As we wrap up our 2016 activities and begin to discuss plans for 2017, below list some key accomplishments for TIO in 2016. While, this is by no means is a complete list, it encompasses the major activities that defined our team. Through the dedication, hard work, commitment of TIO, LTS and various teams throughout Lehigh University we were able to meet our goals in providing a secure reliable cyberinfrastructure for faculty, staff and students.

• Mountaintop Fiber Project was approved, funded and awarded. When completed, we will have diverse fiber paths from Asa Packer Campus to Mountaintop Campus. These paths are crucial in supporting new academic and research initiatives such as DataX.
• Throughout the year, we upgraded various building infrastructure wired and wireless networks. The results of these upgrades provides higher capacity, performance and stability for faculty, staff and students. Buildings that were part of our upgrades include Mudd, Packard Lab, Flatiron, and the Police Station.
• The networking team, successfully engineered and piloted a next-generation wireless architecture at Warren Square. This hospitality design enhances wireless connectivity while providing 1 GB wired connectivity via 2-ports for those that still required wired connections. Pilot was well received and will be expanded pending funding.
• For Asa Packer Campus, we dramatically increased the fiber-optic capacity, which will be required to support future Lehigh University growth as discussed in the Path to Prominence announcement.
• Along with physical wiring, we replaced various building end of life (EOL) network switches. With the switch lifecycle management performed in 2016, nearly all of lower campus switches are now fewer than 5 years old. Not only do these switches provide higher speeds, better performance and stability, but they support new features such as Power over Ethernet that provides power to VoIP phones.
• The Infrastructure Operations team continued to manage our data centers and operations. The team made many Data Center improvements such as adding UPS and HVAC to our secondary data center, additional UPS in main data center, assisted with the installation of the new High Performance Cluster (HPC), modernized and reduced systems using virtualization technologies and performed various data center cleanup activities.
• As we look to replace our aging PBX telephone services with Voice over IP (VoIP), the telecommunications team setup a Cisco Unified Communication sandbox.
• Completed Windows 10 upgrade and deployment to public sites and classrooms campus-wide as well as virtual public sites.
• For special devices that can’t connect to the secure wireless network, the networking team engineered and deployed LUNA, a mac-based authentication for IoT networking.
• The systems engineering team completed the effort to consolidate all our application license servers.

Looking forward to a new and challenging year ahead!