is necessary to make Athena operate smoothly on this year's hardware recommendation.
  • Inventory Inventory of cluster desktops, Athena staff desktops, and Athena desktops owned by departments, labs and centers eligbible for renewal.
  • Decision Review of inventory and recommendation of this year's renewal budget.
  • Outreach Notify customers of End of Life of recommendation(s) being retired this year. Shepherd the customers to an appropriate renewal process for their systems.
  • Future Plan for subsequent renewals including decisions of early or late renewal for some classes of machines.
  • Implementation Purchase and deployment of the renewal hardware.

Hardware Recommendation Issues

  • The recommendation will build on the previous year's, reflecting changing customer needs, changing hardware and vendor landscape.
  • Balance new development work against the ideal of having the SAME recommendation both for Athena and the Administrative Desktop.
  • Choose hardware parameters at the "sweet spot": Go for the highest incremental improvement before the cost jump starts to get big.
  • Attempt to maximize the amount of time the recommendation will be able to be purchased through the year.

Special Tasks this year

  • DONE Extra work to shrink the Athena-unique "Buy Athena" web pages by eliminating pages that describe services no longer offered, and help that is no longer needed. See Also: Revise Buy Athena online Documents.
  • Harmonize inventory taking and hardware tracking processes.
  • Athena Sun Desktops will be phased out in the coming year. See Also: Desktop Solaris Sunset
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